Zelensky Appears to be another Fraud

It's worthwhile to read Clara Weiss's "Paris summit on Ukraine overshadowed by inter-imperialist conflicts" after reading Andrew Higgins of The New York Times "In First Meeting With Putin, Zelensky Plays to a Draw Despite a Bad Hand" and Colonel Cassad. Higgins breathes a sigh of relief that Ukrainian president Zelensky did not end the war with Russia. The ceasefire will be extended and a promise of a prisoner exchange reaffirmed, but on the main features of Minsk II, the special status of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and a new "federalized" Ukrainian constitution, there was no movement.

Higgins applauds Zelensky's intransigence, vaguely referring to spine-stiffening protests in Kiev:

Worried that Mr. Zelensky might succumb to Mr. Putin’s powers of persuasion, as Mr. Trump did in Helsinki in July last year, three opposition groups in Ukraine issued a manifesto ahead of the Paris meeting drawing six “red lines” that should not be crossed. They demanded that Mr. Zelensky make no concessions to Mr. Putin on Ukraine’s “Euro-Atlantic” foreign policy, the status of eastern regions and the timing of elections in territory occupied by Russian-backed separatists.

Early Tuesday morning, protesters gathered near Mr. Zelensky’s office in the center of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, voicing relief that the Paris meeting had not ended in the “capitulation” they had feared.

Here's how Weiss describes the "opposition":

Zelensky had been put under enormous domestic pressure from the US-backed far-right and substantial sections of the oligarchy seeking to prevent him from making any concessions to Russia. On Saturday and Sunday, thousands of supporters of the far-right in Ukraine gathered in Kiev to demonstrate against a rapprochement with Russia. The parties supporting the protests including the anti-Semitic neo-Nazi party Svoboda, which played an important role in the 2014 coup. Ex-President Petro Poroshenko addressed the far-right rally on Sunday.

Weiss assesses the Paris summit on Ukraine in terms of rising tensions within NATO:

The summit had been aggressively pushed for by the French president Emmanuel Macron, who has met with Zelensky several times, both before and after the latter’s election as president. Under conditions of growing transatlantic tensions, Macron has been calling for NATO and the EU to “reconsider our position towards Russia.” In a recent interview with the Economist, Macron called NATO “brain-dead.” His criticisms of NATO and the US were sharply rebutted by US president Trump at the NATO summit just days before the Ukraine summit on Monday.

Berlin too has rejected Macron’s dismissal of NATO. Despite growing tensions with the US, including over the Russian-German pipeline Nord Stream 2, Germany has insisted on the need to maintain and strengthen NATO. Recent weeks have also seen a worsening of relations between Berlin and Moscow, with Germany expelling two Russian diplomats, accusing them of complicity in the murder of two Chechen separatist leaders. Ahead of the Ukraine summit, the German defense minister Heiko Maaß stressed that Russia had to give in to the demands posed by Ukraine, and that the Kremlin was to blame for the crisis in the country. At the summit, Merkel and Putin reportedly met one-on-one to discuss the recent diplomatic crisis.

The escalation of warfare within the US ruling class and the intensification of the conflicts between the imperialist powers occur amid the unraveling of the strategy that US imperialism has pursued in the region since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991: aiming to secure its world hegemony through control of the Eurasian landmass, the US has aggressively worked to encircle Russia, above all by extending NATO to its borders and through the enlargement of the EU. The East European EU member states, above all Poland and the Baltics, have been transformed into critical props of US militarism in the region.

Ukraine has historically been central to that strategy. The US has pumped massive resources into the operation of turning Ukraine into a reliable prop of NATO and the US against Russia. In 2004, sections of the Ukrainian oligarchy and upper middle class with funding and support of the CIA toppled a pro-Russian government in the so called “Orange Revolution.” Then, in 2013-2014, the US and the EU supported the so-called Maidan movement which culminated in a fascist-led coup and the establishment of the Poroshenko regime.

Between 1991 and 2014, the US, according to the former US assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, pumped some $5 billion into Ukraine’s “civil society.” Since 2014, the US has spent another $5 billion on Ukraine, according to congressional testimony in the impeachment hearings. The US military has also taken an active part in training and arming the Ukrainian army and paramilitary fascist organizations like the Azov battalion. (See also: Who decided the US should fight a “hot war” with Russia? )

This strategy, however, has failed to achieve its main goals. Ukraine remains mired in a civil war and the Putin regime has remained in place and continues to be a thorn in the eye of US foreign policy. Analysts widely agree that it is impossible to resolve the military stalemate in East Ukraine without turning what is now a proxy war into a direct war with Russia.

Polls among the East Ukrainian population have repeatedly indicated overwhelming hostility to an accession of the country to the EU and NATO, making it all but inconceivable that these territories be integrated without massive political and military conflicts in the country. Zelensky himself was voted into office in April largely on the basis of promises to end the widely hated war, and discontinue the provocative anti-Russia policies of his predecessor Poroshenko.

Similarly, US efforts to prop up the right-wing liberal opposition in Russia and figures like Alexei Navalny and undermine the Putin regime through economic warfare in the form of sanctions have yielded only limited results.

The deadlock of US foreign policy in the region was spelled out in a recent piece in Foreign Affairs, the publication of the US Council of Foreign Relations, which advises US imperialism on its strategy. The journal noted, “Over the past quarter century, nearly all major efforts at establishing a durable post-Cold War order on the Eurasian continent have foundered on the shoals of Ukraine. For it is in Ukraine that the disconnect between triumphalist end-of-history delusions and the ongoing realities of great-power competition can be seen in its starkest form.”

The only solution offered by the advisors of US imperialism was to double down on a strategy that has proven both disastrous and dangerous, and escalate the war preparations against Russia and US involvement in the region. The piece concluded: “Washington’s best option at this point is to strengthen its bilateral political and security ties with Ukraine while working closely with its European allies to ensure Ukraine’s ability to protect its sovereignty… Above all else, Washington must protect the impeachment process from Russian interference and get past the illusion that it can promote a stable political order either at home or abroad without successfully navigating the shoals of Ukraine.”

Cassad thinks the Paris summit achieved very little:

As expected, the big breakthroughs of the summit, “Norman four” in Paris to no avail. The main message is that the parties agreed to negotiate further. The reasons for such insignificant results are quite obvious: the main player [United States] not involved in these negotiations, at least on the face of things. In fact, the main achievement of the summit was an agreement that in four months it will be repeated, which automatically means that the war is extended for another four months. That means it will be a year since the election of Zelensky under the promise to bring peace. As we can see, a year will have passed, and peace will not have come. People will always be foolish victims of deception.