Forbes contributor Melik Kaylan, who’s described by that outlet as having covered global geostrategic conflicts for three decades, published a highly speculative piece last week about “Moscow’s Hidden Plans For Exploiting A Ceasefire With Ukraine”. He predicts that “ultra-nationalist elements of the army (will) revolt and stage a coup against Zelensky for giving away Donbas and Crimea” if there’s a ceasefire, after which they’ll align with Russia due to being subjected to its propaganda and aliened by the West.
According to Kaylan, versions of this approach have been employed by Russia in the past in Georgia and Armenia, the first by supposedly meddling in its 2013 elections to get conservative-nationalists elected and the second after pro-Russian veterans of the original Karabakh War came to power. These are imperfect comparisons though since neither had a military coup nor were the nationalist who came to rule those countries driven by anti-Russian sentiment like is the case with most Ukrainian nationalists.
While there do indeed still exist some representatives of that ideology’s moderate school, in the sense of those who are proud of the regional identity that’s formed around their lands over the centuries but aren’t obsessed with hating Russia, the radicals still far outnumber them. It’s therefore unrealistic to imagine that there are enough moderates in the army to attempt a coup, that they wouldn’t be stopped by the radicals, and then their new regime will successfully repair ties with Russia.
What’s much more likely is that the radicals among them might attempt a coup if there’s a ceasefire, perhaps with the support of the SBU, though it wouldn’t be for pro-Russian purposes but to perpetuate the conflict that they’re doomed to lose anyhow in order to become “martyrs” for their cause. Even if that doesn’t unfold or fails, there’s no way that they’d sit back and let moderates take over the armed forces and then repair ties with Russia. They’d either rise up on their own or be ordered to by the US.
By seeding the false narrative that a ceasefire could lead to a pro-Russian coup, however, Kaylan is trying to scare the Western public away from embracing this scenario that’s increasingly being discussed. He’s hoping that Forbes’ perceived authority will reduce the chances that they’d question his words, but most Westerners already know that Ukrainian nationalists fiercely hate Russia. They remember Russia calling them Nazis and then their own governments defending them as “patriotic freedom fighters”.
Nobody will therefore be fooled by what he wrote, but it’s also possible that these weren’t solely his own ideas and that he was instead tasked by hawkish members of America’s permanent military, intelligence, and/or diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) with seeding this on their behalf. If that’s the case, then media figures might soon start talking about this too, all with the same intent no matter how ridiculous their forecast sounds to friends and foes alike.
Conspicuously absent from his prediction is any reference to the hundreds of billions of dollars that the West gave Ukraine, which bought them lots of influence within the Ukrainian “deep state”, thus raising questions about why their proxies wouldn’t stop a pro-Russian fascist military coup. The more that one thinks about it, the less that Kaylan’s fears make any sense, which exposes him as a propagandist whose only purpose is to fearmonger about the ceasefire scenario that more Westerners are now supporting.
