While politicians wage a propaganda war to ensure continued funding for the Western proxy conflict against Russia, average Ukrainians are left to suffer for the sake of powerful outside interests, according to one whistleblower and former diplomat.
Analyst Andrii Telizhenko, who previously served in Ukraine’s government but fled the country after facing opposition to his anti-war beliefs, joined Sputnik’s The Final Countdown program Monday, lamenting the fate of hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian men and women who have sacrificed their lives for the intractable US-backed conflict. The former government official said Kiev has lost 970,000 troops since 2022, confirming previous analysis that has placed the number of Ukrainian deaths during the conflict at close to one million.
“Zelensky… could have stopped this war before it started,” said Telizhenko of the controversial figure, whose constitutional mandate as president of Ukraine ended in May. “That's why he has to continue this rhetoric, to stay in power.”
“He can't [negotiate] because he's owned by the West, by Washington, by London, by BlackRock, by the military industrial complex, so they're not gonna let him do that,” he continued. “They are making money out of this war and getting everything they can out of Ukraine and out of the resources that Ukraine has. So he has no other possibility. He could have stopped it as soon as he became the president in 2019.”
“He could have [granted] Donbass… autonomy without losing hundreds of thousands of lives,” the former diplomat noted, faulting Zelensky for not following through on a peace plan reached with Russia in Istanbul or implementing the Minsk Accords after campaigning on the issue in 2019.
Ukraine’s Western allies have intervened multiple times to prevent Ukraine from reaching a peaceful resolution to its differences with Russia, most recently when the Zelensky regime took part in talks with Moscow after the launch of its special military operation. The United States intervened to put an end to at least two separate rounds of peace negotiations, according to testimony from former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and revelations about the role played by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Neoconservative elements in Washington have long sought to respond to the perceived threat of Russian military and diplomatic power, but the interests of large Western financial institutions in seeing the proxy war continue have received less attention. The US investment firm BlackRock and Delaware-based bank JP Morgan have launched a massive fund for public and private interests to invest in Ukraine’s reconstruction, it was announced earlier this year.
It has been estimated that some half a trillion dollars could be sought to help the country rebuild.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent supporters, working behind the scenes with a number of wealthy donors to help Democrats craft campaign strategy as the party ultimately chose to replace President Joe Biden on the presidential ticket.
The investment firm was subjected to significant criticism from Republican presidential candidates during the party’s primary earlier this year; BlackRock has publicly supported progressive-leaning environmental, social, and governance (ESG) corporate principles and has made Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) the largest recipient of its campaign contributions.
“Zelensky is… destroying his own country, leaving people to die for BlackRock, for Washington, for London – and Lindsey Graham confirmed it,” Telizhenko claimed, referring to the hawkish senator’s unyielding support for the proxy conflict. “Ukraine has trillions of dollars… worth of resources. That's why we're fighting this war. This is why Zelensky has to continue this war.”
“I fled this war because I was against this war and my government – the regime, the Kiev Nazi regime – tried to kill me for fighting for peace,” he continued. “A lot of Ukrainians who fled this war, they fled it because… they just don't want to fight, but they want to continue this war so they have the pride of Ukraine winning, and that is it. They don't understand the consequences. The consequences are a World War III situation. Ukraine cannot win this, and Ukraine already has lost when the war started, day one.”
“Ukraine is already, unfortunately, done as a country. You can see economically, there's no economy. It's being fed by the West, being supported like Frankenstein, by the West. As soon as the Western support goes out, it's dead. It's a dead body,” Telizhenko concluded. “Zelensky is doing what he wants to do because he thinks he's backed up, not just [by] Washington, but he's backed up by the deep state and BlackRock and the elites of the United States and the so-called West, the Anglo-Saxon world. That's why he's acting this way.”