Grave Nation: Ukrainian Cemetery Mega-Project Reveals Dimming Military Hopes

a shroud of occlusion wears heavy over the outcome of the war is because the West has done their utmost in hiding Ukrainian losses.

“The right question is not whether Ukraine has lost the war – that seems all too obvious to me – but how far it will lose it.“

the Ukrainian deputies who still have some brain left understand that with the current state of affairs in Ukraine, the country will soon cease to exist. All the Ukrainian “partners” who were verbally ready to fight for Zelensky’s regime have now completely “frozen” and don’t even want to contribute money.

Simplicius, Jul 22, 2025, https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/grave-nation-ukrainian-cemetery-mega?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1351274&post_id=168791044&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

A new Le Monde article sends spider cracks through the facade of Ukrainian losses:

Right off the bat, they reveal that cemeteries throughout Ukraine are full, requiring a national project of building a large-scale network of new military burial sites:

The squares reserved for the soldiers are full. Everywhere, teams of architects are working on memorials that tell us as much about the scale of the slaughter as they do about the ongoing reflection on the idea of nationhood.

They visit one of the first under construction, which already has a main square of plots for 10,000, eventually to be expanded to 160,000 graves:

In the village, only a brand-new brown sign, the color reserved for national sites, currently marks the road leading the trucks to the construction site. It reads: “National Military Memorial Cemetery”. A first square of 10,000 graves, already partially dotted with wide, light-colored granite paths lined with benches and lime trees, will welcome the first “heroes” this summer. Eventually, however, “130,000 or even 160,000” deceased will be laid to rest on this future mortuary site, explains architect Serhi Derbin, wearing khaki linen pants and a straw panama, in the bright Saturday sunshine of July.

Rightly, the Le Monde staff turn to the issue of “official” Ukrainian casualty statistics. In a growing Western trend, they admit that the number of dead is likely “much higher” than Zelensky gives credit for. Of course, pro-UA zealots will ignore the fact that there is no such project in Russia, no inordinately exceptional outgrowth of military cemeteries anywhere. They’ll make excuses, pointing to the cliche of “Russia’s size” as somehow ‘concealing’ such markers of losses, ignoring that Ukraine itself is the largest country in Europe and remains oddly unable to ‘conceal losses’ in the same way.

In the same circles, there are increased talks of Ukrainian collapse by end of year. Le Figaro’s new article making the rounds offers such a prediction. The writers spoke to French military officers who believe the situation is turning dire:

A French military source:

Moscow’s “thousand cuts” strategy is intensifying. The front is not set in stone. Offensives are localized in a multitude of small battles fought over a few kilometers. The cuts are getting deeper, even though the Ukrainian army is already weakened. It is stretched over a front of more than 1,000 km. Lacking sufficiently frequent replacements and human resources, the units are becoming exhausted.

“The Russians are multiplying offensive sectors to disperse enemy reserves,” explains a French military source. Russia has deployed nearly 700,000 soldiers in Ukraine, more than the Ukrainian army. Patiently, it continues to nibble away at territory, at the cost of colossal human losses: up to a hundred dead a day; some 40,000 casualties (dead and wounded) a month. The Russian army has adapted its tactics, preferring to launch assaults with small infantry units or units mounted on motorcycles, in order to advance faster and more lightly.

They slip in the usual sop about the “costs” Russia is incurring, but then critically add:

But the army, the Ukrainian, it also lost some of the material she had received from Western for the past three years. Time plays against it with the risk of a break in a part of the front. “Forces of Ukraine are in [dire straits]… Can they last six months? A year? In reality, the war is already lost“, continued in the military source. In this war of attrition, the time changes everything.

And in another even more erudite offering, Figaro interviews French historian Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, who is particularly a leading expert on the First World War.

Utilizing his expertise on the Great War, he makes some fascinating parallels to the current Ukrainian conflict that are worth a deeper look.

First, he notes that in his opinion the Ukrainian war is only the third war of its particular type in recent history—the type being ‘siege warfare, but in the open country’:

You note another similarity between the First World War and the Ukraine, as both were wars of position…

There are few historical examples of this very recent form of warfare, as it requires armaments that only became available at the end of the 19th century. Structurally, it is siege warfare, but fought in open country over hundreds of kilometers. There have only been three conflicts of this type: the Great War (from late 1914 to spring 1918, not beyond); the Iran-Iraq war (from 1980 to 1988); the Ukraine war (from April 2022, not before).

He goes on to draw further parallels:

What are the invariants of such a war?

The main point is the superiority of the defensive over the offensive. Had this not been the case, Ukraine would have been beaten long ago. Already during the First World War, it was necessary to cross a “no man’s land” saturated with barbed wire, one of the most effective weapons of the early 20th century. Then there were the minefields we saw in Iran-Iraq and now in Ukraine. They are an extraordinarily compact barrier. The Ukrainians came up against it in the summer of 2023 during their failed counter-offensive, and the Russians since 2024. As a result, it’s impossible to break through dozens of kilometers wide and break the enemy’s front line.

He notes that due to these peculiarities, there is a kind of obligatory “regression” in each conflict, where previous means are no longer workable:

There is a kind of regression in all three conflicts. In Ukraine, helicopters and airplanes fly very little above and beyond the front line. Nor are there any major armored offensives. We’ve never seen anything like the Battle of Kursk in 1943. As a result, the battle is heavily infantry-based.

And at the same time, firepower…

Yes, that’s another invariant of this type of warfare. Initially, this firepower was linked to artillery, with the cannon dominating the battlefield during the First World War. This overwhelming dominance of the cannon can be seen again in Ukraine, until 2024. Unfortunately, Russia has always had very good artillery and, unlike the Ukrainians, has had the means to supply it, where the latter ran out of ammunition well into 2024.

But the point in setting the stage above, is that by analyzing these parallels, this preeminent historian has reached a final decisive conclusion: that Ukraine has already lost the war:

It was by considering these invariants that you came to a radical conclusion, set out at a Senate hearing in April: in your view, Ukraine has already lost the war…

Indeed, as we speak, Ukraine unfortunately seems to have lost the war, probably as early as the summer of 2023, when it became clear that its long-awaited counter-offensive had failed. One could imagine a spectacular turnaround, but it’s not clear how. Of course, when you say this, people are shocked because it’s unbearable to think that Ukraine has lost the war. It’s unbearable for me too.

He adds to the list of peculiarities of the war the fact that even Ukraine’s now-certain loss is not overtly visible:

But here’s the thing: there’s no point in remaining incantatory, we have to get out of a new denial, that of defeat, after that of the possibility of war itself. For I would add another characteristic of the war of position: defeat is not immediately discernible when it looms. It takes a long time to appear. It’s not like Stalingrad, where the vanquished leave the battlefield and the victor occupies it. It’s not like the blitzkrieg of May-June 1940. In a war of position, it’s two bodies in battle, slowly wearing each other down. Only in the end does it become clear that one has worn out faster than the other.

He hits the nail on the head, but likely in a way even he doesn’t fully understand—or at least not in a way he’s ready to admit. You see, the reason such a shroud of occlusion wears heavy over the outcome of the war is because the West has done their utmost in hiding Ukrainian losses. His final pithy admonition that only in the end does it become clear who lost the war of attrition inadvertently bears testament to this: only those of us who truly care about facts and uncovering the truth—not dogmatic reasoning and propaganda—are able to demystify the more-than-obvious signals that Ukraine is taking ungodly and unsustainable losses comparative to Russia.

He goes on to demonstrate his cause with an example:

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Let’s imagine that in early October 1918, a group of military experts, journalists and historians were gathered in a neutral country to ask their opinion on the situation. And now suppose someone had then suggested that Germany had already lost the war. Well, everyone would have cried out! At that time, the Reich was still occupying immense territories in the east at the expense of Russia, since the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It occupied the whole of Belgium and large parts of France. It’s true that the German army has been retreating since the summer, but nowhere has the front given way. The Germans are inflicting heavy losses on the Allies, since it is the Allies who are on the offensive and therefore taking the greatest risks. So where is the German defeat?

In reality, German defeat has been certain since July-August 1918. It has happened, but it is not yet apparent. Since the summer, the German General Staff has been well aware of this, and has called for negotiations to be launched. Except that the political powers don’t understand it, nor does German public opinion, and never will. This failure to understand the defeat of 1918 was one of the reasons for the rise of Nazism.

The interviewer lightly pushes back, stating that the Ukrainians are not yet visibly collapsing despite Russia’s slow-moving gains:

Here again, let’s think back to the First World War. When the Allies launched their counter-offensive in July 1918, it was a general one, but apart from the Americans, the soldiers were no longer capable of attacking. They were so used to throwing themselves on the ground at the first danger that everyone was extremely cautious. But we could have imagined that part of the front would be breached, in which case… Germany had no more reserves to plug the holes. That’s why I’m worried about the risk of a Russian offensive in Ukraine this summer: given the disproportion of forces, could it break through the front? We would then be entering a different configuration, as any break in the front would risk producing a powerful moral effect on the Ukrainian armed forces, on political power and on public opinion.

He concludes by stating that the right question is no longer whether Ukraine has lost—which is rhetorical at this point—but how far Ukraine will lose:

The right question is not whether Ukraine has lost the war – that seems all too obvious to me – but how far it will lose it. On the basis of the current balance of power, or on that of an even more unfavorable balance of power? This will determine whether or not the Ukrainian defeat represents a strategic victory for Russia.

On that note, Russia again launched one of the largest attacks of the war last night—at least according to frenetic Ukrainian commentators who, admittedly, could be playing things up for dramatic effect to curry sympathy:

There has been a surge of such attacks the last few weeks, particularly ones targeting Ukrainian recruitment centers operated by the notorious TCK (Territorial Recruitment Center). Farsighted Ukrainian officials have ‘brilliantly’ concluded this is a Russian effort to cripple Ukraine’s ability to round up meat for Zelensky’s conveyor belt of horror.

Likewise, Russian strikes have been completely erasing Ukrainian weapons industries. Many people watch the endless parade of explosions in a detached manner—at this point it has become passé to the point that people assume these strikes do little, or are just carrying out some vague ‘background work’. In reality, they have been neutering Ukrainian industries, halting many of the farfetched Ukrainian weapons ambitions which were at one point widely talked about.

For instance, a recent hit was said to have destroyed the Grom-2 production line, a big Ukrainian ballistic missile that was meant to be their answer to Russia’s Iskander. There’s a reason you don’t see much of the weaponry constantly talked about and billed as the next “wunderwaffen”: it’s because these ongoing, systematic Russian strikes are wiping out their industries, leaving Ukraine with no ability to produce anything other than small quadcopter drones in tiny boutique workshops which can be hidden anywhere. The larger facilities which were meant to produce more prestige-level systems, from mobile artillery, to various analogues of Russian air-to-ground and ballistic missiles, to artillery shell production lines, etc., have all been extirpated by these relentless systematic strikes.

More and more, top Ukrainian figures are panicking over this and concluding that if it continues on this way, Ukraine will have nothing left. Listen to the Ukrainian officer below, who states that “at this rate, Ukraine will be returned to the stone age”:

🇺🇦The chair under Zelensky is starting to shake more and more. After all, allowing such statements on the air of pro-Kyiv media was previously unimaginable👍

➖Apparently, the recent report about the production of Geran-2 drones and their quantity, along with massive attacks on Ukrainian military infrastructure, really forced the top officials of Zelensky’s office to activate the “brown” alert.

➖Because the Ukrainian deputies who still have some brain left understand that with the current state of affairs in Ukraine, the country will soon cease to exist. All the Ukrainian “partners” who were verbally ready to fight for Zelensky’s regime have now completely “frozen” and don’t even want to contribute money. Support is dwindling, and stealing is becoming difficult. The people fully realize that Zelensky will shout about VICTORY from his bunker or Europe until he is hoarse, while Ukrainians rejoice at the Geran-2 strikes on the TCC.

He’s referring in particular to the new videos showcasing Russia’s Geran (Shahed) drone production at the Alabuga factory in Tatarstan where hundreds of the drones are produced each day around the clock:

The full episode where the above excerpt is from, which deals with many other drone types being used in the Russian Army, can be viewed here.

One of the reasons, by the way, that the French historian, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, saw Russia winning the war despite parallels to ‘stalemated’ conflicts like the Iran-Iraq war, is because in previous examples he believes the industrial capacities and general capabilities of the combatants were likewise roughly static. But in the case of the Russo-Ukrainian war, he admits that Russian capabilities are growing each year, far out-pacing Ukrainian ones. This goes toward things like the previously-talked-about manpower gains of 100k per year—while Ukraine’s manpower shrinks—as well as the industrial growth of the arms industry.

That being said, there’s one last important point to be made. Many point to Russia’s “growing economic problems” as a counter-argument for why Russia could begin “losing” in the future, despite its seeming present dominance. I even saw one Western publication spin Putin’s announcement that Russia would be reducing its military budget next year as an “act of desperation” which means Russian military capability is finally “weakening”.

On the contrary, the signals here are the complete opposite: Putin’s plan to begin slowly reining in Russia’s military spending is the acknowledgement that Russia has finally reached a total equilibrium in the war, where current production levels are stable and sustainable indefinitely in relation to the losses. That means further inordinate military expansion is unnecessary, and Russia sees a successful path in defeating Ukraine at current levels.

This is obviously in conjunction with the fact that Russia has now attritioned the AFU to such an extent that it no longer requires the same disparity levels in military spending—as Ukrainian capabilities shrink, Russia likewise settles its war-making into a manageable level by taking things from overdrive to simply ‘autopilot’—if the analogy makes sense. Once again, dogmatic Western analysts incapable of impartial reasoning fail to pick up on this obvious cue, which totally spoils their analyses.

To leave off, here’s a typically comical new “threat” issued by beltway bugger Lindsey Graham against Putin. He boasts that Trump will “put a whoopin’ on your ass”, but then veers to say Trump will “punish” not Russia, but countries buying Russian oil:

This again proves the US has no cards against Russia, and must desperately punch Russia’s friends on the arm as a substitute threat. The problem is, this hurts the US and its relations with key foreign powers more than it does anything to Russia.

More and more Ukrainian commentators and political figures are cottoning on to the fact that “sanctions” were always nothing more than a desperate and hollow performative act:

The West, with its illusory economies, fraudulent GDPs based on hyper-financialized and leveraged debt, and miserably deteriorated industrial capacities has worn out its ‘sanctions’ cudgel—at least for anything more than performative ‘punishments’.

July 23, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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 | Leave a comment