Zelensky, Not Putin, Is Increasingly Threatened by the Prospect of a Palace Coup

Engaged in a continuing Great Purge against top officials, the authoritarian Ukrainian president finds himself with fewer and fewer allies where it matters.

By Jordan Schachtel
Global Research, March 01, 2023
The Dossier 28 February 2023
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Volodomyr Zelensky has a lot of powerful backers around the world, and from afar, the Ukrainian president seems politically invincible.

He’s got the Uniparty in Washington, D.C. on his side, coupled with the international globalists in the robust World Economic Forum-attached network, along with the public-private asset management behemoth financiers in BlackRock and co, and another heavy line of credit through the IMF-World Bank group.

Domestically, it’s an entirely different story. The Ukrainian people are suffering greatly under Zelensky, with mandatory conscription and half the country’s land mass now exposed to the horrors and bombardment of an indefinite war footing. Kiev once pursued neutrality and embraced its role as a buffer state as the functioning gold standard for geopolitical relations. Now, at the insistence of the western ruling class, Ukraine has committed realpolitik seppuku and has become fiercely antagonistic to its more powerful neighbor.

The corporate press and D.C. institutions have insisted that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s standing is most at risk of a coup or popular overthrow, but there is no evidence for such an assertion. In fact, polling from the independent Levada-Center shows Putin’s approval rating has spiked to over 80 percent since the commencement of the war in Ukraine. Zelensky, on the other hand, is heading in the opposite direction, becoming increasingly unpopular as the war drags on.

The Zelensky government is fighting wars on two fronts, having engaged in ethnic cleansing against large swaths of its own population, especially the third of the country that is now labeled as enemies of the state due to their Russian ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.

Moreover, despite the seemingly endless rounds of Western supplies and money disbursements contributing to the war effort, Ukraine is losing this conflict badly, and their citizens are paying the greatest price for it.

In order to protect his government and his personal standing in office, Zelensky has spent recent weeks and months conducting a Great Purge within Ukraine.

Countless high-ranking ministers, governors, and other Ukrainian bureaucrats have been stripped of authority, of course, without any due process. In recent weeks, Zelensky’s deputy minister of defense, the deputy head of the country’s presidential office, and the deputy prosecutor general are but many of the high-ranking individuals who were removed due to “corruption” allegations. In one such incident, the three highest ranking officials in Zelensky’s interior ministry were killed in a “helicopter accident” over Kiev.

There’s surely a large kernel of truth to the corruption allegations, as Ukraine is regularly ranked as the most corrupt country in Europe. Yet it doesn’t seem to be the motivating force behind the systematic removal of upper management at lightning speed.

Despite facing an ongoing war, Zelensky has been known to take time to engage in very public spats with his political rivals — only those who are still allowed to serve in government, following the Zelensky government’s extrajudicial elimination of their political opposition — over trivial issues. Nonetheless, he’s been publicly beefing with a political rival in the mayor of Kiev, the popular former boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, who has previously been well positioned to throw his hat in the ring for the presidency.

Over the weekend, Ukraine took another series of devastating battlefield losses. On Sunday, Zelensky fired a top general in Eduard Mykhailovich Moskalov, who led Ukraine’s joint forces and was appointed to the post in March of 2022. There was no reason given for the abrupt firing, but in all likelihood it has to do with Ukraine’s struggle to retain Bakhmut, the war-torn city in the country’s east.

The corporate press has finally started to address the possibility that Zelensky’s Great Purge is not a corruption-busting endeavor, but a power preserving initiative. It is much more likely, in fact, that these officials are being removed because they threaten the integrity of the regime. While Zelensky’s foreign backers can continue to prop him up, the people closest to him must also buy into the mission. As the fog of war clears, so too may the honeymoon period for Zelensky’s unopposed standing as the leader of Ukraine.

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Featured image: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivers an address in Kiev, Ukraine, April 15, 2022. (Credit: Ukrainian Presidency)
Articles by: Jordan Schachtel

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