In early August, the most discussed topic in Ukrainian society concerns protests against the governing regime in Kiev, including their future prospects. Beginning July 23, two different forms of public demonstrations erupted in Ukraine, quite opposite in their aims. One-sided reporting of them by Western media agencies has revealed to the Ukrainian population this media’s hypocrisy and double standards.

Protests in Kiev by pro-Western NGOs erupted late on July 22, quickly earning the moniker ‘Cardboard Maidan’. This refers to the cardboard signs being carried by protesters (bearing demands similar to those of the ‘Euromaidan’ protests, which began on Maidan Square in central Kiev in late 2013 and led to the violent, paramilitary coup of February 2014). Protesters gathered in their thousands in Kiev beginning on the evening of July 23 and during the days following to condemn the decision of the regime of the unelected ‘president’ Volodomyr Zelensky to severely weaken the work and the powers of the two leading anti-corruption agencies of the Ukrainian state.

The sham role of anti-corruption agencies

The agencies were created at the insistence of Western embassies following the 2014 coup but have never actually fought corruption. They have served, instead, to warn or chastise certain thieving officials in the governing regime and economy of the country. The record shows that even if a government or police official is caught taking a bribe, he or she is rarely convicted of anything or sentenced to prison. Instead, ‘anti-corruption’ agencies usually oblige the accused to ‘make a deal’ with investigators, after which the accused typically find employment at Western embassies or non-governmental organizations.

In reality, these agencies have served as tools for external control of Ukraine and the Zelensky-led governing regime.

Zelensky and his legislature (both of whose electoral terms expired in April 2024) approved a bill on July 22 that would henceforth subordinate the work of anti-corruption agencies to the presidential office of Zelensky. The bill was approved within a couple of hours of the meeting, and following the vote, legislators were quickly sent on vacation.

“Corruption has eaten away at the office of the Ukraine president. As anti-corruption agencies get closer to Zelensky’s closest thieves, NABU detectives are being arrested and NABU itself is being disbanded,” writes Ukrainian blogger Anatoly Shariy, who previously fled Ukraine to Spain.

In July, the work of anti-corruption agents and their two leading agencies began to get uncomfortably close to Zelensky’s own entourage and relatives. In response, agents of the SBU (national secret police agency), who are entirely controlled by Zelensky and his regime, began searching and arresting investigators of the National Anticorruption Bureau (NABU), as well as those of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor (SAPO). SBU officers accused the agents of ‘working for Russia’.

Zelensky’s team hoped that since the anti-corruption agencies being targeted had been created during the previous US presidential administration of Joseph Biden, the administration now led by Donald Trump would be unlikely to defend them.

The reaction of Western media and embassies to the turn of the Zelensky regime against the agencies was immediate. The British and American media began accusing Zelensky of authoritarianism. Representatives of Western NGOs took to the streets of Kiev carrying their cardboard protest signs. Formally, any and all protest rallies are prohibited in Ukraine under martial law, but this was a case of protest by several thousand people who happen to work for Western embassies or for NGOs whose salaries are paid directly or indirectly by the embassies.

A further reason for the ‘courage’ of these protesters in taking to the streets is that all employees of Western NGOs in Ukraine are exempt from conscription and cannot, therefore, be punished by the threat of immediate conscription. Those who work directly for a Western government or Western-financed NGO are considered to be an ‘elite’ in wartime Ukraine, unlike the workers in Ukrainian enterprises who keep the country and its war running, so to speak. The recent protesters in Kiev have covered their actions in nationalist slogans reminiscent of the 2014 Euromaidan coup, demanding Zelensky’s resignation and accusing him of betraying the ‘ideals of Europe’.

Zelensky was soon forced to repeal the law, having lost face and being subject to public humiliation. Legislators were hastily called back from vacation on July 30. Within a day, they solemnly adopted a bill, unanimously no less, repealing the bill they had passed one week earlier.

This case showed Ukrainians who is the real boss in the country. Legislator Alexander Dubinsky writes that starting from August 1 (the day after the repeal of the presidential order and legislation to weaken anti-corruption agencies), “The president will begin a new and interesting life — a phase of explanatory diplomacy in 24/7 mode.” In other words, Zelensky will have to steadily twist and turn as he continues to tell Western sponsors that there is no corruption in Ukraine, and adds that Russia is trying to frame him. Ukrainians and Russians have a saying ‘to wriggle like an eel’; many are now using this to describe Zelensky’s behavior.

Marat Basharov, a professor at the Russian Higher School of Economics, believes that anti-corruption agencies were created by the Western powers in Ukraine in order to gather information on who is stealing in Ukraine, by how much, and then bring such individuals and groups of individuals under the supervision of the Ukrainian elite as a whole through their state institutions. He writes that “the anti-corruption agencies work not for justice but for the CIA: everything that agents of NABU collect, including documents, wiretaps and other products of surveillance, have gone to the U.S. embassy and from there to Washington. NABU has also created a whole network of informants to snitch and betray; the amount of compromising material so collected is enormous.”

Ukraine as mercenary state

Ukrainian media outlets are citing threats by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union to cut off funding as being the main reason for Zelensky’s retreat. Currently, Ukraine’s entire budget--including government spending and social payments, building and maintenance of infrastructure, and provision of military supplies--depends entirely on the continued ‘generosity’ of the Western powers.

In early August, the head of the financial committee of Ukraine’s national legislature, Danil Getmantsev, stated that everything in Ukraine that is not related to the war is being paid for by the West, but most of this is in the form of loans. According to him, Ukraine does not use its own budget revenues for non-military needs; all tax revenues are directed exclusively to the country’s military.

According to Bloomberg News on July 25, the Zelensky-led regime is preparing to demand that countries of the European Union undertake the financing of the salaries of Ukrainian military personnel. Should the EU concur, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will formally become what it already acts like: a mercenary army. So far, news outlets in Europe are silent on the matter. The Estonian vice-president of the EU, Kaja Kallas, issued a statement on August 6 stating, “The EU and its member states remain committed to provide Ukraine and its people with all the necessary political, financial, economic, humanitarian, military, and diplomatic support, for as long as it takes and as intensely as needed.”

Ukrainian economist Alexei Kushch cautions that Ukraine is approaching complete and irreversible bankruptcy. He told a podcast on July 30, “Soon, our creditors may start lining up to divide up strategic assets. The Americans will shout that they have an investment fund and will show off papers to this effect, the Brits will wave a century-old agreement with Ukraine (giving them privileged consultation on government decisions), and the EU will talk about a Ukraine ‘association’ (integration). Someone in charge will shout ‘Get in line, you sons of bitches, get in line!”

In financial terms, Zelensky is like a swindler who has managed to mortgage the same property to multiple banks all at once. But this is impossible to pull off if the Western officials who allocate loans to Kiev from their state public budgets are not themselves involved.

Suppression of protests against conscription

Alongside the protests opposing any restrictions on Western financial control over Ukraine, spontaneous protests against forced conscription are also rising in the country daily. The largest of recent protests took place on August 1 in the city of Vinnytsia in south-central Ukraine (app. 200 km southwest of Kiev, pre-war population of 350,000). A crowd of women and youths stormed a stadium where more than 100 forcibly conscripted men were being held. Zelensky threw all available police and SBU forces against the protesters, including the use of tear gas.

Western media stubbornly ignore reporting on anti-conscription protests. Instead, they pay close attention to rallies by handfuls of nationalists employed at Western-funded NGOs in a regional center, while there is total silence when it comes to protests against conscription. Banning of rallies during martial law does not apply to rallies held in the name of protesting corruption, while Ukraine’s entire policing apparatus is unleashed against anti-conscription protests. These examples are serving as living proof to ordinary Ukrainian citizens of the hypocrisy and double standards of the Western media and Ukrainian authorities.

One exception to Western media silence over conscription is a recent report in the Financial Times (paywalled) entitled ‘Shoved into vans, slashing tyres, Ukrainians balk at conscription’. The report notes that resistance to the recruiters is growing in Ukrainian society but concludes, oddly, that this is being stoked by Zelensky’s refusal to respond to calls from the West to begin conscription of young people under the age of 25.

The Ukrainian online publication Strana wrote on August 5 that intolerance toward military recruiters and the law enforcement officers assisting them is growing in Ukrainian society, and this could lead to even more clashes between civilians and recruiters. The confrontations will only intensify, Strana believes, if rumors of an upcoming reduction in the conscription age from 25 to 18, long demanded by Western governments, are confirmed.

An anarchist writing from Odessa, Vyacheslav Azarov, sees the protest at the stadium in Vinnytsia as the beginning of a new phase of resistance to conscription. “The stunning nighttime storming by protesters of the Lokomotiv stadium in Vinnytsia, where forcibly mobilized recruits were being detained, marks a new phase in the tensions in the Ukrainian rear. Ukrainians are tired of the war. Not only the relatives and friends of the victims of the recruiters but also representatives of certain public organizations tried to rescue the prisoners from the stadium, so much so that the police had to use tear gas and batons in order to disperse them.”

Legislator Alexander Dubinsky, who has been detained for the past 21 months under criminal accusations of treason, has written an appeal to Donald Trump, seeking to draw his attention to the arbitrariness of the recruiters and police in Vinnytsia. “The situation in Ukraine is escalating,” he writes. “There are fierce clashes between civilians, the TCC [military recruiters], and the police. People are rising up against the violent mobilization of their sons, husbands, and brothers. Men are being grabbed off the streets like cattle, beaten, forced to sign consent forms to participate in the war, and then are sent straight to the front lines.”

Dubinsky emphasizes in his open letter to Trump that Ukraine’s Western allies are closely following and publicizing the protests in Kiev defending the anti-corruption agencies being targeted, but are failing to report the news of “pregnant women being tear-gassed for simply demanding to know whether their son, husband or brother is alive”. He believes that without a reaction from the US government to Zelensky’s terror, he will continue to denigrate and destroy the Ukrainian people and nation.

In another post to social media about the protests against conscription, this one dated August 4, Dubinsky admits that the West is keen to see continued ‘busification’ (forced conscription) of Ukrainians, so help and sympathy should not be expected from there. “Since war is the approved policy of the EU and the U.S. towards Ukraine, it is impossible to expect them to protest against the actions of the military recruiters and the police who enforce the conscription policy. But if the Ukrainian authorities decide to push back and protest against external control over their actions, then protesting is allowed. Understand this, serfs," writes the imprisoned Ukrainian legislator.

The Ukrainian underground organization ‘Workers’ Front of Ukraine’ (WFU) is asking why the spontaneous protest in Vinnytsia was not supported by thousands more city residents. “What about the rest of the city; couldn’t more concerned people have protested in Vinnytsia? Yes, they could have. After all, the protesters launched an online broadcast, and its broadcast information instantly spread across social media networks. But more people did not rally”, the WFU laments. Activists of the organization call this a disgrace for Ukrainian society, which they accuse of “meekly going to the slaughter, its members acting like sheep being set upon by wolves”.

The Ukrainian magazine Liberal notes that Zelensky’s administration is preparing for an increase in spontaneous protests and intends to suppress them with particular force. “Volodymyr Zelensky has long since established himself as a full-fledged dictator. He may show his true colors in the challenging times ahead”, Liberal writes. According to the magazine’s sources, prisoners convicted of criminal offenses are being transferred out of prisons in the Kiev region. The publication concludes that this is happening in order to make room for a coming wave of detentions of political prisoners.

The liberal-left publication Assembly in the city of Kharkiv (the second largest city in Ukraine) notes that the civil conflict unfolding on the streets of Ukraine between the people and the repressive forces of the state is continuing unabated, although it does not attract as much media headlines as do the rallies protesting the curtailment of the powers of anticorruption agencies. (Many Ukrainians call these particular allies a ‘competition among parasites’.) Assembly acknowledges, nevertheless, that in Kharkov, “rebelling while on one’s knees remains the lot of protesting civilians”. It says that “Soldiers voting with their feet by conducting mass desertions have a much better chance of stopping the ‘conveyor belt of death’ taking place on Ukrainian soil compared to protesting on one’s knees.”

In early August, legislator Anna Skorokhod stated that the total number of desertions in the Ukrainian army had reached almost 400,000. That amounts to a rate of desertion of some 40 per cent of Ukrainian army recruits (voluntary or conscripted, with some deserters being recaptured or returning of their own accord).

In this situation, the tactics of the advancing Russian army have changed somewhat, as reported by the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Alexander Syrsky, in early August. According to him, there is now a “total penetration” of Russian army groups into the rear of the Armed Forces of Ukraine along the front lines. The Ukrainian army does not have enough personnel to cover the entire front line, so Russian soldiers often bypass its sparse positions, creating panic and chaos in its operations.

There appears to be no way out of the morass for the Kiev regime. That includes the upcoming meeting in Alaska between the Russian and US presidents. The meeting was supposed to offer some hope for the Trump regime in Washington that a ceasefire could be agreed on that would halt the accelerating Russian military advances. But Russia says the original goals of its military intervention in Ukraine—demilitarization and ‘de-Nazification’ of Ukraine--remain in place, while US media is reporting on August 12 that the White House now expects the meeting in Alaska to be limited to ‘exchanges of information'.