The peace initiative collides with golden-toilet raids, fleeing oligarchs, and growing Russian leverage marking the end of the wartime narrative
The collapse of confidence in the Ukrainian leadership began with the slow failure at the front and the steady hollowing out of the state at home, but the past days have brought a convergence of events that now leaves Volodymyr Zelensky with almost no room to manoeuvre. Russian forces have taken Kupiansk after months of steady pressure on the eastern axis, and the Russian commander Valery Gerasimov informed President Vladimir Putin that the town had been “liberated,” signalling that the Russian command considers this a completed phase rather than a contested operation.
The Kremlin has folded this battlefield momentum into a wider political message, with Putin describing the Ukrainian leadership as a “criminal gang” seated on “golden toilets,” a phrase intended to draw attention to the corruption scandal that has broken out around Energoatom and Zelensky’s inner circle. This scandal brings together allegations of stolen American aid, smuggled dollars, war-time profiteering, and the collapse of internal discipline in Ukrainian institutions, and it has emboldened independent analysts who have long argued that the war served as a moneymaking system rather than a national salvation campaign.
Christopher Helali, who recently visited Ukrainian prisoners of war, said that many front-line soldiers sought to surrender at the earliest chance, a description that matches reports from several Russian and independent observers who have noted declining morale and growing desertion pressure among Ukrainian units. Helali described Ukraine as a “major moneymaking operation for the West,” and his account of prisoners kept in barracks rather than punitive conditions was intended to underline how far the war narrative presented to Western publics differs from the experience of soldiers on the line. His comments gain force when set alongside the corruption case built by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, a Western-funded institution that has now turned on figures close to the president.
NABU has seized millions of dollars in cash from individuals linked to Tymur Mindich, Zelensky’s childhood friend and long-time fixer, with sealed bundles of US dollars carrying barcodes from American cities, suggesting a supply chain inconsistent with official channels. Ukrainian bankers cited by MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak explained that no legal withdrawal system could produce four million dollars in cash under wartime financial controls, making it clear that the funds were either smuggled or handed out through a collusive scheme involving banks entitled to import dollars into the country.
The Energoatom case forms the core of the crisis. The allegation is that every payment made by the state nuclear operator was taxed at fifteen per cent by Zelensky’s circle, with the United States having already provided five billion dollars in energy assistance that created a three-quarter-billion-dollar pool for illicit appropriation. The material seized in raids includes a solid-gold toilet, stacks of euros, and property records pointing to large-scale kickback schemes involving one hundred million dollars in “fortification contracts,” none of which produced the promised defensive work.
The fact that Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies launched seventy coordinated raids backed by a thousand hours of surveillance suggests that Western sponsors had lost confidence in Zelensky’s management of funds and were now prepared to expose the network that had been tolerated during the early war period. Former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko said Ukraine was turning into a “disenfranchised colony,” and while this remark was dismissed several months ago, the speed with which the country’s internal apparatus has fractured since the scandal emerged gives her warning new weight.
Russia has seized upon this moment by linking the battlefield situation, the corruption scandal, and the impending peace proposals emerging from the Trump transition team. In Moscow’s framing, the collapse of governance in Kiev offers a justification for regime change, which Putin hinted at when he called the Ukrainian leadership a gang acting only for personal enrichment and showing no concern for soldiers or civilians facing the consequences of war. Independent analysts close to Russian policy circles argue that Moscow sees no reason to negotiate with a leadership that is losing internal authority, and that the Kremlin will drive forward with the military operation until a government able to deliver a settlement is in place. This tracks with Moscow’s formal response to the leaked American peace plan, which the Russian Foreign Ministry rejected on the grounds that no official document had been submitted, even though Russian officials were almost certainly aware of its contents through informal channels. The Kremlin has created distance from the plan while Russian forces advance, allowing Moscow to shape conditions further before taking a public negotiating position.
The Trump team’s twenty-eight-point plan, leaked by a Ukrainian MP, has been described by independent analysts Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou as chaotic, poorly drafted, and internally contradictory, with sections that contradict others within the same document. Their reading is supported by the fact that the version in Ukrainian hands appears to have been modified by Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, who replaced an original call for a full audit of Ukrainian wartime finances with a blanket amnesty covering all wartime actions, a move that protected officials implicated in graft but also deepened Western suspicion that Zelensky’s team sought to block any retrospective investigation.
The plan’s central structure benefits the United States rather than either belligerent, granting Washington the role of “neutral mediator” while allocating large shares of Ukraine’s reconstruction, gas infrastructure, mineral extraction, and frozen Russian assets to American management and profitstreams. Analysts reviewing the document observed that Russia would be expected to accept reintegration into the Western-led economic order on terms that resembled a vassalage arrangement, which no major Russian faction would tolerate, making the plan unworkable as a settlement and viable only as a public relations tool.
The territorial clauses demand particular attention because they reveal the strategic mindset behind the plan’s authors. Crimea, Donetsk, and Lugansk would be recognised only de facto as Russian, while Kherson and Zaporozhye would be frozen along current lines of contact, creating a demilitarised zone that leaves part of Donbass under neither Russian nor Ukrainian control but in a neutralised limbo with no Russian military access
This arrangement openly contradicts the Russian constitution, which recognises these territories as part of the Russian Federation, making any acceptance politically impossible. Even more striking is the clause limiting Ukraine’s army to six hundred thousand troops, which according to the analysts reviewing the document would produce an army larger than Ukraine currently fields, thereby failing to meet any Russian demilitarisation goal and creating space for a long-term rearmament campaign backed by the European Union’s planned military expansion.
The European reaction to the plan reflects its uneasy geopolitical position. Estonia’s Kaja Kallas reportedly prepared a counter-proposal, a gesture mocked by independent commentators who noted that she relied on European institutions that had failed to deliver meaningful action throughout the war. Sweden’s foreign minister Maria Stenergaard acknowledged that the European Union has given Russia one hundred and twenty-four billion euros more in energy purchases during the war than it has given Ukraine, a statistic that undermines the EU’s rhetorical posture and demonstrates how Europe financed its adversary even while presenting itself as an arsenal for Kiev.
Germany has promoted hundreds of thousands of new jobs through rearmament, a policy that commentators argue will supply little more than a larger pool of manpower for a future confrontation with Russia that Europe cannot sustain politically or materially over the longterm. The French army chief has publicly warned citizens to prepare to “lose children” in a potential war with Russia, an admission that elite circles in France are preparing their population for military commitments that few voters support and that the French state cannot finance without major cuts elsewhere. These events lead analysts to conclude that Zelensky’s political demise is now the most likely outcome, not because of any single blow but because multiple fronts of pressure have collapsed at once.
Ukraine’s oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, previously a sponsor of Zelensky and now imprisoned, is reported to have told associates that “Zelensky’s end is near,” with Ukrainian media suggesting he provided information to investigators as revenge for his fall from favour. Mindich, long associated with Zelensky and deeply embedded in the financial operations around the presidency, fled the country hours before the anti-corruption raids began, an act that signals internal knowledge of impending charges and the fracturing of the president’s protective network. The involvement of the Justice Minister and Defence Minister in the scandal places the core of the wartime cabinet under suspicion, while the rivalry between NABU, SAPO, and the SBU shows that Ukraine’s internal security agencies are no longer aligned, a situation incompatible with sustained war.
Analysts close to Moscow argue that Russia sees little value in the Trump plan and will likely revert to the framework shaped at Istanbul in 2022, which required Ukrainian neutrality, demilitarisation, and recognition of territorial changes that reflected military realities on the ground. The example document provided in the files shows how Kiev masked its actual negotiating position during the Istanbul talks by publishing a version of its proposal for Western consumption that included clauses rejecting any limit on Ukrainian armed forces, while the real document delivered to Russia lacked this paragraph entirely. This discrepancy reinforces Moscow’s belief that Kiev negotiates in bad faith and that any future processes must be conducted with actors capable of honouring commitments. Russian officials are therefore likely to demand that any settlement rest on principles already presented in 2022, when Russian forces held a narrower territorial position, meaning Moscow now expects considerably more favourable terms.
The likely outcome, according to independent analysts who have studied all available proposals, is that Russia will wait for political change in Kiev while advancing militarily to strengthen its negotiating position further. The Trump administration appears to seek one of two results: either Russia accepts the plan and halts its advance, allowing Washington to claim a diplomatic victory, or Russia rejects it, enabling Washington to argue that Moscow refuses peace, thereby justifying further sanctions or escalation. The plan’s incoherence makes the second outcome far more likely, which may have been intended from the outset, since US policymakers can use Russian rejection to pressure Europe into deeper military alignment at a time when European institutions face internal dissent.
Zelensky’s end therefore appears to be the product of structural forces rather than personal failings alone. The loss of Kupiansk signals battlefield decline, the Energoatom and Mindich scandals expose the rot in the wartime state, the leak of the peace plan reveals declining Western trust, and Russia’s refusal to engage with the American framework demonstrates that Moscow seeks a settlement on its own terms rather than through Western mediation. In this environment, Zelensky can neither stabilise the front nor clean his administration nor rally foreign allies nor impose unity on internal agencies. The intersection of these crises marks the end of the political project that carried him into wartime leadership and leaves Ukraine facing a transition whose outcome will be shaped by actors outside Kiev more than by any decision Zelensky can still take.
Authored By : Global GeoPolitics
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