Washington’s Puppet: The Rise and Fall of Volodmyr Zelenskyy

In my book, The Road to Fascism, I argued that, although fascism has returned to the political economy, laws and ideology of the West — most explicitly in our governance by unelected international technocracies, the suspension of our previously inalienable human rights under a more-or-less permanent state of emergency, and our indoctrination into behaviours of compliance, censorship and violence by the orthodoxies of woke — the figure of the leader, with which historical fascism is so closely associated in the form of the Italian Duce, German Führer and Spanish Caudillo, has not. But watching the rise of the newly-butch, paramilitary figure into which Volodmyr Zelenskyy — the former dance-show contestant and soap-opera comedian — has transformed, I’m not now so sure.

It’s a rigorously suppressed fact that Zelenskyy is the second US puppet to occupy the office of President since the US-engineered coup overthrew the democratically-elected government of the Ukraine in 2014, and that the war we’re constantly told began when Russian forces moved into the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine in February 2022 in actuality started eight years earlier, when the majority Russian-speaking population formed itself into a people’s militia and rose up against the intervention of the USA in their country.

Zelenskyy was elected as President in May 2019 on a promise to end the resulting civil war in the Donbas, and until the Russian intervention he appeared on the media platforms of the West in the role of a diminutive, clean-shaven, suited-and-booted office boy, trying to work out the dramatic arc of his new character. This was no longer as the star of the television show, Servant of the People (Слуга народу), in which he had played the gun-toting President of the Ukraine since 2015, but as the actual President of a country for which the USA had very definite plans. To his obvious confusion, his new status as a ‘Reality TV’ star didn’t preclude him from, for example, being humiliated by Donald Trump on US television as the whipping boy for the poorest and most corrupt nation in Europe that was ripe for salvation from its Russian oppressor.

Then all that changed last year. A few months in the gym, a new designer beard, imitation army fatigues embroidered with a golden trident, a fashion shoot with his model wife for Paris Vogue, and the former naked exponent of cock jokes on Ukrainian music-television famous for wearing high heels and bondage gear and playing a piano with his penis became the new Führer before whom the leaders of Western capitalism have been only too ready to abase themselves. Despite presiding over a neo-Nazi Government whose ethnic cleansing of its own population had been reported by Western media for eight long years, that has banned Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and pulped 72 tonnes of Russian-language books, including Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, and turned them into toilet paper, Zelenskyy is now fêted in the West as a hero of democracy.

Indeed, the UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak,  the French President, Emmanuel Macron and the US President, Joe Biden, appear to be competing for the role of most adoring fan as they pose in photo after photo of them hugging Zelenskyy, holding hands with Zelenskyy, kissing Zelenskyy, gazing adoringly into the eyes of Zelenskyy, awarding Zelenskyy with honours and medals, before handing over more weapons and tax payers’ money to be laundered through their proxy war with Russia.

I’ll leave it to the plentiful students of LGBTQIA+ theory to untangle the tortuous erotics of masculine desire between contemporary Western leaders when spending the lives of working-class Ukrainian soldiers as recklessly as their tax-payers’ money; but like Mussolini and Hitler before him, Zelenskyy now always appears in mock khaki fatigues, as if just returned from the Russian front. Unlike them, however, Zelenskyy has never been a soldier or even completed military service, having earned his living since the age of seventeen as a professional comedian. But like Mussolini and Hitler — who were chosen by, respectively, Italian landowners and German industrialists to defeat the threat of the workers’ movement to European capital — Zelenskyy’s elevation from preening dance-show contestant to butch President is serving the financial interests of Western capitalists.

It’s an inconvenient fact for those who continue to describe fascism as a form of socialism that Western capitalists supported and funded fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s in order to counter the threat of a politically-organised working class, and that without their financial and political support neither Mussolini nor Hitler would have formed governments. Even before Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, 27 per cent of the German aristocracy had joined the Nazi Party; and between 1928 and 1942, 270 princes from the various old royal families became Nazis. I think it’s safe to say that they had a better appreciation of the putative ‘socialist’ credentials of the Nazi Party than post-war ideologues of Western capitalism. More importantly, the monopolies that funded the Third Reich were not state-owned but bore the names of Germany’s most powerful capitalists: Thyssen (which controlled more than 75 per cent of Germany’s iron ore reserves), Krupp (the largest company in Europe) and Siemens-Schuckert (Germany’s largest industrial conglomerate). Indeed, Fritz Thyssen was one of the nineteen industrialists, financiers and landowners who, in November 1932, petitioned the Reich President to appoint Hitler as Chancellor and, the following year, financed the successful election campaign of the NSDAP with over 2 million Reichsmark, without which it’s doubtful they would have come to power.

As I argued in chapter seven of my book, ‘Facism, Neoliberalism and the Left’, the story that fascism is a form of socialism is a product of post-war US imperialism, which sought both to erase the history of capitalism’s pre-war support for fascism and to denigrate the moral status communism emerged with after the war as both the military defeaters of fascism and the leaders of resistance groups across Europe. Despite the revelatory character attributed to it by defenders of neoliberalism today, the ‘horseshoe’ depiction of fascism and communism meeting at the extremes of the political spectrum isn’t a theory: it’s a pictogram to convince US citizens why, for example, they should hand over $886 billion of their tax dollars to the US Defence Department this year. And it doesn’t stop there.

Today, the West has so far handed over an astonishing $186.52 billion to the Ukraine’s US puppet Government while inviting Zelenskyy to perform to the legislatures of Western nations — something for which, unlike leading a country, he is far more qualified and even adept, according to his starry-eyed fans. Personally, I see nothing convincing or charismatic about a small man speaking with the put-on gravelly voice Zelenskyy uses when begging for more money from Western nations. But I appear to be in the minority. The recent spectacle of Zelenskyy, in designer fatigues, demanding more weapons from the UK in the semi-religious setting of Westminster Hall didn’t stop a crowd of breathless MPs from making themselves ridiculous by snapping his now quasi-sacred presence on their smart phones and then posting the photograph on their Twitter accounts with some variation on the statement that the puppet-President of the Ukraine — as our Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, wrote — is ‘the bravest man I have ever met’.

But how did this bravest man rise from MTV star to President of the Ukraine? In March 2018, four years after the US-led coup, a political party named after Zelenskyy’s soap opera, Servant of the People, was registered with the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice by its then leader, Ivan Bakanov, an entrepreneur in the field of hydro-electricity. A year later, on a promise to stop the civil war in the Donbass, the show’s star was elected President of the Ukraine. Upon assuming office, he appointed Bakanov, who is Zelenskyy’s childhood friend, First Deputy Chief of the Security Service, which is the main directorate against corruption and organised crime in the Ukraine. Three months later, Bakanov became Head of the Security Service with unlimited and uncontrolled powers, which he didn’t hesitate to use for the benefit of his inner circle, including Zelenskyy.

I’ll come back to Mr. Bakanov later, but how did such a farce materialise? It’s hard for reality to keep up with the fantasies of US foreign policy, but I can imagine Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to the Ukraine in 2016, watching Zelenskyy’s television show late one night and putting in a call to Victoria Nuland, the US Secretary of State for European Affairs who famously picked the post-coup Ukraine Cabinet in 2014. ‘Hey, Vickie, I think we found our next President of the Ukraine!’ Since it elected Ronald Reagan to the office, Washington has preferred B-movie actors, recovering alcoholics, game-show hosts and senile senators to play their Presidents, so it makes perfect sense that the hawks in Washington thought someone who has played one so successfully on Ukrainian television would make the perfect puppet for US foreign policy. That is, of course, if the US didn’t itself create the television show — which charts the rise of Zelenskyy’s character from primary school teacher to President on an anti-corruption platform — in order to promote Zelenskyy from actor to the same position in what we continue to call, increasingly unconvincingly, ‘real life’.

But there’s a more serious side to this elevation of a professional actor to the puppet Führer of NATO. Just as Western capitalism found that, once the socialists and communists had been defeated in Italy and Germany, there was no one left to control Mussolini and Hitler, so Zelenskyy’s call for NATO to launch ‘pre-emptive’ nuclear strikes on Russia has pushed the world closer to World War Three than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Of course, as a puppet President, Zelenskyy only speaks when someone’s hand is up his trousers, so these motions towards World War Three are mouthed on the command of Washington hawks intent on Russia’s oil and gas reserves. In preparation for which, the dehumanisation of the Russian people and banning of Russian culture by the neo-Nazi Government of the Ukraine — which for nearly a decade now has waged a genocidal war on the 8.3 million ethnic Russians within its own borders — is presumably preparing Western audiences for the ethnic cleansing of Russians ‘post-conquest’.

I was recently listening to the famous recording of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat (Op. 73) by the great Russian pianist, Emil Gilels, which was made in London in the Spring of 1957; and it suddenly struck me that this would never have happened in today’s climate of censorship, no-platforming and virtue-signalling. On the grounds not only that Beethoven was a German — and therefore as responsible for the Second World War as Tchaikovsky apparently is for the current war in the Ukraine — but that the UK was in a Cold War with the Soviet Union — although not as heated as the one we are in today with Russia — this recording would instead have been voluntarily and proudly cancelled by the Philharmonia Orchestra, just as the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra cancelled a performance of Tchaikovsky last year. Thankfully, even under the threat of nuclear annihilation that has returned today, in the 1950s we still remembered that such censorship is a characteristic of totalitarian regimes — something we have forgotten with the return of fascism to the West. For myself, I dissociate myself from this contemptible behaviour towards the Russian people and their thankfully still-intact national culture, and condemn the geopolitical aggression of the West it is being used to justify.

Fantasies of conquest aside, the fact that Washington’s performing puppet has the unrestrained admiration, here in the lapdog Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, not only of the Conservatives but of Labourites, the Greens, the Left, the Woke, and of every other idiot across the West — all of whom have collaborated willingly, fervently and unquestioningly with this attempt to dehumanise Russia and its people — shows just how little we have learned from history, how low we have sunk as a nation, and how ripe we are for the return of fascism.

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But things have now changed. Since Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping signed the fourteen agreements between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China in March, the Zelenskky puppet has fallen silent as its master’s hand has been removed from its strings. Even the braying mouths of Western politicians have closed in the face of this threat to their hegemony. Now, for the first time in over a year, it’s possible that Zelenskyy and his wife will be arrested and executed by the People’s Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic and — like Mussolini and his mistress in 1945 — hung by their heels and put on display for their former victims to mock. That might be unlikely — especially since Zelenskky spends so little time in the Ukraine, let alone near the frontline — but we can still dream. In the rest of this article, I’m going to show why Washington’s puppet deserves such a fate.

Since Russian forces moved into the Donbass region, my newsfeed — I imagine like yours — has been inundated with advertisements for Ukrainian women. Apparently, they are beautiful, warm, have traditional values, prefer older men, and — most alluring of all — they value the wealth of would-be husbands over their looks. This information is related over footage of women in various stages of undress, pouting their lips and kneading their breasts, as a narrator invites us to ‘take what is yours’. There’s a less than metaphorical connection in these online brothels between selling Ukraine’s women to the highest bidder and what Volodmyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s Prime Pimp, is doing to their country. Under the cover of this proxy war, Ukraine has been turned into a brothel for the West. Zelenskyy is the pimp pulling tricks off the street; Nuland is the Madame running the whores; US asset managers are their favoured clients; Sunak is the coat-check boy. This isn’t a war, it’s a gang bang, a snuff movie of drone strikes for Twitter; and its the people of the Ukraine that are being raped and murdered.

With the eyes of UK journalists focused on important issues like pronouns, they missed or have since forgotten the fact that the war in the Ukraine began in 2014, not 2022, and it was started by the USA, seeking to annex both Georgia and the Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance and imposing the same practices of neoliberalisation it imposed in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. One might ask how the US would respond if Russia — or, more comparably, China — staged a political coup deposing the President of Mexico, set up a puppet government in his place, severed Mexico’s economic relations with the US, and sought to draw it into a military alliance with itself — and did so with the whole of South America already in its pocket. The impossibility of the USA permitting even the first stage in such geopolitical aggression to take place suggests that, in advancing to the last of these stages in the Ukraine, Washington was deliberately trying to provoke Putin into a response — which it got when Russia occupied and then annexed the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014.

Zelenskyy, like all politicians, is a liar; but he is also a thief who has embezzled the Ukrainian people, handing over the grain, oil, gas, mineral and lithium resources of his country in shady deals with predatory US asset managers BlackRock, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. Without democratic mandate from the Ukrainian electorate and under cover of the war with Russia, Zelenskyy has implemented the Washington Consensus, ten principles of neoliberalisation enforced by the US Treasury, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as a condition of receiving loans and investement. These include removing import tariffs, cutting corporate taxes, revoking employment laws, deregulating industries, privatising state-owned companies, assets and banks, and, of course, cutting Ukraine’s economic ties with Russia, its largest trading partner.

And in order to pre-empt any opposition to these policies, Zelenskyy has banned eleven opposition political parties and all independent media platforms in the Ukraine, made laws prohibiting around 73 per cent of workers from forming unions or collective bargaining, and issued hit lists against journalists and academics denounced as ‘enemies of Ukraine’ for criticising his Government.

In this, at least, the Zelenskyy puppet has learned its lesson. It was the refusal of President Viktor Yanukovych, the democratically-elected President of the Ukraine, to implement the IMF’s demands to cut wages, slash spending and end gas subsidies preparatory to the assimilation of the Ukraine into the European Union, and instead to sign a trade deal with Russia, that led to him being toppled in the US-engineered coup in 2014. As Washington’s puppet, Zelenskyy has presented no such barrier to US imperialism — if we can use that word to describe Western capitalism’s rape and pillage of the Ukraine and its people under the cover of war and its propaganda.

To this end, Zelenskyy has obediently and repeatedly refused diplomatic moves by China to broker peace between Russia and the Ukraine, and instead sent tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers to their deaths in the war against Russia that has also killed unknown thousands of Ukrainian civilians. Nobody knows what the actual casualty figures are since February 2022, which range from 8,000 to 30,000 civilians and between 10,000 and 120,000 military personnel; but the cannon-fodder for Western capital must be running low, as Zelenskyy recently dropped the age of at which Ukrainian nationals must register for the military to 16 for men and 18 for women. Indeed, it was unsurprising to see what were, in effect, the 4,000 Ukrainian draft-dodgers who paid the average weekly wage in Ukraine for a seat in Wembley Stadium to watch representatives of their nation play England in the European Cup qualifiers this March. And who can blame them, even if we might question the sincerity of their rather too loudly protested patriotism?

By continuing the proxy war with Russia, Zelenskyy has perpetuated the cover under which the $186.52 billion of Western ‘aid’ can be laundered into anonymous accounts in offshore jurisdictions. In October 2021, the Pandora Papers revealed that Ivan Bakanov — remember him? — the Head of the Security Service, his chief Aide, Serhiy Shefir, and Zelenskyy himself, together own a network of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus and Belize that, among their investments, include London property. Indeed, in October 2019, even before the billions of dollars in ‘aid’ was sent to Ukraine, Transparency International estimated that £100 billion of dirty money enters the UK every year, with Ukraine surpassed only by Russia as the greatest source of high-end corruption and money laundering in which UK financial services are involved. So, financially speaking, the proxy war is only extending what the City of London has been doing since the last Global Financial Crisis sent Ukrainian and Russian billionaires scurrying for tax havens in which to hide their booty, and hedge-fund managers who wouldn’t ask questions about where and how they got it.

Of course, the purpose of such offshore financial jurisdictions is not only to hide the money but also who owns it, so nobody knows how much Zelenskyy has made from this vast programme of embezzlement, which has been very much modelled on that employed in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But one estimate of the net worth of this former TV comedian has put his personal fortune at $596 million. However, the page reporting this figure cited no source for this estimate, so the only indicator of its accuracy is that, as soon as it was published, the corporate-funded fact checkers employed to do so immediately denounced it as ‘false’, as they have every other ‘conspiracy theory’ that has turned out to be true.

According to Seymour Hersh, the internationally-respected journalist who broke the story about the sabotage of Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipeline by covert US operatives, Zelenskyy and his Cabinet have embezzled at least $400 million from the ‘aid’ package of the USA. Reportedly, Ukrainian Government Ministers are competing to set up shell companies in order to export weapons and ammunition supplied by ever-generous Western governments to private arms dealers around the world. Many of these companies are registered in Poland and the Czech Republic, others in the Persian Gulf and Israel, and suspected others in the Cayman Islands and Panama. According to Hersh’s source, Zelenskyy has been criticised by his own Ministers for taking more than his fair share of the kickbacks from this money-laundering scheme.

My own view is that, given Zelenskyy is handing over an entire country to the oligarchs of Western capitalism, either this figure is far short of his actual compensation or he needs a new agent. I have little doubt that the UK’s ‘world-beating’ financial advisors could cut him a better deal. But beyond the personal profit accrued with the blood and soil of his countrymen by this thief, liar and war criminal, if you’re looking for the simplest reason why the UK Government, Parliament, media and their financiers in the City of London are all so committed to the war in the Ukraine, this is it.

Finally, and not least in the list of crimes Washington’s puppet has committed or enabled, since 2014 the policies and actions of the Governments of the Ukraine against the people of the Donbas, where thousands of ethnic Russians — including an estimated 3,400 civilians — have been killed by ultranationalist armed forces like the Azov Regiment, the Aidar Volunteer Battalion and Right-Sector paramilitaries, and Russian culture and language is banned from public consumption and official use as effectively as that of the European Jews was under the Third Reich, meet the United Nations’ definition of genocide.

For all these crimes, Volodmyr Zelenskyy should be at the top of the International Criminal Court’s list of criminals wanted for war crimes and theft. But, personally, I hope the People’s Militia get him first. But where to hang this puppet from his severed strings?

After their execution, the bodies of Mussolini and his fellow fascists were strung up in Piazzale Loreto in Milan. The partisans that captured them chose this site because, the previous year, fifteen Milanese civilians had been shot by the Gestapo in retaliation for partisan attacks on a German military convoy. Forty years later, the Monument to the Liberators of Donetsk, built in the Lenin Komsomol Park in the capital of the Donbass, commemorated the liberation of the Ukraine from the German occupation during World War Two. Beginning with the massacre at Babi Yar outside Kyiv in September 1941, the Germans, with the willing help of their Ukrainian collaborators, managed to kill, in a little over two years, 5 million Ukrainian nationals, including 1.5 million Jews, as well as executing and starving hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war. The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS raised from Ukrainian volunteers during this occupation is still celebrated in street marches through Kyiv today; and the wolf’s hook and black sun on the emblem of the Neo-Nazi Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard are both taken from SS insignia, as are the death’s head and other emblems of Nazism worn by Ukraine’s armed forces and openly displayed across the country. It’s a well-known maxim that the first casualty of war is truth; and part of the truth this proxy war has sought to kill is that Zelenskyy’s political allies, the Ukrainian military and elements of Ukrainian society glorify the country’s past collaboration with the Nazis and still have links with Neo-Nazi organisations today.

As they were in 1943, the liberators are the lesser of two evils, but I can’t think of a more fitting end to the Zelenskyy puppet and his collaborators than to be strung by their heels from the monument to the defeat of fascism eighty years ago — unless, of course, it is to be strung from a newly-erected monument to the liberation of the Ukraine from contemporary Western fascism and its puppet dictator.

Am I joking? I’m certainly not laughing. I find nothing funny about Zelenskyy, although the obsequiousness with which he is treated by the UK Parliament and media would be laughable if it wasn’t so utterly contemptible. And I, for one — and I know I’m not alone, although most still daren’t say it — would rejoice to see such justice served by those on whom he has inflicted such suffering. It’s unlikely, perhaps, given the brazenness with which even greater criminals than Zelenskyy walk free in the glare of the media and the indifferent eye of the law today, and there are hundreds if not thousands more who should share his scaffold. But as I said, we can dream. The task facing those of us opposed to the return of fascism as the political economy of the West is to turn this dream of liberation and justice into reality.

Simon Elmer is the author of The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State, which is available in hardback, paperback and as an ebook. Please click on the links for the contents page, introduction and purchase options.