© UnknownUkrainian military in Kiev
With the Ukraine's defense lines and army in
slow-motion collapse and
extreme discontent among top military commanders and across the political elite,
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy is fighting for his political and personal survival. More importantly, the stakes could not be higher for the Maidan regime's coalition of nationalists, neofascist, corruptionaires, new oligarchs, and the occasional republican. Meanwhile, the young Ukrainian state, based on still poorly consolidated quasi-republican institutions and a nationalist ideology, is at
risk of disintegration, dissolution, and even disappearance. It surrounded by growing threats: the Russian army, angry Ukrainian soldiers and commanders, Kiev's financial and economic insolvency and dissipation, popular desperation, and the risk of palace or military coups, even a new 'Galician' civil war.
We can understand possible futures of the crisis by looking at two already developing, nascent scenarios competing to sieze the day:
A new revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary Maidan or Maidan 3, on the one hand, and a coup, whether
a civilian 'palace' or armed military coup, on the other hand.
For each of the more likely scenarios
a regime split is needed. A regime split involves a defection by regime elements from the present rulng group or coalition
along political, ideological, or institutional lines. A major defection to opposition by significant military elements would be a regime split along institutional lines. It might be mixed with political or ideological differences. The most obvious political difference in Ukraine between the military and civilian leaderships is that over
a future strategy for the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war or the potentially more
divisive issue of whether or not to begin negotiations with Moscow. At present, the latter issue is not at the forefront, but soon could become so. However, war strategy has been a driver of the growing deterioration in Ukrainian civil-military tensions since the war's first summer, and in recent months has pushed polarization in those relations to the breaking point, with a pre-coup situation already extant. As the situation for Kiev at the front deteriorates,
the intensity of the struggle over strategy is becoming an outright struggle for power involving various factions but primarily between Zelenskiy and his presidential team and allied corruptionaires in his 'Servants of the People' party, on the one hand, and various siloviki departments, foremost among the latter being the embattled military.
Comment: Hahn spells out the possibilities for Ukraine and the reasons they will fail.