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Given the Chance, Ukrainians Would Give Zelensky the Boot

A fifth of those who say they do not trust him cite corruption as the main reason, and 59 percent of Ukrainians blame Zelensky personally for the extent of corruption in Ukraine today.

The wartime leader’s favorability ratings have plummeted.

Ted Snider, Nicolai N. Petro, Sep 18, 2026, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/given-the-chance-ukrainians-would-give-zelensky-the-boot/

There was a time, not very long ago, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was lionized around the world and spectacularly popular at home. But, if elections were held today, he would struggle to finish in the top three.

Zelensky came to power in a landslide victory in 2019. His term, constitutionally limited to five years, has now stretched to over seven years because of the war. Although it is true that 57 percent of Ukrainians say they do not want to hold elections during the war, it is simply not true that it is unconstitutional to hold presidential elections until the fighting stops.

The western media has provided cover for Zelensky by reporting that presidential elections are not permitted by Ukraine’s constitution at time of war. But while Ukrainian law prohibits parliamentary, presidential, and local elections under martial law, the highest law in the land, the Ukrainian constitution (Article 83), speaks only of the parliament as being able to extend its authority in the event that martial law is declared and elections cannot be held. It pointedly says nothing about extending the term of the president.

This omission was deliberate: The authors of the constitution feared that some future president might declare martial law precisely to prevent removal from office. Indeed, Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, was accused by three former presidents of Ukraine of trying this very maneuver in late 2018 in order to derail the elections that he later lost. 

Setting aside tricky legal matters, where do things stand politically? Were elections to be held today, three key metrics suggest that Zelensky would suffer a similar devastating loss. 

The most obvious is recent polling. Only 28 percent of Ukrainians say they want to see Zelensky remain president after the war. Other recent polls show that only around 21 percent of Ukrainians would vote for him in the next election—putting Zelensky just one point ahead of his rival, former Commander-in-Chief Valeriy Zaluzhny—while other polling suggests that Zelensky would lose to Zaluzhny. Meanwhile, a number of “closed polls,” those commissioned by the government for internal use only, apparently show that he would probably lose to Kyrylo Budanov, the former intelligence chief and Zelensky’s current chief of staff.

The second metric may be even more important. Current polling shows that no candidate would win the required majority in the first round, thus necessitating a runoff round. Since he has the highest number of Ukrainians who say they would not vote for him under any circumstances, one can infer that Zelensky would be soundly defeated in this round under any scenario. A recent poll indicates that Zaluzhny would defeat him by a margin of 66 to 34 percent; Budanov would defeat him by 60 to 40 percent; and even the recently fired minister of defense, Mykhailo Fedorov, would beat him by a whopping 64 to 36 percent.

The third metric is trust. In an ever-shifting field of hypothetical candidates, how much Ukrainians trust their candidate may be the most important question of all. And here, Zelensky does even worse. When the question is trust, Zelensky places a distant sixth.

Zaluzhny comes in first with 28 percent of respondents fully trusting him, 37 percent trusting him somewhat, 12 percent somewhat distrusting him, and 18 percent not trusting him at all. Fedorov and Budanov are more trusted than Zelensky, as are Mykhailo Drapatyi, the current commander of the Ukrainian armed forces, and even Robert Brovdi, commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces. Only 18 percent say they fully trust Zelensky and 25 percent somewhat trust him, while 37 percent say they do not trust him at all.Government corruption is a big reason for Zelensky’s collapse. A fifth of those who say they do not trust him cite corruption as the main reason, and 59 percent of Ukrainians blame Zelensky personally for the extent of corruption in Ukraine today. And this perception is unlikely to change for the better, as new corruption scandals are exposed. They already reach deep into Zelensky’s inner circle and personal staff. Last year, these scandals took out Zelensky’s powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. More recently, they have hit three deputy chiefs of staff and Yermak’s successor, Budanov, not to mention several government ministers and Ukraine’s chief prosecutor.

Popular reluctance, as well as the logistics of holding elections under the strain of war, will prevent elections from taking place any time soon. But when this horrible war finally ends and Ukrainians return to the polls, if democracy is permitted a full and unimpeded voice, then Zelensky, Ukraine’s acclaimed wartime president, will probably not be its peacetime president.

September 30, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, Ukraine | Leave a comment

A bit more clarity about Volodymr Zelensky

A comment from Steve on https://theaimn.net/volodymr-zelensky-the-exceptional-leader/#comment-34519

For those who like Zelensky and for whom nothing will change their minds, this from MSN this morning — Brussels is stepping up expectations on Kyiv to accelerate reforms indispensable for unlocking €20 billion in financial assistance, which the country badly needs as the budget deficit swells and Russia escalates the war.
EU officials have raised the alarm about the slow legislative pace in the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, where several laws are stalled. Two separate payments, one of €3.9 billion and another of €2.9 billion, have been delayed as a result.
As my colleague Jorge Liboreiro reports, the situation stands in stark contrast with the public messages from Zelenskyy and his deputies, who are asking allies to mobilise additional resources to plug a €23 billion gap in the Ministry of Defence. Separately, the country faces a €32.6 billion hole in next year’s budget.

Could this reform delay have something to do with Ukraine’s long-standing reputation as the most corrupt country in Europe?

State corruption in Ukraine was reported by journalist Seymour Hersh a few years ago.
He wrote that the CIA assesses that Ukrainian officials, including Zelenskyy, have embezzled $400 million from money the U.S. sent Ukraine to buy diesel fuel for its war effort, and that Ukrainian government ministries literally compete with each other to sell weapons paid for by U.S. taxpayers to private arms dealers in Poland, the Czech Republic and around the world.
A press release from the European Court of Auditors, Luxembourg, 23 September 2021, adds some weight to the claims by Hersh.
The report heading reads — EU support for reforms in Ukraine ineffective in fighting grand corruption.

It continues;
“Grand corruption and state capture are still widespread in Ukraine despite EU action, according to a special report published by the European Court of Auditors (ECA). The EU has been trying to address corruption in Ukraine as a cross-cutting priority; it has channelled funds and efforts through a variety of sectors, from the competition environment to the judiciary and civil society. But the support and measures put in place have not delivered the expected results, the auditors say…Grand corruption and state capture are endemic in Ukraine; as well as hindering competition and growth, they also harm the democratic process.”

EU support for reforms in Ukraine ineffective in fighting grand corruption??
That report came out 5 years ago!
What can we say?!
The EU has been oh, so relentless in pulling Ukraine into line.
About as relentless as they were in stopping Ukraine from murdering its citizens in the Donbass, even though the OSCE ( Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) was a signatory to the Minsk 1 Protocol.

The entire mainstream narrative of what happened in Ukraine, Crimea and Donbass since 2014 was fraudulent.
The countries of Europe wanted the war with Russia, and they want it to continue.

September 26, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, Ukraine | Leave a comment

How Palantir Turned Ukrainians Into Lab Rats (And Helped Ruin Ukraine)

Today, Palantir software helps power Ukraine’s domestic security services, its education system, and is at the forefront of the country’s efforts to digitise all government functions and create what Ukraine calls the world’s first AI-powered “agentic state.”

Nate Bear, Sep 16, 2026, https://www.donotpanic.news/p/how-palantir-turned-ukrainians-into

AI war-tech firm Palantir has embedded itself deeply within Ukrainian military systems and civil society, turning the country into a laboratory for its dystopian technologies of tracing, surveillance and kill-targeting.

Palantir, founded by technofascist warlord Peter Thiel and currently run by Jewish supremacist Alex Karp, began providing Ukraine with data systems that control and accelerate the military “kill-chain” shortly after the outbreak of war with Russia in 2022. The kill-chain, which aggregates huge amounts of data to track a target to the point of a strike, or death, is controlled by an AI system made by Palantir called maven. Another Palantir system, prisma, directs drone attacks, while a third Palantir product, metaconstellation, assigns low earth orbit satellites to survey a designated area anywhere on the planet before calling in a strike.

Following this initial military partnership, Palantir rapidly expanded its influence in the country, becoming integral to the functioning of the Ukrainian state itself. In 2023 Ukraine announced that Palantir had established a “point of entry” through Ukraine’s digital transformation ministry and had begun working with “many Ukrainian governmental institutions.” Today, Palantir software helps power Ukraine’s domestic security services, its education system, and is at the forefront of the country’s efforts to digitise all government functions and create what Ukraine calls the world’s first AI-powered “agentic state.”

The most dystopian expression of Ukraine’s transformation into an “agentic state” is its tracking and tracing of military-age men to snatch off the street and feed into the meat-grinder. To achieve this, Ukraine digitised its national military database, known as Oberih, and consolidated the data into a system known as Reserve+. This system merges Oberih data with data from the country’s state registries alongside a wealth of other personal information, including tax and employment records, residence information, and medical records. Once a complete picture of a person has been established, the system uses AI to determine a person’s fitness and status for military conscription.

And it is this Reserve+ system which powers Ukraine’s detested programme of forced mobilisation. The videos documenting Ukraine’s mobilisation units kidnapping men while shopping in supermarkets, or off the streets, often in front of their families, bundling them into minivans before sending them to an almost-inevitable death on the front-lines, have become ubiquitous, daily occurrences on Ukrainian Telegram channels.

While neither Palantir nor Ukraine have confirmed the company is behind the digitisation of Ukraine’s military systems, the circumstantial evidence is extremely strong, given that Palantir’s technology is designed specifically to connect multiple databases and derive relationships and patterns from them. This is precisely what the Reserve+ system does. And Palantir has an open door into all of Ukraine’s governmental institutions.

It is also no coincidence that these mobilisation units bear a striking resemblance to the ICE snatch squads which roam the US with impunity, given that Palantir has been working with ICE and supplying it with AI and data tools for over a decade. Palantir’s Investigative Case Management platform is used by ICE to scrape and aggregate massive amounts of data on individuals including school status, family relationships, employment information, phone records, personal connections, biometric information and residential addresses. In both Ukraine and the US, then, the underlying software leading to the physical apprehension of a person is almost identical. And Palantir is the thread connecting the two.

Palantir is also bringing misery on Ukrainians by directing the so-called “deep strikes” into Russia. This campaign, much heralded and hyped in western media and by western elites, has achieved no gains of strategic note but instead has provoked Russia into far more devastating counterattacks which have brought even greater misery on Ukrainians. These counterattacks have closed the Odessa ports, effectively turned Ukraine into a land-locked country, depriving Ukrainians of vital imports, and have also targeted critical warehouses and power infrastructure. According to recent statements from Ukrainian officials, Russian strikes have destroyed about 90% of Ukraine’s food-logistics infrastructure and 80% of Ukraine’s power generation.

But Karp and Thiel don’t care about the suffering of Ukrainians. The strikes may have been counterproductive and led to greater misery for ordinary people, but the data gleaned from the campaign will be fed back into Palantir systems and allow the company to refine and market future AI war-tech products.

Palantir, in case you needed reminding, is not on the side of the good. It is not helping Ukraine because it cares about democracy or human rights or any of the propaganda that we’re sold about why the west must support Ukraine against Russia.

This, after all, is the company which helped Israel commit the genocide of Gaza. Palantir, which has been active in Israel since 2014, held its first board meeting of 2024 in Tel Aviv to celebrate Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, and shortly after began supplying the IDF with AI tools to help the colony execute its mass slaughter. This is the company whose maven AI system is the core system for the US military and was used to massacre 120 children in Minab, Iran, on the first day of the US-Israeli attack on the country.

It is the company run by a man who says that “the west has a superior way of living and organising itself” and in a letter to Palantir shareholders said that “the rise of the west was not made possible by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” A man who called the mass murdered of Gaza “useful idiots.” This is a deeply violent individual dedicated to employing techno-militarism to advance American barbarity and hegemony.

It is the company founded by Epstein associate Peter Thiel, an arch Zionist and significant funder of Israeli tech whose rise was aided by neo-Nazi groups. It is the company Thiel founded alongside Joe Lonsdale who said recently that Palantir was set up to kill communists.

September 22, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, Ukraine | Leave a comment

The West is watching the wrong Ukrainian collapse

The detachment of the Ukrainian state from society did not begin yesterday. It started the moment the Ukrainian authorities placed the interests of their Western masters above those of their country.

As winter approaches, Ukraine again finds itself at a crossroads. And it appears to be once again choosing the path of war, a path that it’s being desperately pushed onto by Europe’s anti-Russia coalition. 

Missiles and territorial losses dominate the headlines, while the deeper rupture between state and society goes largely unnoticed

Sergey Poletaev, 14 Sept 26, https://www.rt.com/russia/645729-west-is-watching-wrong-ukrainian-collapse/

Last weekend, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Moscow and then Kiev. This was the first such visit in a long time, since all trilateral contacts between Russia, the US, and Ukraine were practically halted following the start of the conflict in Iran this February.

Following the visit, leaks regarding the talks emerged from Kiev; reportedly, the US envoys presented the Ukrainian side with a 28-point Russian peace plan that had been agreed upon a year earlier. Jared Kushner indirectly confirmed this on Saturday, stating that the territorial issue was the only point of the peace plan that remained unresolved.

Is it true that Ukraine accepted all the other fundamental demands of the Russian side – such as the points concerning the Russian language and the status of the Orthodox Church, the renunciation of military cooperation with NATO, the recognition of territorial changes, the reduction of the army, and so on? (Spoiler: no, it didn’t.)

Is Ukraine really losing the war, as many recent statements and publications suggest? Spoiler: yes, but not in the way you’d think. 

Let’s take a look at what this means. 

Shuttle diplomacy

The peace talks involving Steve Witkoff began in February-March 2025, shortly after a phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump that signaled a fundamental shift in US policy toward Russia and the Ukraine conflict. 

Trump’s top priority was to avoid direct involvement, positioning America – as far as possible – at an equal distance from the parties. Of course, to truly achieve this, the conflict would have to be frozen; this would allow the US to restore relations with Russia, counterbalancing China. 

Naturally, freezing the conflict (or, in Trump’s words, ending the war in one day) proved impossible; consequently, the US made the most out of the situation as the war dragged on: it shifted the entire burden onto Europe and stepped aside. This strategy allowed the US to maintain working contacts with Russia, reap maximum benefits from the ongoing fighting, and insulate itself from the risks of Ukraine’s potential defeat while still keeping the door open to capitalize on Ukraine’s hypothetical victory over Russia.

In short, Trump decided to sit on the sidelines and watch who would emerge victorious. 

For Moscow, too, contacts with Washington are incredibly valuable. It proved impossible to decouple Russia-US relations from the Ukraine issue, and relations between the two countries have effectively remained frozen. Yet the fact that the US is disengaging from the Ukraine conflict – and, more broadly, from European affairs – deprives Europe of confidence in US backing and consequently strips it of strategic depth.

The flip side of this maneuver is that the US has effectively relinquished its decisive say regarding Ukraine. Putin and Trump could reach any agreement whatsoever, but Ukraine is now entirely dependent on Europe. This means that it is Europe that will ultimately determine the final terms. As a Russian saying goes, “He who pays for the girl’s dinner gets to dance with her.”

Surely, Trump could exert pressure on all sides, but why bother? He is essentially satisfied with the current situation and needs nothing more from Moscow. So he has simply let things run their course,

Kiev is well aware of this, which is why Ukrainian officials play along with US envoys. Though direct opposition is out of the question – after all, they still need American missile defense systems – they can avoid any action and buy time. And that’s precisely what Kiev is doing. 

The fact that Zelensky visited Canada last week but not the US clearly shows that Kiev no longer sees Washington as the primary center of decision-making. Consequently, the negotiation track involving Witkoff and Kushner is seen by the Ukrainian side as little more than a mandatory part of the show. 

Is Ukraine losing? Yes, but not in the way you might think

On September 8, British magazine The Spectator published an editorial titled ‘Ukraine is losing the war’. A week before, several prominent Ukrainian figures – including former Defense Minister Mikhail Fyodorov and the current head of Zelensky’s office, Kirill Budanov – had expressed similar sentiments.

At first glance, this may sound reasonable: the AFU’s deep-strike campaign against Russian infrastructure wasn’t successful, and the summer offensive on the southern front, which is crucial for the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), has de facto failed. 

Moreover, Ukraine was unprepared for retaliatory strikes targeting port facilities, logistics, energy infrastructure, and transport networks. This confirmed what experts had been saying for over a year: Ukraine’s air defense systems, which are entirely dependent on US supplies and severely depleted, could barely cope with the previous intensity of air raids; now they can shoot down one ballistic missile out of a dozen, at best. This has made it possible for the Russian Army to launch massive attacks on the Ukrainian rear.

Of course, massive raids by Ukrainian drones and, occasionally, cruise missiles also inflict damage on the Russian rear. This summer was marked by a gasoline shortage and long lines at gas stations. Dozens of warehouses in the European part of Russia are in flames, and other targets are under attack as well. 

However, the scale of these attacks is incomparable: by various estimates, the AFU managed to disable up to 3% of Russia’s warehouse storage capacity, whereas Russia has disabled between 30% and 60% of Ukraine’s capacity. Ukrainian experts admit that the strikes on Odessa port have had a far greater impact on Ukraine’s fuel logistics than Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. 

For instance, the price of diesel fuel in Ukraine has topped 100 hryvnias, which is nearly three times the cost in Russia. For the first time since the start of the conflict, fuel rationing is being introduced for the AFU (no such measures have ever been implemented for the Russian Armed Forces).

Russian strikes have effectively halted Ukrainian grain exports by sea, depriving the national budget of a key revenue stream. Retail businesses are closing en masse, undermining what is arguably the economy’s last remaining civilian sector.

This looks like an obvious reason why Ukraine is losing the war. So does this mean that all those hysterical reports and articles are actually true?

Not quite. I would venture to say that all the above-mentioned factors are merely temporary difficulties to which Ukraine can adapt, and which have little impact on the situation at the front. It’s true that there is a gaping hole worth tens of billions of dollars in the Ukrainian budget; likewise, it’s true that the civilian population will face a harsh winter; and yes, what remains of the energy and industrial sectors is under constant attack. 

But all this means that the additional financial burden will fall on Europe’s shoulders, while the civilian sector and the state’s capacity to fulfill social obligations will continue to deteriorate; the people will be left to their fate. 

All this will affect not only ordinary citizens but entrepreneurs as well. Ukrainian businesses, which largely supported the Kiev regime and the war simply because there were no other options (given that their future was directly tied to that of the central government), are also being left to fend for themselves.

The central tension in Ukrainian society right now is the smoldering civil conflict between Territorial Centers of Recruitment (TCRs) and the men who are being conscripted by force. The destruction of the civilian economy is likely to spawn similar scenarios: bankrupt entrepreneurs, an impoverished middle class, and the unemployed will all see that the Ukrainian state is doing them more harm than good. As a result, the state itself, and not just state-controlled TCRs, will become the enemy. 

One might argue that as opportunities and funds in the civilian sector decline, the military sector becomes more attractive. However, there are no new opportunities in military production and logistics (after all, Ukraine has no money), and fewer people are willing to die on the front lines.

All of this will lead to an even greater disconnect between the Ukrainian state and society. And a state severed from society is essentially a military organization. History offers us many such examples, the most recent being ISIS.

A military organization that lacks the support of civil society cannot hold the front line, especially one stretching 1,500 kilometers. There are no historical precedents for this. 

A collapse of the front would mean the end of Ukraine in its current form. Kiev understands this perfectly well, which is why it undertakes superhuman efforts to hold the line – even at the cost of a smoldering civil war on the home front.

The detachment of the Ukrainian state from society did not begin yesterday. It started the moment the Ukrainian authorities placed the interests of their Western masters above those of their country.

As winter approaches, Ukraine again finds itself at a crossroads. And it appears to be once again choosing the path of war, a path that it’s being desperately pushed onto by Europe’s anti-Russia coalition. 

That is precisely why Witkoff and Kushner left Kiev empty-handed, and why the war will continue – first until the Kiev regime is completely severed from Ukraine, and then until that regime is utterly destroyed.

If you need an example, just look at ISIS. 

September 21, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, Ukraine | Leave a comment