The phases of Ukraine – continued.

By Gordon Hahn – March 1 ^, 2025 – Source 
Russian and Eurasian Politics, Translated by Wayan, proofread by Hervé, for Saker Francophone.

– – ……………………..……………………………………………………..The collapse of the Ukrainian army

The collapse of the front is expected to occur simultaneously or shortly after the collapse of the Ukrainian army. The state of the Ukrainian army is indeed dire. It suffers not only from a growing shortage of weapons, but also from a shortage of personnel, discipline, morale, and capabilities, all crippled by corruption. The 2024 military mobilization failed. Desertion and refusal to obey orders are endemic, and corruption not only hinders recruitment but also promotes high levels of absence without leave, reducing the number of Ukrainian soldiers actually fighting at the front.

The military mobilizations of the past and present year are having a debilitating effect on the economy, and society is failing to replace current losses at the front with completely inexperienced recruits with low or zero morale. There are no more volunteers, and by spring, some Ukrainian officials report, the situation will be irremediable. Moreover, almost all of the new recruits are elderly or demotivated, reports The Economist .

Frontline commanders, such as the commander of the drone battalion of Ukraine’s 30th Mechanized Brigade, confirm that the 2024 mobilization was an absolute failure and that there are now too few men to replace combat losses. Mobilization is carried out through harsh, often violent, measures. Verkhovna Rada deputy Alexander Bakumov of  Zelenskiy’s 
Servants of the People party  said in a session that the mobilization in the Kharkiv region is forced, resembling a filtration of the Ukrainian population (referring to the practice of detaining, beating, and torturing citizens of the occupied areas in an ostensible search for fighters and collaborators), with exits from the city blocked by “recruitment  “ gangs  and lawyers for the mobilized men beaten. Small businesses are facing mass closures due to the lack of workers willing to leave for fear of being drafted into the army. Others have reported data falsification at recruiting offices to justify recruitment . There are numerous reports and videos of the violence used by recruiting gangs. Ultimately, what can be said of an army whose military system must force citizens to fight, even by forcibly seizing priests leading a religious procession and sending them to the front?

Moreover, many men are fleeing the country in greater numbers to avoid Ukraine’s desperate and draconian forced mobilization measures, sometimes risking their lives and sociopolitical stability. More recently, Western governments have pressured Kyiv to extend mobilization to the 18-25 age cohort, which would lead to a near-catastrophic demographic collapse of a population already reduced by some 30 percent due to war deaths and emigration. Even the recruitment centers themselves are trying to avoid the draft. When Rada deputies proposed filling the personnel shortage by creating a brigade from among the mobilization gangs, the chairman of the mobilization centers claimed that there were not enough of them to form a full brigade. The low number of volunteers and the failure of mobilization are creating distortions in the force structure. ”   Zombie brigades  ” or ”  paper brigades  ” are partially manned units simply called brigades to impress Western donors and facilitate the corruption of commanders who  garnish salaries allocated to non-existent personnel.

The large number of desertions from the Ukrainian army, a phenomenon completely ignored by the Western media for three years, was finally revealed in November  to have exceeded 100,000 since the start of the war. This would perhaps represent more than 10% of the Ukrainian army at its current size, given that Zelenskiy recently claimed that it has 800,000 recruits. Moreover, more than half of these desertions took place in the first ten months of 2024 alone. This is already large-scale desertion and  includes mass desertions .

Military blogger Yurii Butusov, Servant of the People MP Maryana Bezuglaya, and others reported late last year  the desertion of an entire 1,000-man brigade trained in France upon their arrival at the front. This may have been a case of the commander’s failed attempt to form so-called ”   zombie brigades .” Indeed, military personnel have questioned the recent practice of creating new brigades when existing ones are woefully underequipped,  apparently suspecting the corruption scheme behind the practice. One Ukrainian commander  told a Polish newspaper that sometimes in combat there are more deserters than killed and wounded.

Desertions are one of the symptoms of lax discipline and, above all, low morale, increasingly plaguing the Ukrainian army. Commanders report that 90 percent of their frontline troops are newly mobilized men forcibly. Sources in the Ukrainian General Staff report the same . Thus, desertions are accompanied by unauthorized retreats, which are becoming increasingly frequent. For example, hundreds of people fled the battle at one point last fall in Vugledar (Ugledar) before the town fell. Vugledar was once a stronghold that, in 2023, Russian forces stormed dozens of times without success.

Ukrainian soldiers refuse to carry out operational orders because they amount to suicide operations and are beginning to surrender in entire units, in one case almost an entire battalion (for example, the 92nd Combat Squadron). Indeed, refusals to follow orders or undertake counteroffensive measures are increasing. In one recent case, the Azov Brigade’s chief of staff, Bogdan Koretich, accused a Ukrainian general of such poor command that he was described as responsible for more Ukrainian war deaths than Russians, forcing his dismissal. At lower levels, commanders are being dismissed in large numbers. At the same time, field commanders  publicly criticize senior commanders and staff for their strategic incompetence and negligence.

One reason for the disintegration of discipline and morale is that there is no relief for the troops, as there is no long-term demobilization or time away from the front other than that resulting from brief episodic troop rotations; a consequence of insufficient troop numbers. Soldiers and their families have been lobbying for over a year for a demobilization law that would allow long rotations for troops to return home, but no such law is in sight. This would likely lead to a deadly shortage of troops and the complete rout of the Ukrainian army on the battlefield.

However, perhaps the main problem in the Ukrainian military, as in the rest of the Ukrainian state and society, is corruption. It is endemic and pervasive in the production and procurement of weapons, mobilization (evasion of conscription through bribes), the purchase of leave and absences from the front, and the staffing of brigades. One Ukrainian defense minister told a journalist that the problem was ”  catastrophic .” Anna Skorokhod, an independent Rada MP, claims that only 15% (!) of rank-and-file soldiers serve at the front, with a large number either nonexistent (dead souls) in service or having bribed their way into hiding somewhere in the rear.

This is how Ukrainian officers describe the widespread corruption in the army. According to a Ukrainian army captain:

”  Due to false information about the presence of personnel, the commanders of the branches receive false information. And they operate with ‘dead souls’, developing combat plans. For example, at a point where the Russians have broken through a section of the front, the commander orders a certain brigade to send a battalion with an attached group as reinforcements. In fact, the battalion has long since left, its number is now only one company, some have bought their way to the rear or deserted. As a result, there is nothing to close the breakthrough, because of the threat, the flanks of neighboring brigades begin to collapse.  “

According to a source in the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces: ” 
If we take the number of Russian soldiers we have at the front on paper, then if the Russians have a numerical advantage, it is less than double. But that’s on paper. In practice, the situation is different. Let’s imagine a section separated from the front. According to the newspapers, there are 100 people on our side and 150 on the Russian side. In other words, the enemy’s advantage is insignificant. With such numbers, it is quite possible to maintain the defense. But in a real battle, the situation is radically different. At most 40 of our 100 people participate. And often even fewer. The rest are deserters, who simply refuse to fight, etc. And the Russians have 140 to 145 people out of 150 fighting. In total, the advantage has already more than tripled. Why does this situation exist?” Our army was initially based on a core of volunteers, ATO veterans, and highly motivated soldiers who went into battle without coercion and seized the initiative. The Russians had a major motivation problem from the very beginning. But they worked on this issue and gradually created their own system of military-repressive coercion. And it works by sending soldiers into battle and stopping cases of insubordination and desertion. We haven’t created anything like that. And I doubt we’re even capable of creating such a system. Our state system is too weak and corrupt for that. And now that the volunteers are dead, either from wounds or simply exhausted, and the army is replenished with fake conscripts who have close to zero motivation, there’s no way to force them to fight. A separate problem is the quality of the command staff and the combat management system. There are also some very big failures here, as many experienced commanders have died and worthy replacements do not always come after them .”

Moreover, corruption reaches the top of the Ukrainian military establishment (as well as the civilian establishment). The suspension of US aid to Ukraine until April and the investigation into US arms supplies to Kyiv announced by the new administration of President Donald Trump resonated in the Ukrainian capital, leading to the opening of an investigation into the procurement practices of the Defense Ministry and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, whose predecessor, Aleksey Reznikov, had also been ousted on suspicion of massive corruption. Umerov immediately moved to fire the head of the procurement organization, but 
she refused to leave her office. There have been rumors for months that Zelenskiy was seeking to oust Umerov, and following the announcement of the investigation, calls for his resignation are growing . This adds crisis to crisis, dealing another blow to the military establishment at a pivotal moment in a catastrophic war.

Ukraine’s endemic and universal corruption has seen the artificial or outright absence of construction of fortifications at the front, bringing us back to the previous section on the collapsing front lines.

It is a state of corruption, low morale and incapacity reminiscent of Bashar al-Assad’s recently collapsed Syrian army.

This kind of Ukrainian army, or its collapse, poses a threat to both the Maidan regime and the Ukrainian state. The troops of a collapsed Ukrainian army will become a force that can be mobilized by a military or civilian leader to carry out a coup d’état and possibly a neo-fascist revolution, or by peripheral and local figures to establish separate fiefdoms. Recall that during the Maidan protests, leaders in Lvov and elsewhere first broached the idea of seceding from Ukraine, then controlled by Yanukovych. After the Maidan uprising and Yanukovych’s overthrow, it was Crimea and Donbass that moved toward separatism.

Ukrainian regime splits, then falls

With the army in collapse or even on the verge of collapse, political instability can be expected to intensify, with internal infighting intensifying as what remains resembles a front line moves closer to Kyiv. Russian forces will reach the Dnieper River by this summer and may capture territory along much or all of its length this year. With the fall of industrial giants, such as the cities of Dnipro and Zaporozhe, rump Ukraine will be reduced to a country of Western Ukrainian traders in a decimated economy, society, and political regime, assuming the Russians decide to stop at the Dnieper. Already, HUR leader Kyryll Budanov and the head of the Office of the President (OP), Andriy Yermak, are at odds, with rumors circulating for months that Zelenskiy is preparing to fire Budanov. In late January, Ukrainskaya Pravda , a pro-Maidan newspaper, reported that Budanov shocked Rada deputies at a closed-door meeting by declaring that if peace talks did not begin soon, processes would begin that would lead to the destruction of Ukraine . There has been some cooperation in the opposition between Zelenskiy’s dismissed armed forces commander, General Valeriy Zaluzhniy, and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Both have been investigated for alleged treason by Zelenskiy’s prosecutors and the secret police, the SBU, and have been the subject of political attacks by the PO. The leader of the parliamentary faction of Zelenskiy’s ”  Servants of the People  ” party in the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada, David Arakhamiya, is reportedly on the way out and will soon be replaced as party faction chairman. Arakhmiya is one of the few Ukrainian figures to acknowledge that Ukraine almost reached a peace deal with Russia in March 2022 that would have brought a swift end to the war, but that the West scuttled the agreement by withholding security guarantees and urging Kyiv to fight. Recently, as the new Trump administration put peace talks back on the agenda, Arakhmiya appeared to encourage the process by noting that he was in contact with Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and had good ties to Republicans in the United States, likely increasing Zelenskiy’s suspicions about his loyalty. https://lesakerfrancophone.fr/les-quatre-prochaines-phases-deffondrements-de-lukraine

These internal struggles are compounded by the unfulfilled revolutionary aspirations of its ultranationalist and neofascist wing, which led the Maidan takeover in the first place ten years ago in February 2024. More recently, the founder and former leader of the neofascist Right Sector group and advisor to former Ukrainian Army Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhniy, Dmitro Yarosh, 
repeated his call for the completion of the neofascist revolution on his Facebook page: “  
It turned out that during the Revolution of Dignity and the Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukrainian nationalists became the main factor in the Ukrainian national liberation struggle in the 21st century. I am a Ukrainian nationalist—this sounds proud both in Ukraine and around the world. The next power after the War of Independence should be nationalist.” Otherwise, we will once again be drawn into an unbreakable cycle of national humiliation, corruption, degeneration, moral degradation, economic decline, inferiority, and defeat. Therefore, after the War of Independence, the wise, courageous, and noble must reign in Ukraine. Glory to the Nation! ” The leader and commander of the neo-fascist Azov Brigade, Andrey Biletskiy, 
sounded the alarm about the army in December and called for far-reaching reforms, perhaps with the aim of taking over the leadership of the army and even the state. In short, the Zelenskiy government has opponents , even enemies, in all political camps, from the military to moderate nationalists to neo-fascists, even in his own largely discredited and corrupt Servant of the People party.

These developments within the elite are compounded by the collapse of Zelenskiy’s popularity and public trust. General Zaluzhniy is favored over Zelenskiy in the most recent opinion polls in Ukraine. Ukrainians’ trust in Zelensky 
has plummeted from 80% in May 2023 to 45% a year later, according to the US National Democratic Institute. A recent Ukrainian opinion poll conducted by the Kyiv-based Center for Social Monitoring shows that only 16% of Ukrainians are willing to vote for Zelenskiy in any future presidential election, and 60% would prefer him not to run. Meanwhile, Zaluzhniy, ousted by Zelenskiy, would lead in such an election and would have 27% support, the poll found. According to previous internal opinion polls by the Presidential Office, Zelenskiy would lose a presidential election to Zaluzhniy today. The dismissed general ranks as the 
most popular political and military figure in Ukraine, according to other recent polls (). In approval ratings, Zelenskiy has fallen to third place, after Zaluzhniy and the head of military intelligence (HRU) Budanov, whom the President’s Office is trying to fire . The stumbling block may be Budanov’s long-standing ties to US and Western intelligence services . In a more recent survey, Zaluzhniy (71.6%) and Budanov (46.7%) retained higher approval ratings than Zelenskiy (40.8%).

All of the above strongly suggests that the regime is fracturing behind the scenes and that Zelenskiy will be unable to maintain the situation as crises at the front and in the army intensify. The Maidan regime is threatened by a regime divided into competing factions, each putting forward its own claim to the sovereignty of the Ukrainian state or parts of it. Zaluzhniy’s reported contacts with opposition figure Poroshenko would mark the defection of a key actor from the Maidan regime to the political opposition to Zelenskiy. Such defections play a decisive role in regime transformations, whether transitional or revolutionary. It is sufficient to recall the effect that Eltsion’s defection from Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist Soviet CPSU regime had on Soviet politics, exacerbating the polarization to both the ”  left  ” and ”  right  ” of Gorbachev’s perestroishchiki and leading to the sweeping August coup against both and ultimately the collapse of the USSR.

On top of all this, the regime’s stability is being undermined by the Trump administration’s push for peace talks with Moscow and, most recently, its implicit decision to remove Zelensky from the presidency to facilitate those negotiations. The February 2 call by Trump’s Ukraine peace envoy, Keith Kellogg, for presidential elections to be called by the end of the year appears to spell doom for Zelenskiy, given General Zaluzhniy’s far greater popularity. For Zelenskiy, an electoral defeat or a decision not to run would be a saving grace compared to other means by which he could be removed from power. But Kellogg’s mere suggestion, let alone an actual presidential campaign waged as the front and the army collapse, will intensify the power struggle, perhaps to the breaking point.

Then there is the very real potential for a popular uprising as the economy deteriorates and corruption becomes more publicized, especially as it is linked to the military’s difficulties. Ukrainians already view this as a greater threat than the Russian military, according to a recent poll conducted by the Kyiv-based sociological research group  Reinting . The poll showed that more Ukrainians cited price increases and the general state of the economy (32% and 33%, respectively) as more worrisome than the expansion of Ukrainian territory occupied by the Russian military (25%). Social discontent with the regime’s shortcomings, highlighted by the extravagant lifestyles visible online by Zelenskiy’s family, his inner circle, and the Ukrainian elite in general, is a time bomb waiting to explode.

This crisis of the Maidan regime is likely to trigger a state crisis, perhaps state failure and territorial collapse. Domestic infighting and instability could very well lead to military and/or palace coups, and even to internecine wars and the division of parts of the country by mutually antagonistic Ukrainian factions of one kind or another.

The Failure and Collapse of the Ukrainian State

The collapse of the regime could lead to the organizational and administrative collapse of the state, leaving no functioning central government. This would facilitate territorial dissolution through warlord-led secessions, regions dominated by ethnic minorities, and/or vengeful takeovers by foreign powers: Poland, Romania, not to mention Russia. All of this could be compounded by economic dislocation and social chaos, leaving both Europe and Russia with a major security problem on their borders. One need only recall the Ukrainian national separatism that arose in Lvov and other regions of western Ukraine during the Maidan protests. These initial separatist measures preceded those taken in Crimea and Donbass, but came months after the collapse of the Yanukovych regime and the victory of the Maidan uprising. Below, I review various aspects or phases of Ukraine’s potential collapse as a state: state disorganization and functional failure; territorial collapse on a Ukrainian nationalist and/or quasi-criminal basis; minority ethnonational separatism; and foreign national revanchism.

The Ukrainian state is vulnerable to organizational incapacity and administrative failure due to an increasingly dysfunctional economy and the almost total dependence of its economy and state budget on foreign aid, loans, and grants. I and others have noted the destruction of Ukraine’s energy grid and other infrastructure and the further debilitating effect of military mobilization on businesses.

Against the backdrop of such grave difficulties and what can only be greater economic dislocation caused by the buildup and advance of the Russian military, Ukraine’s largest donor, the United States, has frozen all foreign aid, excluding only Israel and Egypt from the decree, as announced by the Trump administration. This will soon leave the Ukrainian government without the necessary funding to govern, provide public goods, and so on. Ukrainians already view prices as a greater threat than the Russian military, as noted above.

Thus, Ukraine’s loss of sovereignty to the West, primarily Washington, means a complete collapse with the withdrawal of funding. This is already evident in the most transparent of USAID corruption revelations, which revealed that 85% of Ukrainian media outlets will have to close without USAID funds. One can imagine the destructive impact on other sectors of Ukraine’s lifeline of Western aid: the economy, healthcare, social benefits, and so on. One can then expect regional governments, supported by ambitious oligarchs opposed to the Zelenskiy government or even the entire Maidan regime itself, to become separate fiefdoms for said oligarchs, paving the way for regional hoarding of key assets and possibly even separatism.

Furthermore, Ukraine suffers from an ethnically based “state problem,” driven by regions populated by ethnic minorities and foreign legacies encompassing most of western Ukraine. These regions became part of Ukraine following the Soviet defeat of Nazism in the Great Patriotic War and the occupation of these regions by the Red Army, which were subsequently incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union. As I wrote in my book ”  
Ukraine on the Brink : Russia, the West, and the ‘New Cold War’  ” (McFarland, 2016), today’s Ukrainian state was built by Lenin, Stalin, and later Khrushchev (Crimea). Thus, in the Transcarpathian region of western Ukraine, there are subregions with large Romanian and Hungarian populations whose lands previously belonged to Romania and Hungary, respectively, then allies of the Nazis. These populations were already subjected to linguistic and other forms of discrimination at the hands of the state and its Ukrainian ultranationalist and neofascist allies before Russia’s invasion in 2022. Now, they are being brutalized by Zelenskiy’s military mobilization gangs, perhaps disproportionately compared to ethnic Ukrainian areas. This may fuel a desire to return to their national homelands by enlisting their aid by incorporating them into Romania and Hungary, respectively. Territorially speaking, this is a far lesser danger than the potential for Polish revanchism, which would mean the dissolution of the Ukrainian state. Fortunately for Kyiv, such developments are for the time being a remote possibility. But if the Ukrainian state begins to disintegrate, let alone experience internecine warfare or an incipient civil war, the potential for external revanchism will become more kinetic.

Conclusion

There is nothing inevitable about the cascade of collapses proceeding at full speed. Regime collapse can still be avoided, but regime collapse will quickly follow that of the front and the army. The only ways to fully prevent this cascade of collapses are a ceasefire, a full-fledged peace agreement, a full-scale NATO military intervention, or the conquest of all of Ukraine by Russia. Of these, only a ceasefire agreement is theoretically possible this year, and as early as April, a ceasefire could come too late or prove ineffective in stopping several of these collapses, holding the front line but unable to prevent the collapse of the army, the regime, and the state. Roving bands of idle soldiers on little or no pay will remain a combustible force, and a ceasefire could force the equally combustible crucible of presidential and parliamentary elections. In this, one can agree with HUR leader Budanov, who stated that if Ukraine does not begin peace talks by the summer, processes could begin to destroy the country. And Budanov’s assertion may be an understatement of the urgency. Trump must place Ukraine at the top of his agenda and pursue a settlement with maximum effort, using all the levers of persuasion Washington still possesses. Otherwise, Ukraine could explode. The fact that Kellogg’s call for elections produced a statement the very next day from Zelenskiy finally supporting negotiations with Moscow and thus seeking to break off direct US-Russian talks ”  on Ukraine without Ukraine  ” and without Europe is a demonstration of how pressure on the increasingly politically weak and emotionally damaged Zelensky could produce rapid results. But time is running out, and Ukraine’s four collapses are approaching.

July 16, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war