Foreign Affairs The Unraveling of Volodymyr Zelensky The Ukrainian president’s campaign promises of peace and public integrity look wobblier than ever. (Photo by NICK PALEOLOGOS/SOOC/AFP via Getty Images) In 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky swept to power in a shocking landslide victory, taking 73 percent of the run-off vote. He won on a platform with two major planks: first, implementing the Minsk Agreements and making peace with Russia, and second, fighting high-level corruption in Ukraine’s government. Both planks are now in splinters. The Minsk Agreements are dead, Ukraine and Russia are almost in their fourth year of hideous war, and the scandal of high-level corruption has crept into Zelensky’s innermost circle. Upon being elected, Zelensky told reporters that he would “reboot” peace talks with separatists in Donbas and that “we will continue in the direction of the Minsk [peace] talks and head towards concluding a ceasefire.” But it was not to be. Ultranationalist leaders defied Zelensky and warned that fulfilling his campaign promises would lead to protests and riots. Dmytro Yarosh, the founder of the ultra-nationalist Right Sector paramilitary organization, threatened that, if Zelensky were to pursue a ceasefire, “he will lose his life. He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk boulevard if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War. And it is very important that he understand this.” But it is also now known that no one ever intended the Minsk Agreements to work. Each of Putin’s partners in the Minsk process, including then Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, France’s President François Hollande and Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko have confirmed that the Minsk Accords were a deception designed to lull Russia into a ceasefire with the promise of a peaceful settlement while actually buying Ukraine the time it needed to build up an armed forces capable of achieving a military solution. Despite his campaign promise, in February 2023, Zelensky reportedly told Der Spiegel that he saw the agreements as a “concession,” and he “surprised” Merkel and Macron by telling them that “as for Minsk as a whole…we cannot implement it like this.” But, even after the collapse of the Minsk process, in the early weeks of the war, before all the loss of life and land, there was still a chance for Zelensky to negotiate peace with the Russian invaders.  In April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators arrived at a draft peace treaty. But Zelensky was diverted by his Western partners. Rather than pursue the promise of diplomacy and a peace that would satisfy Ukraine’s goals, Zelensky allowed himself to be pulled by the promise of whatever it takes for as long as it takes onto the path of war. The U.S. and its partners failed to prioritize diplomacy, and Zelensky was seduced by promises of support and victory onto the path of war. Several officials, from several countries, who were involved in the negotiations have confirmed that the West pushed Ukraine off the path of diplomacy. Davyd Arakhamia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team, has confirmed the December 2022 report in Ukrainska Pravda that on April 9, 2022, Johnson hurried to Kiev to tell Zelensky that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with” and that, even if Ukraine was ready to sign some agreements with Russia, “they [the West] are not.” Arakhamia says that “when we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.” Most recently, Oleksiy Arestovych, a former advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine and a member of the Ukrainian negotiating team for the peace talks in Istanbul, has said that “they did not continue negotiations in Istanbul, didn’t finish their work after Johnson arrived…. I was at the negotiations, we returned from the Istanbul negotiations, and then something happened to Zelensky.” Arestovych added that the peace agreement “had already been completely decided” in early April but that, “Biden and Johnson promised volume military diplomatic assistance, allowing to defeat at least part of the Russian military and take a better negotiating position.” The possibility of peace, consistent with Zelensky’s campaign promises, was still alive. It was Russia that started the war, and the U.S. and NATO share the blame for the causes that brought it about. But Zelensky could have resisted Western seduction and pressure and pursued the promise of peace that was still possible in Istanbul. The promise to end corruption in Ukrainian politics is equally splintered. On November 11, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), in cooperation with the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), in “a major anti-corruption operation,” charged multiple high level people, some from Zelensky’s most inner circle, in a $100 million kickback scheme involving energy contracts. The scandal has led to the suspension of Justice Minister German Halushchenko, who served as energy minister from 2021 to July 2025. And it has led to the resignation of Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk. There are reports that other high level former officials have been implicated, including Rustem Umerov, who served as defense minister for much of the war, and the former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov, who is accused of receiving at least $1.2 million in the kickback scheme. Chernyshov is a close friend and ally of Zelensky. And he is not the only close associate of Zelensky to get caught up in the investigation. According to NABU, Timur Mindich, “controlled the work of the so-called ‘laundry room,’ where criminally-obtained funds were laundered.” Mindich, the alleged ringleader, is the co-owner of Zelensky’s Kvartal 95 media production company. He is also a close friend of Zelensky who has acquired “broad political influence over Mr. Zelensky” that has grown during the war. Zelensky has called for sanctions on, but not for the arrest of, Mindich. Mindich fled Ukraine hours before investigators raided his house. There are various reports about where he has fled with the latest suggesting Poland.  The corruption scandal has sent shivers through Europe, which has poured billions of dollars into Ukraine’s defense and into Ukraine’s energy sector. It has reawakened anxieties about sending money to Ukraine and about Ukraine’s candidacy for membership in the European Union. Zelensky himself has not been implicated. And he has called for “effective actions against corruption” and “punishment.” But his recent actions have given, at least, the appearance of implicating himself. In July, Zelensky attempted to decapitate the anticorruption agencies as they pursued the case that has now caught his close associates in their net. Zelensky attempted to place the independent agencies under the control of Ukraine’s prosecutor general who is appointed by the president, placing all ability of agencies to investigate government corruption under the control of the government.  But it is not just the continuation of the corruption that has been a part of the Ukrainian government from the beginning, it is the proximity to Zelensky and the specific nature of the corruption.  According to NABU, the “high-level criminal organization” made all energy contractors of the state nuclear agency “pay illegal benefits.” The criminal organization bribed contractors between 10 percent and 15 percent of their contracts’ value. What’s worse is that while Russia is devastating Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and Ukrainians are suffering daily blackouts, the investigation has zeroed in on kickbacks on contracts that were for the construction of defensive fortifications to protect those very energy installations. Tapes obtained by NABU even seem to contain conversations about delaying these fortification projects to obtain maximum profit on kickbacks from more lucrative alternatives. With the collapse of the anticorruption campaign and the collapse of peace talks with Russia, the two major planks upon which Ukrainians voted for Zelensky have collapsed. With the war going increasingly (and apparently irreversibly) badly, the threat to Zelensky’s public trust could not have come at a worse time for Ukraine. The post The Unraveling of Volodymyr Zelensky appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Corporate Media Ignores the Real Epstein Story Selective and politicized revelations distract from new evidence that the disgraced financier served Israeli interests. (Photo by Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images) Amid an intensifying Capitol Hill fight over Jeffrey Epstein disclosures—led by Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, Ro Khanna, and others—House Democrats last week published three email exchanges involving the disgraced financier, and then House Republicans released 20,000 additional documents. The selectively released emails from House Democrats, like the corporate media’s own reporting around the Epstein files, has focused almost exclusively on salacious aspects of Epstein’s life, with pundits attempting to determine whether and to what degree President Donald Trump knew about or engaged in sex crimes with Epstein.  Very much like corporate media attention around the Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent Ken Starr investigation, which nearly derailed the Clinton presidency, outlets like The New York Times focus almost exclusively on the tabloid aspects of Epstein’s life, a search Democrats and their corporate media allies believe will finally deliver “the goods” on Trump, implicating him the ultimate presidential sex scandal. None of the emails released this past week outright confirm their hypothesis.  An email dated April 2012, in which Epstein wrote that “the dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him,” was immediately seized on by online liberals as supposed proof that Trump had engaged in sex crimes. Yet X users quickly noted that the redacted victim was Virginia Giuffre, who later recanted some of her allegations, raising serious questions about her credibility relative to Epstein’s many other victims, which may be why House Democrats chose to redact her name from the email release. Epstein was someone whose sexual behavior was proven in court to be criminal. It is entirely possible that powerful elites, including Trump, engaged in those crimes with him. But if evidence of Trump’s crimes really does exist in those files, one wonders, why haven’t Democrats already released it?  That Trump abruptly on Sunday encouraged House Republicans to back further Epstein disclosures suggests he is confident nothing in those materials implicates him—or, at least, that whatever emerges will prove more damaging to prominent Democrats than to himself, and less damaging than perceptions of a White House cover-up.  However, a provision in the disclosure bill likely to pass this week, as journalist Michael Tracey notes, grants Attorney General Pam Bondi sweeping discretion to redact any content she deems invasive of victims “privacy.” It is not difficult to imagine such unilateral power being abused to protect administration officials from scrutiny. Many of the most important Epstein revelations have come not from the files released by House representatives just last week—and extensively covered by corporate press—but from independent media. For starters, investigations into Epstein’s operations in the U.S. Virgin Islands and the political network that enabled and protected them have been systematically ignored or suppressed by corporate media. Documents uncovered by independent journalist Lee Fang showing that Albert Bryan Jr., the current governor of the Virgin Islands, used his office to advance Epstein’s interests for several years, lobbying for tax exemptions for Epstein’s businesses and pushed for waivers that allowed the convicted sex criminal to evade local sex offender laws. Other recent reporting from Fang exposes U.S. Virgin Island’s non-voting delegate in Congress and MSNBC darling Stacey Plaskett’s deep ties to Epstein (and reveals her previous denials about those ties to be complete lies). Epstein not only raised money for Plaskett’s campaigns, but also introduced her to key Democratic donors in New York, helping secure early funding that jump-started her political career. More than that, from 2013–2014 Plaskett worked for Erika Kellerhals, Epstein’s tax attorney and personal adviser. Plaskett’s close political relationship with Epstein was further exposed by the Washington Post, which published video and text messages showing Epstein coaching the delegate in real time during a congressional hearing for Michael Cohen—instructing Plaskett on what to ask Trump’s former lawyer. What these new emails do not address are the questions with geopolitical implications: Was Jeffrey Epstein some sort of intelligence agent and, if so, which government or governments was he working for? A recent investigative series from Drop Site News journalists Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain provide the clearest answers to those questions so far. Together, they extensively document Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to the Israeli government and its intelligence sphere, confirming his long-suspected key role as an international political fixer, often in service of Israeli interests. For example, the outlet reveals how Epstein worked on behalf of Israel with Ehud Barak and the Mossad to open a covert backchannel to the Kremlin during the Syrian civil war, with the ultimate goal of removing Israel’s enemy Bashar al-Assad from power. Using his contacts, such as oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, Epstein secured a private audience for Barak to meet with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in order to push for that outcome. Additional reporting from Grim and Hussain exposes how Epstein and Barak operated as emissaries for Israel’s intelligence services in Cote d’Ivoire, using Epstein’s private network and Barak’s political status to broker meetings with foreign leaders to advance Israeli interests.  Prior to his West Africa trip, Barak commissioned an intelligence-style dossier from the private firm Ergo—a link I and journalist Jack Poulson exposed this summer—on Cote d’Ivoire’s President Alassane Ouattara’s inner circle and his country’s security apparatus. Barak later arranged a “non-security” pretext through his son-in-law’s medical-equipment company to mask the operation’s true purpose. After meeting Ouattara and senior officials in West Africa using that cover, Barak received a Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) blueprint from former Israeli intelligence chiefs to construct a nationwide cell phone and internet interception apparatus; that plan became the basis for a 2014 Israel–Cote d’Ivoire security and surveillance agreement. Drop Site’s reporting demonstrates the operational role Epstein served in securing that deal for Israel, coordinating Barak’s meetings during the UN General Assembly that fall and connecting him directly to the Cote d’Ivoire president’s chief of staff.  Their investigations reveal how Epstein, working with Barak, routinely played that sort of operational role on behalf of Israel—for example, by helping it construct a similar security agreement with Mongolia. Most recently, Grim and Hussain documented how Jeffrey Epstein hosted an Israeli military intelligence officer, Yoni Koren, at his East 71st Street estate on multiple occasions: once in February 2013, while Koren was serving as a senior aide to Barak, who was then Israel’s minister of defense; a second time, for two weeks, in October 2014; and again for ten days in September 2015.  As late as January 2013, Israeli media still described Koren as the Ministry of Defense’s bureau chief, and even after Barak’s retirement he continued acting as an informal conduit between Israeli and American intelligence circles—relaying messages to Israeli military intelligence (Aman), scouting cybersecurity firms for Epstein and Barak to invest in, and arranging high-level meetings through security officials such as former CIA and DOD chief of staff under Obama, Jeremy Bash.  Emails published by Drop Site reveal Epstein’s possible role in war profiteering. In one from 2014, Epstein wrote to Barak: “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you,” to which Barak responded, “not simple to transform it into a cash flow.” And yet, notably, not a single mainstream U.S. corporate media outlet has reported on Drop Site’s revelations and the definitive proof it provides that Epstein acted as an intelligence agent or asset for Israel. Their omission is unsurprising; even the House Democrat’s own selective window into Epstein’s world reveals the indispensable role those same corporate media institutions served shielding Epstein from scrutiny.  In an email from September 27, 2017, journalist Landon Thomas, at the time an international finance writer for The New York Times, tipped Epstein off about an investigation by former NYPD detective John Connolly. “He is digging around again,” Thomas wrote. Emails also expose how author Michael Wolff helped Epstein coordinate his media strategy, advising him on how to best pressure Trump and exert leverage over him. In December 2015, Wolff warned Epstein that CNN planned to ask Trump about their relationship, suggesting to Epstein how he could best use the moment for “valuable PR and political currency.” Wolff had also recorded hours of interviews with Epstein, most of which have never been made public. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who features heavily in the latest Epstein emails released by House Democrats, likewise recorded more than 15 hours of interviews with Epstein—footage which, like Wolff’s, is in the public interest yet remains unreleased. The revelations unearthed by Fang and Drop Site News—not the curated and redacted releases from congressional Democrats—have done more to expose Epstein’s real role in global affairs than any official investigation. If the Epstein files released this week prove anything, it is that independent media has rapidly emerged as the only institution capable of an honest analysis of power. The post Corporate Media Ignores the Real Epstein Story appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs A Recent Attack on TAC Falls Flat I was right about Iran, actually. On Iran and the Middle East broadly, The American Conservative gets everything wrong. At least, that’s what pro-Israel neoconservatives would have you believe, notwithstanding much evidence to the contrary. Last week Commentary published a hit job on us with the rather uninspired headline, “Neither American nor Conservative.” According to the subhead, “The flagship paleoconservative publication got everything about Donald Trump’s Middle East policy wrong—and then melted down.” The author, James Kirchick, is a longtime neocon who has supported such America First causes as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, gay rights in Eastern Europe, and slandering antiwar conservatives as “objectively pro-fascist.” As senior editor at TAC, I have a pretty good handle on what we run online and in print and what goes on inside our DC office, and I don’t recall anyone ever “melting down” about the Middle East. But what about the other, sweeping claim, that TAC has gotten “everything” about Trump’s Mideast policy wrong? Au contraire, we have gotten a lot right, and Kirchick, who seems to have scoured our coverage of Iran and tallied the (alleged) misses and none of the hits, surely knows that. Allow me to survey my own recent writings on the subject to refute this claim. After Trump bombed Iran in late June and then announced a ceasefire to end the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, I recalled that in May I had predicted that the U.S. would attack Iran, rather than strike a deal that limits its enrichment of uranium for nuclear fuel. While Trump seemed to genuinely want such a deal, I reasoned, Israel would go to great lengths to sabotage diplomacy.  “What I’m imagining is that Israel conducts strikes and then we get dragged into war in support of them,” I said on an episode of TAC Right Now. “They [Israel] can’t take out these underground nuclear reactors on their own; they need bunker busters for that, 30,000-pound bunker-busters that require B-2 Spirit stealth bombers.” The U.S., and not Israel, possesses those bunker-busters and B-2 Spirits, and I expected the U.S. to use them on Israel’s behalf. This weekend, that prediction came to pass. Though America’s intervention now seems like a one-off, and though Israel and Iran have agreed to a ceasefire, the same dynamics that last month made me so pessimistic are still in play. Does this sound to you like the rantings of a Mideast melt-downer who is wrong about “everything”? Compare my prediction from May to arguments then being advanced by pro-Israel conservatives. Back then, figures like Ben Shapiro were confidently proclaiming that Israel could take care of Iran all by itself, and that the U.S. absolutely wouldn’t attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, so the White House shouldn’t restrain Israel out of misplaced fears of getting dragged into the conflict. Moreover, as I had warned would be the case, America’s deep involvement in the conflict went beyond its own offensive military action, despite what the Israel-Firsters would have you believe. Throughout the war, Washington extended its superpower shield over Israel, defending it from Iranian retaliation and, in the process, rapidly depleting American stocks of scarce missile interceptors. Had the U.S. refrained from coming to the rescue, the damage done to Israel would have been even more severe than it was, perhaps catastrophically so. In fairness to Kirchick, he didn’t quote the piece from late June, so maybe he never got around to reading it.  Nor does he refer to my discussion on Iran with Daniel McCarthy, a board member at The American Conservative, though TAC published a transcript in mid-June, after the war kicked off but days before the U.S. bombed Iran. One reason for publishing that transcript was to expose our readers to McCarthy’s argument that, in my words, “some figures on the antiwar right have become mirror images of the neocons: While the latter push for Trump to join Israel’s war with Iran, the former argue he should have prevented it.”  During the conversation, McCarthy warned against assuming a “nightmare scenario” of Iraq War 2.0 and reminded me of the responsibility we have to look at each step of this mess that we have, and to say, you know what, America has a choice every step of the way and can back down or choose not to be involved at any point. That proved excellent advice, which guided my subsequent analysis. The piece constitutes a rather glaring counterexample to one of Kirchick’s central criticisms and generalizations: that TAC routinely insisted that any engagement in Iran would spin out of control. So, which of my pieces did Kirchick highlight? The only quote by me comes from an early July piece. Kirchick writes: Senior editor Andrew Day sourly fumed that Israel “instigated” the war and that “its campaign, though impressive, failed to eliminate the Iranian threat, and probably made it worse in the long run.” Where to begin? First, as my friends know, I’m rarely sour and never fume. Second, as I like to remind the younger writers here at TAC, you can’t magically enhance your argument by stuffing attributions with adverbs or using colorful alternatives to the time-honored “wrote” and “said.” Some questions: Does Kirchick disagree that Israel, by launching a surprise attack on Iran, thereby “instigated” the war? Does he believe that Israel did indeed “eliminate the Iranian threat”? (The Israelis themselves don’t seem to think so.) Lastly, is it patently absurd of me to assess that Israel, by heightening Tehran’s threat perception and spurring its buildup of military forces, worsened the long-term threat posed by Iran? Kirchick evidently thinks that merely quoting this line is sufficient to discredit my analysis, but I’m not sure why. Note also my use of even-handed, probabilistic language when forecasting. No meltdown here. Of course, I didn’t get everything right on Iran. But I was sometimes wrong in a direction opposite the one Kirchick emphasizes. In a piece entitled “Trump Can, and Must, Avoid War with Iran,” published on June 12, I wrote:  Fortunately, the U.S. and Iran still plan to hold nuclear talks this weekend. Israel is not likely to attack before then, meaning Trump has one more shot at salvaging diplomacy. As we now know, Israel attacked Iran the very next day. Evidently, I underestimated Israel’s willingness to sabotage U.S.–Iran diplomacy and overestimated Trump’s abilities to avoid getting dragged into another Mideast conflict. Kirchick would surely reply that I nevertheless assumed the risk for America was getting dragged into a “forever war” in the Middle East, whereas Trump—to his credit—wound up authorizing limited strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and then pushing the two main belligerents to cease fire. Fair enough. But before Trump’s intervention, my published conversation with McCarthy highlighted the possibility of limited U.S. engagement.  Kirchick faults TAC for repeatedly predicting that war with Iran would lead to “World War III,” and he seems to think we’re terribly embarrassed by our failures of prognostication.  In fact, none of the articles mentioned by Kirchick used the term “World War III,” though a speech he cites delivered this September by Curt Mills, our executive director, does reflect on the criticism that so-called isolationists falsely predicted World War III. And one TAC article from June argues that America’s accumulation of security dependents (not just Israel) makes World War III more likely. When I myself have talked about the possibility of world war in recent months, I’ve cautioned against alarmism. For example, when the foreign policy analyst and podcast host Brandon Weichert interviewed me in August and asked whether a renewed war with Iran could widen into a global conflagration involving Russia and China, I answered, “I am not quite concerned about World War III breaking out over that particular issue.” This might be the mildest meltdown in human history. That podcast proves instructive in another respect: As my comments clearly demonstrate, I harbor no hysterical animus toward Israel, and I have often criticized its actions on the basis that I think they are counterproductive to Israel’s own long-term interests. On the podcast, I even emphasized that, in the short term, Israel’s bellicosity toward Iran is comprehensible and rational (though not optimal), given its threat environment. As I made clear, the problem for me is that it’s not in America’s interests to subsidize and enable that bellicosity, and Trump should avoid becoming embroiled in a war on Israel’s behalf. Kirchick, unsurprisingly, also painted TAC as a motley collection of nefarious antisemites. His most confident accusation of Jew hatred was leveled against Harrison Berger, TAC’s newest staff writer, who also happens to be a devout American Jew. I’ve enjoyed hours of conversation with Berger, once involving copious amounts of wine, and have yet to hear him slip up and express bigotry against himself. Perhaps Kirchick wouldn’t deem these facts dispositive, but consider his own evidence: Berger “scornfully referenced the Hebrew word hasbara without translation… a sure sign that the writer is an anti-Semite.” Okay. In recent weeks TAC has been subjected to what feels like a coordinated campaign to delegitimize our magazine and demean us personally. We’ve even weathered a DDoS cyberattack, originating in Israel, that briefly took down our website. Kirchick and others are, of course, free to criticize our ideas—we enjoy rough-and-tumble debate—but so far the most impressive attack was the one against our website.  As the TAC staffer who has written the most on Iran this past year, and who wrote the most articles cited by Kirchick, I don’t consider it cherry-picking to review my own output to refute his critique. Of course, I would welcome a riposte, if Kirchick’s not too busy sourly fuming. The post A Recent Attack on TAC Falls Flat appeared first on The American Conservative.

Congress Should Pass a Discontinuing Resolution

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