By Ivo Kokić

For the Ukrainian government (whose mandate expired long ago, but where new elections are not allowed to be held), this has become a purposeless war. The only meaning of continuing the war is no longer any hallucination of victory, but exclusively the prolongation of their stay in power. As long as the war lasts, there is justification for not holding elections and thus for Volodymyr Zelensky remaining in power. Incidentally, this is an utterly meaningless argument. Franjo Tuđman won the presidential elections in Croatia in 1992, when a third of Croatia was under Serbian occupation. Moreover, Zelensky himself won the 2019 elections when Ukraine had already not controlled Crimea and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk for five years.

But let us return to the point. Elections will be held one day. It is difficult to predict who will win, but much easier to predict who will not. Everything for which Zelensky’s government has been waging this war for years will not only fail to be achieved, but the inversion of those goals is a condition for ending the war. The best example of this is Ukraine’s (non-)entry into NATO. Therefore, it is unlikely that the majority of the public (even in the West, and especially in Ukraine) will be able to avert their gaze from such an outcome of the war.

Given that he will not be able to present defeat as victory, it is likely that Zelensky will lose the next elections. That is why he will do everything to prevent peace from being achieved, and his sponsors will greatly assist him in this. As Boris Rašeta wrote, these are voluntary donors of other people’s (Ukrainian) blood.

Ukraine kindergarten among civilian sites hit by Russian drone and missile strike

The suffering of civilians

Aleksey Arestovych was an adviser to the Ukrainian president for strategic communications from 2020 until January 2023. He is a skilled propagandist and a man who is practically the author of everything we hear about this war from the Ukrainian perspective. He constructed the entire official narrative of the conflict. Moreover, he is on Russia’s list of terrorists and extremists. All of this must be kept in mind so that even the strongest supporters of Ukraine cannot question his objectivity.

Arestovych parted ways with Zelensky in January 2023, after Russia carried out an air strike on Dnipropetrovsk in which several dozen Ukrainian civilians were killed. At that time, Arestovych publicly admitted that the collapse of the residential building (and the deaths of those civilians) was not caused by Russian missiles, but on the contrary by Ukrainian air defense. This was the first time that someone from the top of the Ukrainian authorities deconstructed the myth that the Russian army allegedly targets Ukrainian civilians. This does not mean, however, that the Western public has been spared hearing such claims in the media even when they have been proven false.

The mentioned example is only a drop in the ocean of what is happening in Ukraine. In 2025, Arestovych said that Zelensky himself was responsible for the deaths of several tens of thousands of Ukrainians and that he did so knowingly solely in order to remain in power. Therefore, he promised that, if he became president of Ukraine, he would sentence Zelensky and his government to life imprisonment. This is justified, because it would not be right for those responsible for the deaths of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to go unpunished.

What is at issue here is the exposure of civilians (by their own side) to likely death, solely in order to portray the opposing side in a negative light.

It should also be said that those familiar with the situation in Ukraine may not have been overly shocked by Arestovych’s admission. Namely, in August 2022 Amnesty International published a report stating exactly how Ukrainian combat tactics violate international humanitarian law and endanger civilians. This concerns the Ukrainian army establishing military bases in civilian facilities such as schools and hospitals. Furthermore, the Ukrainian army launches attacks from populated areas, establishes operational weapons systems in those areas, and thus turns civilian objects into artillery targets.

It goes without saying that, for example, a hospital or a maternity ward cannot be a legitimate military target, because no reasonable person would think of using such facilities as military bases. Yet the Ukrainian army does exactly that, attacking Russian positions from such locations.

Suffering of civilans in Ukraine

Comparison with “Operation Storm”

This tactic is actually not particularly innovative. It is enough to look at the Human Rights Watch report on Operation “Storm” and on Croatian operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina afterwards. It cites similar examples of civilian casualties as a result of clashes between two armies. The Croatian Army always targeted legitimate military objectives, but Serbian forces deliberately positioned military personnel and weaponry among civilians, thereby exposing their civilians to danger. This is contrary to the principle that an army must not endanger civilians under its control.

Thus, there were Serbian civilians who were killed in attacks by the Croatian Air Force. However, responsibility for their deaths does not lie with Croatian aviation, but with those who knowingly exposed them to such danger. In material terms, they were killed by Croatian weapons, but in terms of responsibility they were killed by the Serbian side. An army is allowed to strike military targets. That is why even the prosecutor’s office of the Hague Tribunal, in its (later dismissed) indictments against Croatian generals, did not address these cases at all, because the prosecutors themselves were aware that guilt for such actions would be impossible to prove.