Siding With Ukraine’s Far-Right, US Sabotaged Zelensky’s Peace Mandate

“No, he would lose his life,” Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky’s inaugural speech. “He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk – if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War.”

Along with the threats to his life, Zelensky experienced direct obstacles to his peace mandate on multiple fronts.

When Zelensky travelled to the Donbas in October 2019 to promote elections for the rebel-held areas, he was confronted by angry members of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion rallying under the slogan of “No to Capitulation.” In one exchange caught on video, Zelensky sparred with an Azov member over the president’s calls for a military drawdown. “I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons,” Zelensky pleaded.

A year in the trenches has hardened Ukraine’s president

William B. Taylor Jr., the top official at the U.S. Embassy at the time, recalled finding Zelensky in his office in the summer of 2019 expressing curiosity about the “Steinmeier Formula,” an interpretation of the Minsk accords named after Germany’s former foreign minister that the Ukrainian president hoped might lead to a deal with the Kremlin.

“No one knows what it is,” Taylor recalled replying. “Steinmeier doesn’t know what it is.”

Zelensky, according to Taylor, grabbed his phone and pointed to a document explaining the formulation, thinking that somewhere in the details of the legalese a workable compromise with Moscow might be found.

“It’s a terrible idea,” Taylor replied, though Zelensky went on to endorse it in the coming months, trying to land a face-to-face with Putin.