Ukraine-Russia: Drone rain, hybrid warfare against European countries and accelerated rearmament; difficult domestic political situations, with the respective populations in turmoil. Zelensky and Putin are in the final act of a very tough confrontation. A war – pending negotiations – on which their very existence will depend
To try to imagine what is happening between Kiev and Moscow, but also to understand whether Vladimir Putin’s threats to Europe – which today take the form of several drones found at Leipzig airport in Germany – are serious, it is worth rewinding and stopping at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. There, half a century ago, George Foreman and Ron Lyle faced off: two heavyweights. In the fourth round, Lyle knocks Foreman down, who gets up and, in turn, sends his opponent to the mat; but just three seconds before the gong, Foreman falls again in the middle of the ring. He is saved by the count. In the fifth round, Lyle throws himself furiously at Foreman, who resists and, at 2 minutes and 28 seconds, hits Lyle with a barrage of punches, who falls.
The coming months will decide who, between Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin, is Foreman and who is Lyle: just like in Las Vegas, only one will be left standing.
Of course, in the relevant corners there are those who cheer the defeat not of the opponent, but of their own man. The war, waged mainly with drones and cyberattacks, has weakened the winter force, but it does not rule out low blows. The most exposed to “friendly fire” is Zelensky, who must face a serious crisis of credibility. On the other hand, in Moscow, subterranean winds of opposition to the Tsar are blowing, but if the West feeds the illusion that, if Vladimir Putin is removed, moderates will prevail, it is mistaken.
The British weekly The Economist has made it clear that “Putin is stepping up his attacks because he is convinced that if he loses Donbass, he will be hanged.” The proof? Not a day goes by without an attack by the so-called hybrid war on Europe’s borders. Donald Tusk, the Polish leader, insists that the EU budget should have more money for the defense of the eastern flank; Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, after the drones discovered in Leipzig – one of which contained the explosive Hexogen – protested by closing the Russian consulate in Bonn and received the solidarity of NATO and, for the first time, even Giorgia Meloni. And yet, the Kremlin pretends not to understand. It seems to be saying: remember Stream Two (the gas pipeline connecting Moscow with the EU), which the Ukrainians blew up and in which the Russians have tried to get involved.
The fact remains that Germany, for decades doing business with Putin and involved in 2019 by Volodymyr Zelensky himself in seeking a deal with Moscow over Donbass, is on standby and relations with Moscow are at an all-time low. There are those who whisper that Merz is using the Russian threat for domestic purposes, to curb the AfD’s electoral rise and to justify spending 800 billion euros on rearmament.
Like the two boxers, the two presidents at war have parallel fates. Zelensky must face the growing opposition, which has found a figure in his former protégé Mykhailo Fedorov, the very young former Minister of Defense, the most determined and senior representative; Putin must begin to reckon with a public opinion tired of the war and the shortages of grain and gasoline (a Levada poll shows that 57 percent of Russians can’t stand it anymore) and with a military hierarchy that wants total war, including the use of low-intensity nuclear weapons.
Volodymyr Zelensky is seeing his support plummet: his Ukraine is still a democracy, while the Duma elections in Russia, scheduled for September 18, are more of a farce than an election. Corruption investigations have torn apart the inner circle of the Palace in Kiev, and people are beginning to wonder whether it is worth dying for the president. Desertions are on the rise. According to the German weekly Die Zeit, 80 Ukrainian soldiers who were training in Saxony-Anhalt have deserted in the last month. In Germany – and this would justify the attempted attack on Leipzig – 29 of them have been trained since the beginning of the war, but thousands have deserted, so much so that the EU has been forced to adopt a norm according to which Ukrainian men of military age are not granted international protection.
For more than a year, their mothers, sisters and partners have been gathering in Kiev, on Maidan Square – the one that sealed Zelensky’s popular uprising – to protest against the corrupt who send their husbands to the front. They are also protesting because they are becoming increasingly poor: the average salary is less than $600, with a family fortune that does not reach 10 thousand, while the former comedian has increased his fortune by 30 million.
His oligarch friends – Rinat Akhmetov and Viktor Pinchuk, whose fortunes exceed $4 billion – complain that they have lost 40 percent of their wealth in the war. Even among them, the president has chosen who to save and who not. He has filed 18 lawsuits against Petro Poroshenko – the president before him; a year ago, however, he passed a law on rescuing the corrupt, to avoid consequences for Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s business partner from the beginning. Angry Ukrainians demanded that justice be served. In the end, Yermak was involved in the Midas investigation, a $100 million scandal related to Energoatom, the public nuclear power plant company, and which brought down the then Minister of Justice and Energy, Herman Galushchenko.
Like a corruption doll, the 150 million hryvnia (3 million euros) bail paid to get him out of prison gave rise to another investigation: Forrest Gump. And for the president, it is devastating. It has involved Iryna Mudra, deputy minister of justice and number two in the presidential office, arrested for trafficking in Sense bank, the most powerful in Ukraine, nationalized in 2023. The list of corrupt people is as devastating as Russian drones, also because it makes accelerated membership in the EU impossible. All that is missing is the arrest of Timur Mindich, the man who manages the money and secrets of the Ukrainian president. He is said to have taken refuge in Israel (like Zelensky, he is of Jewish origin).
But Fedorov, recruited by the Italian Minister of Defense, Guido Crosetto, as a strategic consultant on technology, also knows a lot. This choice has irritated Kiev and has not been well received in Moscow either: they fear that the “boy”, who managed the entire presidential campaign, could give new energy to the Ukrainian resistance. When, on January 13, he was appointed Minister of Defense, he directly took up the issue of desertions: 200 thousand soldiers “disappeared”. It is known that in many cases they have paid to avoid the front: he denounced this and ended up clashing with the generals and being thrown out of the game. In response, he has begun to demand elections, which his political “father” denies the country. Martial law prevents a return to the ballot box, even though the presidential mandate has expired for two years, but there is also fear of polls.
The latest poll says Volodymyr has just 25 percent support, Fedorov 17, while General Valery Zaluzhny — the man who stopped the first Russian offensive — is closely following with 23 percent. And he was the first to be eliminated.
The instability of the Ukrainian president worries the “allies”. Ursula von der Leyen continues to pump money into Kiev: according to estimates, the EU has already poured 200 billion euros and lent another 90. Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Poland insist that now, to help Kiev, assets confiscated from the Russians should be used. On the other hand, Washington is not only hesitant about new supplies of weapons and especially Patriot missiles – the “ready-made” Emmanuel Macron and Andy Burnham have tried to intervene by offering Storm Shadow – but a quick solution is being sought. John Ratcliffe – head of the CIA, has flown to Moscow to open a tripartite negotiation: Moscow, Kiev and Washington. Richard Gallagher, the archbishop sent by Leo XIV to talk to Sergey Lavrov, the Foreign Minister and the Kremlin’s number two, has moved in the same direction. The Vatican’s diplomatic offensive will continue at the end of the month with Cardinal Matteo Zuppi’s trip to Moscow. The effort is to exploit the weaknesses of Zelensky and Putin to launch a possible path to peace. Although the bombs continue to fall – the last few weeks have been brutal and the Russian president has sought to accelerate the offensive, apparently to sit at the negotiating table from a position of strength.
The feeling is that Mychajlo Fedorov is right when he states with bitterness: “We are at a turning point: it seems that gradually, slowly, we are losing; there is an urgent need for a plan to end the war.” They say that George Foreman thought exactly the same thing between the fourth and fifth rounds, that night in Las Vegas. (Panorama Italia)