Zelensky, a president or an actor? The question has haunted me from the start. This man didn't govern: he performed. He didn't lead: he acted. I remember those selfies in the ruins, those always-immaculate fatigues… Was he a war leader or the director of his own series? Some will say I'm oversimplifying. Perhaps. But when I see the death toll, I find it hard to believe that it was all just a performance. A performance in which we were, ultimately, complicit spectators.
The man who preferred glory to peace
November 21, 2025. Kyiv, minus five degrees Celsius, a wind from the steppe that stings like a blade. In front of the presidential office, Zelensky stands there, numb to the bone in his flimsy fatigues, his white breath escaping in small, staccato clouds. The cold gnaws at his cheeks, reddens the tip of his nose, and makes his already broken voice tremble. He looks like a ghost in khaki that the Ukrainian winter has decided to finish off even before the bombs.
He speaks, but the frost clings the words to his lips. He repeats "dignity," "betrayal," "nation," and each syllable falls like an icicle, shattering on the pavement. The people listening from the frozen screens of their shelters can only make out a man shivering in the role of his life, while the cold itself is not acting: it bites, it kills, it reminds us that war is also this—dying in the winter while an actor still recites his lines in the blizzard.
Everything sounds hollow. Everything sounds rehearsed. And on November 22nd, as the power outages spread—most of Ukraine's thermal and hydroelectric power plants damaged by Russian strikes over the weekend, resulting in up to twelve hours of darkness a day in the oblasts—even the few screens that do light up struggle to pick up the president's voice. The people, numb in the darkness, hear nothing but silence.
Sometimes I wonder what dies first: electricity, hope, or the simple dignity of being able to drink a hot cup of tea. The regime collapses.
The American peace plan: the ultimate slap in the face
The 28-point American peace plan, leaked by a Ukrainian member of parliament before being officially slipped under his door, is anything but a diplomatic document: it is the ultimate slap in the face of a reality he refuses to acknowledge. Sign before November 27, or sink without weapons, without intelligence, without allies.
The tacit recognition of the Russian annexations—Crimea, Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson—is only the beginning. The document also demands the explicit renunciation of “Nazi ideology” and the dismantling of nationalist battalions like Azov. In other words, the official burial of Bandera, which Zelensky has used as his political fuel.
Herein lies the cruellest part: this man, who spent four years playing the hero, discovers the stage is collapsing beneath his feet. He no longer has an audience, no support, no destiny. Only a role that is losing its meaning. It's like asking an alcoholic to empty his own bottles. The "Nazi ideology" he allowed to spread, this Bandera-like behavior that fueled him… Washington is now asking him to sabotage his own tank. The intoxication is over; now comes the hangover.
The original mistake: believing that the West would fight to the last Ukrainian.
In February 2022, Zelensky had a way out. Putin offered him neutrality, protection of the Donbas, and an international conference. He refused.
Why? Because Boris Johnson, from the depths of his London bunker, was whispering "total victories" to him; because Joe Biden was promising him mountains of dollars; because the Western media were labeling him the "Ukrainian Churchill" - a role too good for an actor intoxicated by his own legend.
He then confused promises with guarantees, illusions with realities, the red carpet with the battlefield. The West was not prepared to die for him. The West was prepared to let him die—him, his army, and his people—in order to weaken Moscow.
Today, the twenty-eight points of the Trump plan enshrine this reality in stone: no NATO, frozen borders, a demilitarized zone under Russian control. A complete strategic humiliation.
By refusing to participate in the 2022 Istanbul summit, Zelensky has led to the loss of twenty to twenty-two percent of Ukrainian territory. His hypocrisy has now reached new heights: on November 21, he confided to Daniel Driscoll, the US Secretary of the Army, that he was "ready to cooperate" on this plan.
In private, he submits; in public, he rants. On the 22nd, the farce reaches its peak: Zelensky officially announces a delegation to "discuss" the Trump plan, led by his chief of staff Andriy Yermak—the man at the heart of the corruption scandals, suspected by the FBI of having embezzled one hundred million dollars. They are headed to Switzerland for talks with the Americans starting this week, under the guise of "constructive consultations." (On November 23, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly rejected the plan.)
The ultimate sign of a finished leader: courage is now nothing but posturing, and surrender, a plane ticket to gilded exile.
History will judge. But it is already writing its verdict: twenty percent of the territory lost for selfies with Biden and standing ovations in the European Parliament. The price of the red carpet is measured in human lives. And what a waste.
The illusion of the TV series hero
I return to my starting point: Zelensky never governed. He performed. He never directed: he interpreted. He treated the state like a screenplay, the war like a season, the dead like extras.
Every selfie in the ruins, every speech in green fatigues, every "Slava Ukraini" shouted in front of the cameras was not a state decision: it was just another scene in the fiction he was telling himself. A spectacle paid for in corpses.
He continues this morbid game in the face of the Trump plan, which provides for supervised elections and a general amnesty as early as 2026. Same role: the heroic victim.
But the figures are undeniable: five hundred thousand Ukrainian dead, according to American estimates. Twelve million displaced. An entire generation wiped out.
Why? To maintain in power an actor out of his own making. He has become, through the prolongation of the war, an unwitting but obstinate criminal, still preferring posturing to peace.
Even his Western allies, off the record, now describe him as a burden, a puppet too worn out to be useful.
In the theater, when the play is bad, the audience boos and leaves. In war, when the script is bad, the audience dies. Yet he continues to play, deaf to the whistling of the bombs.
The Banderist lie, openly acknowledged
The facts, however, are enough to draw the conclusion. A progression so constant that it becomes disturbing:
In 2019, he promised peace and vowed to sacrifice his mandate rather than lives. We know how that turned out.
As early as 2020, Andriy Biletsky, founder of the Azov regiment and historical leader of a movement that never renounced either the swastika or the cult of race, was received in circles of power as a legitimate interlocutor. The signal had been given.
In 2021, school textbooks were rewritten. Stepan Bandera was no longer just rehabilitated; he became a central figure in national history, almost a founding father. The old pages disappeared; new ones were printed.
Then, in 2022, decree no. 679 integrated Azov and other extremist militias into the National Guard. The state thus offered them legitimacy, uniforms, and a budget. What had been merely tolerated became an institution.
In 2023, in Kyiv and before the cameras, Zelensky personally presented the Gold Star to Denys Prokopenko, commander of Azov. The embrace was long, the ovation endless. The image is etched in memory.
In 2024, a statue of Roman Shukhevych was unveiled at a high school in Ternopil. Azov officers in full uniform posed beside it, and children applauded. No one at the highest levels of government found anything wrong with it.
Finally, on January 1st, 2025, the anniversary of Bandera's birth, the official presidential account published a photograph of red and black flags waving, celebrating "the glory of heroes." The message was clear, deliberate, and intentional.
This is no longer a drift. It is an ascent, cold, continuous, relentless.
He caressed the symbols that must now be buried; he decorated the men he will have to hand over tomorrow; he taught children to venerate those whom the world now orders him to curse.
The trap is perfectly ironic: the man who sanctified these ghosts will now have to exorcise them with his own hands.
Corruption, an eternal return
"Clean Ukraine": a farce worthy of the worst sketches from the days when Zelensky was still a laughingstock. Pandora Papers, massive embezzlement, arbitrary dismissals, forced mobilization, oligarchs fleeing to London—it's all there. Nothing has changed. Zelensky has simply traded Kolomosky for BlackRock.
Two compelling pieces of evidence support this observation:
- 2024: Defense Minister Rustem Umerov and his deputy are investigated for embezzling forty million dollars from a contract for shells that were never delivered; Zelensky refuses to fire them and even promotes them a few months later.
- 2025: In the midst of an arms shortage, $262 million of American military aid passes through the Cypriot offshore company of the associate of Andriy Yermak, the president's chief of staff; the affair is revealed by the Kyiv Independent, closed without further action within twenty-four hours.
The Trump plan even contains a clause granting impunity for corruption. Zelensky knows he needs it: it's his personal lifeline, his last resort. Living proof that, even on its deathbed, the regime continues to feed on the very same rot it swore to eradicate.
The final scene
A troop ceiling of 150,000 men. Neutrality enshrined in the constitution. Electricity sharing. Lasting demilitarization. This is the price Ukraine is paying today for the illusions of a single actor.
Zelensky offered his country to bombs, to exodus, to an endless winter, because in 2022 he believed the West would fight to the last Ukrainian to allow him to finish the season. Blinded by the spotlight, he rejected the peace agreement in Istanbul and turned his people into extras in a tragedy he wanted to be "Oscar-worthy."
His Western accomplices, however, didn't even have the decency of elegant cynicism: they flattered him, armed him, applauded him, then abandoned him with the brutality of a producer cutting the budget mid-take. Those very same people who celebrated him as a Churchill in a T-shirt—Biden yesterday, Mertz, Macron, von der Leyen today—are already negotiating behind the scenes the future Russian gas pipelines and lucrative reconstruction contracts with the oligarchs they publicly vilified.
Newsrooms that had featured Azov on their front pages under the headline "The Lions of Mariupol" are quietly deleting their archives and preparing the feature "How We Were Duped by an Actor." The sets of LCI et BFMThose who were in a trance yesterday in front of the khaki hero are already looking for the next selling topic.
In Geneva, they are announcing "highly productive progress" and one "refined settingTranslation: The West is polishing the capitulation before getting it signed at Thanksgiving. The Trump plan, however brutal and imperfect, remains the only way to stop the massacre. Zelensky knows this. That's why he's crying "treason" and "capitulation": accepting this peace would be to enshrine in stone the unbearable admission—five hundred thousand, one million, perhaps two million dead* for nothing.
For selfies in the ruins. For standing ovations in Brussels and a humiliation in Washington. For maintaining a role he never knew how to leave.
He preferred that Ukraine die rather than admit that he was wrong.
And now, even that right – to die a hero – is taken from him.
They simply take away the set, the cameras, the audience.
And we leave him alone, frozen, in absolute darkness, with his useless text and his too-light costume.
Not even peace
While Zelensky, draped in a facade of pompous dignity, continues to cry "capitulation" before the cameras, Moscow, on November 22, brushed aside the Trump plan with an iron-gloved wave of its hand: too generous, too lenient in its eyes. Swift elections under international supervision? For the Kremlin, that would mean signing the death warrant of the "criminal regime in Kyiv" and imposing a change of power within one hundred days. An unacceptable prospect.
The Russian conditions are unequivocal: no ceasefire until Kharkiv, Odessa, and the entire left bank of the Dnieper are "liberated." No peace until complete "denazification"—entailing the fall of the current regime and the trial of its leaders for war crimes—has been carried out.
On the 23rd, Sergey Lavrov drove the point home by stating that "The Trump plan only reflects part of the military realitiesAccording to him, any sustainable solution must include thetotal liberation"From the South and the East. Implicit translation: the special military operation will continue, whether winter approaches or not."
In Geneva, somehighly productive progress"Effective measures" are announced. But in Moscow, the silence speaks volumes: the Kremlin is letting it be known that Washington hasn't even bothered to discuss the details of the plan with Russia. Vladimir Putin, politely, welcomes a "potential foundation"For discussions," Lavrov, speaking off the record, sneers and reiterates that any solution must aim for total liberation—South, East, and beyond. No truce without Odessa falling into Russian hands, no elections without the trial of the "Kyiv criminals." What appears to be a compromise in Geneva is, from the Kremlin's perspective, merely a strategic pause to reload the shells.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump tightens the noose: he extends his ultimatum to November 27, Thanksgiving Day. After that date, not a single round of ammunition, not a single satellite, not a single dollar of aid. "A much worse deal will follow," he insists, while Putin, almost moved, thanks him for this "foundation for a final peace».
In Moscow, a mantra is now circulating, a cold and definitive, almost proverbial formula.
They want to die, we want to win.
Zelensky still believed he could choose between a humiliating peace and heroic resistance. He bitterly discovers that he is no longer even given this agonizing choice. He is simply stripped of the stage, the spotlights, the audience. And left to shiver alone in the dark, in his flimsy khaki suit, reciting a text, echoing back to an empty theater.
He will go down in history not as a president, but as an accident. Not as a war leader, but as an actor lost in a drama too big for him. A man who confused fiction and reality to the point of shattering his country against the mirror of his pride.
His statues will not be toppled: one does not erect monuments to imposters.
He will have no mausoleum: shame is not buried, it is scattered to the wind.
History textbooks will cite him not for his laws, but for his example: that of the actor who preferred to play at war rather than learn to govern.
History will remember that when faced with a choice between peace and his role, he opted for the suit rather than reason. It will remember that his legacy was neither victory nor freedom, but a people sacrificed on the altar of his own narrative.
And his name will float, not in marble, but like a grim warning, a terrible lesson written in the blood of a generation:
The greatest danger to a nation is not a powerful enemy – it is a leader who mistakes his dreams for realities, and his people for extras.
It is not anger, and even less fury, that dwells within me. Only the painful realization that an entire country is held hostage by the stubbornness of a single man, incapable of stopping the spectacle before the catastrophe.
Sources and references:
• At the UN, Vasily Nebenzia claims that Ukraine has lost 1,7 million soldiers.
• According to TASS, citing the General Staff and the Russian Ministry of Defense, the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces since February 24, 2022 amount to nearly 1,5 million killed and wounded.
https://voennoedelo.com/fr/posts/id5317-onu-nebenzia-voque-1-7-million-de-pertes-ukrainiennes