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THE “KIEV REGIME” – A JOKE THAT’S NO LONGER FUNNY

if the agencies intended to provide security are shooting one another in the capital, who is left to protect ordinary people?

In conversation with Marta Havryshko

Ian Proud, Sep 09, 2026, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/the-kiev-regime-a-joke-thats-no-longer?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=214839408&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

On 6 September, Davyd Arakhamia sat down with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in a T-shirt reading “Kyiv regime.” Volodymyr Zelensky’s team then handed the same shirts to the American envoys. Officially, it was “trolling” Putin, who uses the phrase to delegitimise Ukraine’s government. Inside Ukraine, a lot of people did not laugh. The regime in Kiev is now a joke that uses theatre and illusion to cling to power at all costs, while stealing the nation’s future

I caught up with historian Marta Havryshko who, said the first reaction on Ukrainian social media to the ‘Kiev Regime’ t-shirt stunt was disbelief. Many thought the pictures were fake. When they realised they were real, the mood turned sour.

Focus.ua wrote that Zelensky and Arakhamia were “torn apart” over the shirt. On Threads and Facebook, the complaint was not that the men supposedly negotiating life and death issues around the war’s ending looked as if they lived in another country.

Children still do lessons in basements. Families still count explosions at night. Working-class men are still pulled off the street like dogs. And at the peace table: a joker in a souvenir t-shirt. gag.

Marta’s suggests that irony worked in 2022. Remember Zelensky’s video on the day the war started with his team in Central Kiev? It may still have worked in 2023 before teh failed summer counter-offensive.

In 2026, after unsuccessful offensives, overflowing military cemeteries and a war that no longer looks winnable to many ordinary Ukrainians, that same irony reads as indifference.

She described visiting her native village two years ago and finding at least ten new graves under Ukrainian flags in a place of two thousand people. Some of the dead she had known. That, she said, is the price people see every day.

The timing of the T-shirt stunt also appears cynically deliberate, coming after yet another corruption scandal; Havryshko claims that war is now a business model for Zelensky’s corrupt regime.

Zelensky publicly speaks of around 50,000 Ukrainian dead. At the same time, Kyrylo Budanov has said Ukraine needs at least 30,000 men a month just to hold the line. Havryshko’s question is the one families ask: if the war is going well and few people are dying, why do you need so many new bodies each month for the meat grinder?

She argues the government hides the scale of loss because the truth would further collapse support for the in Ukraine and also in the west.

That helps to explain why the resistance to forced mobilisation — busification — is growing all the time. The fiercest resistance, she notes, is often in western Ukraine, the old heartland of the ethno-nationalist far-right elements associated with Azov, UPA etc. Draft officers have been attacked. The people in the streets are working-class men and the women trying to keep husbands and sons out of the grinder. Class and gender, she insists, explain the war better than slogans about national resilience.

The T-shirt was not the only story to hit the headlines. On 2 September, Ukraine’s two most powerful spy services opened fire on each other in a Kyiv residential street. Three HUR officers were wounded. When a drone later hit an SBU building, Western headlines rushed to blame Russia. She says Ukrainians mostly laughed as the strike came straight after the shootout.

Two versions spread at once: a HUR revenge drone ordered as a warning, or an SBU false flag to strengthen Zelensky’s hand against Budanov. She does not claim to prove either. Her point is that if the agencies intended to provide security are shooting one another in the capital, who is left to protect ordinary people? That, she argues, is why anti-war journalists in Ukraine now live on high alert — and why a joke T-shirt at peace talks landed like an insult.

Marta saw little prospect of Presidential elections any time soon. Fedorov’s call for a vote, in her telling, was a shot at Zelensky, not a plan. Millions are abroad, occupied, or at the front. Men of draft age will not walk into polling stations for fear that they will be busified. Zelensky, she argues, has no incentive for peace or a ballot. War protects him from leaving office and losing his immunity to prosecution for corruption. Why end it now or, indeed, ever?

September 10, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, Ukraine