Under the banner of Marxism-Trumpism
Towards uncertainty
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
For a whole decade after the second Maidan, I worked among Western conservatives. For many of them, I became the sole source of unbiased information from an overtly ideologized country that is controlled by their opponents - the Democratic party. In moving from what is considered the far-left wing of thought to what is often painted as the far-right current, I saw the chance of returning normalcy to war-torn Ukraine and dealing a blow to my lifetime enemy - international liberalism. I fought liberals on the left, I fought liberals on the right. There was not a single day in my life when I called myself a liberal.
I would go as far as calling myself the sole grassroots Trumpist in the country. Just one guy with Ukrainian citizenship has a greater reach among Western Trumpists and his name is Andriy Telizhenko. He was sanctioned by the Democratic administration of the US State Department for his role in exposing Biden’s family’s corrupt schemes in Ukraine. Unlike him, however, I am fully independent and don’t have any obligations to anyone. I have been trying to reach Telizhenko since 2015 and Donald Trump’s first electoral campaign, but just like all the people thought to be close to Medvedchuk he is extremely hard to contact. He never responded to my e-mails. Many actual Americans did. With them, I was usually finding myself in a position of asking for more than they were prepared to give. A difficulty most Ukrainian liberals don’t have.
The time goes on however and I am not getting any younger. Now at 41, I have no time to wait around much longer for a serious attitude on behalf of American Republicans. I was deeply distraught by my September 2024 private talk with one of my liaisons in those circles - famous hacker Andrew Auernheimer. Surprisingly, he came off as a Democrat on this occasion, repeating many opinions and positions of Donald Trump’s enemies. He said that the interests of the victorious Trump in Ukraine would be represented by a sole American citizen, which is not enough for anything serious. And all the Ukrainians this citizen would ever need were already chosen by Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani during his 2019 visit to my native city of Kharkiv. A city where Andrew was solving his real estate problems with me as his realtor and where he still owns an apartment near Kyivska subway station.
A few days after that talk, Trump partially restored my morale with his unexpectedly firm attitude during his personal meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump made it clear that he would not allow this war to become endless, scolding Zelensky like a harsh teacher scolds an unruly pupil.
How realistic are Trump’s goals? Let’s think it through while we prepare for election night on November 5.
Back then Avakov showed the most eagerness to cooperate. He was still at the peak of his power and influence, which is no longer the case. He had ambitions of forming a political party out of those parts of Azov-related movements that were loyal to him, he had reasonably favorable ratings in the former Yanukovych electoral belt thanks to being Russophone, he wrote books, and generally had greater intellectual ambitions than other regional bureaucrats. Although some people who benefited from him financially in the past still convince me that he is still a local gray cardinal, I strongly doubt this. Whatever leverage he had among cops is now in Zelensky’s hands, with current Minister of Interior Ihor Klymenko being the most invisible and unambitious Minister of Interior in the history of modern Ukraine.
Wheelchair-bound Kernes was half-alive in all senses, while Terekhov is a perfect conformist, genetically incapable of innovation. All this, combined with Trump’s initial unserious attitude, made these castings pointless and allowed Ukraine to become a militarized arm of Trans-Atlantic liberalism, with all serious Ukrainian state employees answering either to the Democratic Party or to Eurocrats in Brussels.
Assuming Trump is finally serious, he will have to build a lobby similar to what Democrats have been building for decades. For now, he thinks he will solve everything with phone calls, at least this is what he says at rallies. It will probably take no less than a year for him to realize the futility of such hopes. This means the war is guaranteed to span the entire 2025 even if he wins. If he decides to move in, that could go several ways.
If done together with the preservation of Ukraine’s European aspirations it will be a geopolitical Reaganization of the MAGA movement and the Republican Party in general, which will disappoint many isolationists in America. Is it possible to do this without angering Putin further and escalating the situation in Ukraine even further? Hard to say. Maybe in exchange for some big concession to Putin elsewhere, but any such concession would make Trump’s life more difficult in America. The easy part of this scenario is finding the armed backup on the ground in Ukraine - many nationalists will flock to the Trumpist party if that’s the case. The deal with intelligentsia will not be so bright, Academia will remain predominantly liberal, but this is how it is in America as well. Not a big problem.
The lobby coupled with Finlandization would require building the new Party of Regions in a slightly more pro-Western form. While the electorate for such a project is still there, staffing will be a lot harder. Many competent people from that party have already emigrated, and others cut ties with such positioning by either employing radical rhetoric or taking part in the actual war. For example, Oleh Shiryaev, the man who was supposed to chair the security wing of the now-banned OPfL party, has recently received the Hero of Ukraine decoration from Zelensky for his active role on the battlefield. If Ukrainian Finlandization is even possible then it will be less Finnish and more Malorussian for sure, because Russia and Putin place much greater theological importance on Ukraine than Stalin did on Finland.
Third scenario - everything stays the same, except with Trump people encouraging the continued butchering for the sake of the well-being of Estonians. In such case, I wash my hands. Such kind of Trumpist party will compete with the Dems for an already overtly privileged nationalist and liberal electorate. And while this is much easier on an elite level, emigration from the Yanukovych belt will be serious and I just might join these emigrants.
Fourth option - Trump sides with Putin and helps him achieve Sergiy Moiseev’s maximalist goals. Probably a dream scenario for China. Not only would they get a military victory for their ally, but the crazy ensuing ideological and geopolitical chaos in Europe would sell tons of popcorn across the Global South and all the countries that won’t have to deal with the restructuring of this brave new world firsthand.
Fifth possibility - Trump is unexpectedly more hawkish on Russia than Biden. He starts the energy wars, floods the world market with cheap American oil and gas, and in doing so seriously harms the Russian economy in a way Biden’s sanctions could not. I think this is a nightmare scenario. First, the economic effects won’t be quick enough to prevent Russia from finishing the job in the view of Zelensky’s disappearing manpower and loss of credible military deterrence. Second, the complete isolation of Russia from Western politics would bring it even closer to China. Third, it will kill off all the lingering hopes of those moderate Ukrainian militants who foolishly fight for the new 2013, which is already not possible (but they don’t realize it yet).
Assuming Trump’s initial strategy follows the path of least resistance and low investment, then the most likely candidate to become the country’s main Trumpist is a curious person named Denys Yaroslavsky. Once an average cop named Denys Gippik, in 2017 he was involved in a weird plot of kidnapping some unnamed former citizen of the Russian Federation in Ukraine and selling him off to Russia for a ransom of 17 million dollars. After this plot was foiled due to the joint efforts of Kievan prosecutors and SSU, the guy successfully avoids the sentence and changes his surname to one which is already well-known and popular in Kharkiv - that of business tycoon Oleksandr Yaroslavsky, former owner of the main football club in the city - Metalist Kharkiv. Oleksandr and his DCH group were deeply puzzled by this event and held several press conferences highlighting the fact that Denys is not related to Oleksandr. Soon after, the image of Denys was glamorized and he became a regular guest on political talk shows on the now banned channels of Viktor Medvedchuk. While there, his positions seemed to align well with the interests of Mykhailo Dobkin, and as such he gained a reputation of Dobkin’s guy in the most well-informed politicized circles. His trick succeeded for average people - many Eastern Ukrainians do think he is related to Oleksandr Yaroslavsky. Just like Dobkin, Denys started wearing Banderite red-black colors after 2022 and is now an active combatant in the region. While he is a relatively charismatic talker, he has no connections to the remnants of pro-Yanukovych intelligentsia. In a country where Democrat agents of influence hold all serious positions, he will not be able to do anything even if the newly elected President Trump starts promoting him. Why he is chosen ahead of the living martyr of the cause - Dubinsky - is also very puzzling, but that’s what Auernheimer told me in September of 2024.
According to the European Council on Foreign Relations, Trump’s high-tier advisors on foreign policy fall into one of three camps: “restrainers”, or radical isolationists; “prioritizers”, also known as anti-China hardliners; and “primacists”, neocons and Reaganites who believe in projecting American power across the world. ECFR says that the first two are united in wanting to leave Ukraine to Europe, meaning Brussels Eurocrats, who already showed their unwillingness to notice the ongoing rampant breach of rights and freedoms in Ukraine. With them in charge of our security, we can expect endless continuation of what is happening. My last hope for this country is balanced prioritizer victory and the creation of a lobby that could rival Soros one. Restrainers won’t invest enough time and resources, that’s for sure. I learned this firsthand while talking with their people from Palladium Magazine. Primacists are tricky. I actually believe that neoconservatism and Bushism are moderately compatible with modern Russia, but only their pure old-school forms. Their modern, Dem-adjacent forms won’t be sufficiently different from mainstream Euro-Atlanticist liberalism. Were they to resurrect those forms, then the entry to Ukraine should be done simultaneously with re-entry to Russia, together with the creation of an anti-liberal pro-Western network across the entire Eastern Europe.
Apart from all the personalities I mentioned here and in my 2023 text “Who’s who in Ukrainian politics”, two more men might be able to pull it off.
One is Oleksiy Arestovych, former advisor to Zelensky, a former friend of Dugin and Korchynsky, and a moderately popular blogger. I am often asked why I rarely mention him. The reason is that I don’t respect the man. I always get the feeling that I am supposed to be his core audience or electorate and that he is being sold to me. Maybe if I was less educated or attentive I could miss all his unforgivable dogmatic errors and idiotic loyalties, but he continues to throw them at me all the time like the ultimate weasel with no backbone. I had a brief talk with him on Facebook around 2019. It ended in him asking me for money. Essentially he is a right-wing liberal with a bit of cosmetic Sovietisms. He sticks to the Russian language while offering no vision for its survival in light of ever-strengthening Ukrainization laws. He supports the ban of UOC MP and thinks that Vlasovite motto “For your freedom and ours” is a worthy motto. Despite that, he is afraid to return to the country he helped create and was last seen in Monaco and New York.
Another one is the newest and youngest radical vatnik in the Ukrainian Parliament - Artem Dmytruk. Although elected as a member of Zelensky’s party, a fading reflection of its pre-war multiculturalism, he became the most vocal defender of UOC MP in 2024. He is one of only two people who gained wide all-Ukrainian renown in this line of thought after 2022, after the ban of Medvedchuk TV channels, the other being boxer Vasyl Lomachenko. Lomachenko is a celebrity however, all he had to do was to post a couple of pro-UOC MP videos on Instagram. Dmytruk made himself without that advantage. After a short but volatile smear campaign against him by many prominent nationalists, including Korchynsky and Eugen Karas, he illegally crossed the Moldovan border, bypassing the official checkpoints, and eventually settled in London, the United Kingdom. Somewhat surprisingly, British authorities appear to protect him against Ukrainian extradition requests for now. I can imagine him as a guest on Tucker Carlson’s show, but he can only reappear in Ukraine if a long-lasting peace is reached.
Whether with D. Yaroslavsky, Arestovych, or Dmytruk in charge, the hypothetical Ukrainian Trumpist party would face many of the same challenges the old Party of Regions faced. Implicit hostility of state security apparatus, inability to control the streets, and lack of representation in academic circles. Whoever gets to be the chairman, the party would need no less than two purges of Democrat entryists to be at least minimally effective. So I recommend not rushing into it too quickly, even if Trump gets serious.
Considering the unwillingness of major players - Putin and the West - to settle on moderate results, the realization of Donald Trump’s expressed desire to end the war seems improbable. Most likely the country will remain a military dictatorship for a few more years. Prolonged exposure to the so-called busification, the practice of open kidnappings of men by the military and police and stuffing them in small buses or vans, will lead to quickly rising distrust of the state media and institutions, class and gender segregation, surging crime rates.
To Ukrainians, Trump is a choice of uncertainty, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Kamala is a choice of guaranteed suffering for the worthless ideals of lowly people. This is the occasion when a slight possibility of getting a sweet roll is preferable to a guarantee of getting a cake made of shit.
“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
― T.S. Eliot
Finlandization is a wrong word now. Sakartvelization.