Oleksiy Arestovych is the former presidential advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy but more recently has fallen out of favour, fled the country, and intends to run against the president in the next elections, slated for later this year.

The split at the top of Ukrainian politics has grown wider as Oleksiy Arestovych, a former presidential advisor and one of the best known figures in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s administration, fled the country and has come out in open opposition to his former boss in what is expected to turn into a presidential bid.

Arestovych, who heads Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People Rada fraction, gave a controversial interview to Freddie Sayers, the founder of UnHerd, on January 15, where he sharply criticised Zelenskiy’s war strategy and the way he is running the country.

Moreover, Arestovych led the controversial peace talks delegation in Istanbul in March 2022 and again reiterated that a deal was agreed with Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite repeated denials from both Bankova and the White House that any deal was done.

Separately, Putin also confirmed in televised comments on January 16 that not only was a deal agreed that March, but that Arestovych signed the document only for Zelenskiy to “throw it in trash” the next day.

To date, a total of eight people, seven of whom were members of the delegation, have confirmed that a detailed deal was agreed in Istanbul that could have brought the war to an end within a month of its beginning. However, since then commentators have dismissed the claim as “Kremlin propaganda” despite the overwhelming evidence. Most recently Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba denied a deal was done, claiming that it was only a “conversation,” not an agreement.

Arestovych is famous for correctly predicting the war with Russia with stunning accuracy two years before the invasion and is almost as famous a face on social media as the president in Ukraine.

However, he has fallen out favour and recently fled to an undisclosed location in the US after two criminal investigations were opened against him, fuelling accusations that Zelenskiy is showing authoritarian traits. Arestovych decision to go into self-imposed exile comes at the same time several other high profile investigative reporters in Ukraine have had cases opened against them or been intimidated.

Just this week Ukraine's prominent investigative journalist Yurii Nikolov, who broke several corruption stories at Ukraine’s Defence Ministry under its previous leadership, said that he received a visit from unidentified people threatening him. Mediarukh, a Ukrainian media freedom movement comprising leading media outlets and watchdogs, has also appealed to Zelenskiy to protect journalists from state harassment.

In his nightly address on January 17, Zelenskiy briefly commented on the recent slew of leaked hidden camera videos and wiretapped calls of staff members of the investigative outlet Bihus.info, saying that “any pressure on journalists is unacceptable.”

Recent polls show that the population is growing increasingly tired of the upbeat propaganda pumped out by the state-controlled media with its constant positive message despite the stalemate on the battlefield and rising death toll, while more critical coverage of the war is apparently suppressed.

The split at the top was already apparent and growing at the end of last year after Ukraine’s top general Valery Zaluzhny caused a scandal by saying the war had come to a stalemate in an interview with The Economist. Bankova vehemently denied the comment.

Zaluzhny has seen his popularity in Ukraine surge and is also considered a potential presidential candidate in presidential elections that should be held on March 31 when Zelenskiy's five-year term expires. However, according to the Ukrainian constitution, elections cannot be held if martial law is in effect and currently there are no concrete plans to go ahead with the vote.

While the most recent polls show that Zelenskiy still commands the trust of the people, his popularity has begun to fall slowly as the war grinds on towards its second year.

During his Christmas press conference Zelenskiy announced the General Staff had asked for an additional 450,000-500,000 men be constricted into the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) and a set of unpopular mobilisation laws were submitted to the Rada on January 12. The controversial law that would give the authorities wide powers to force people into service and harm Zelenskiy's popularity further was withdrawn at the last minute, with Zelenskiy claiming that he has not yet seen the final version.

Several reports published in the international media at the end of last year painted a picture of rising tension amongst Bankova’s elite as the war runs into a dead end and Western funding and arms dry up. Zelenskiy successfully rallied Ukrainians to the flag in the first months of the war, but questions are being raised 19 months later.

“I’m not so much a critic of President Zelenskiy himself, I criticise the Ukrainian system — a corrupt system, which, if it doesn’t change, means we can’t win this war. I am not in a personal war with President Zelenskiy; I’m criticising the system and his politics,” said Arestovych in the interview.

Pan-European peace deal

Arestovych’s most controversial statement in the interview was to suggest Ukraine give up territory to secure a ceasefire with Russia. Polls have shown that the vast majority of Ukrainians are against any territorial concessions at all and Zelenskiy’s position is recovering all the land lost to Russia, including the Crimea. Arestovych suggests that Donbas should be abandoned and the military efforts focused on retaking control of the Crimea.

“I think if we get into realistic policy, we have to say there’s no way to liberate Donbas. Maybe in five or ten years, even in Crimea, it could be possible. But the only goal we can have right now is not to give Russia more territory inside Ukraine, and to force Russia to give up this military way of dealing with Ukraine,” says Arestovych.

The former advisor proposed that the goal should change from a focus on territory to regional security and for that Ukraine needs a new post-Cold War pan-European collective security deal. Doing a deal directly with Putin is “impossible” he added.

“My main idea is that we don’t need Russian-Ukrainian negotiation, we need negotiation regarding all of Eastern Europe’s security. It could be multiple negotiations. We have to make a new system of security in Europe, because the previous Potsdam/Yalta so-called system, which was created in 1945, does not work at all,” said Arestovych.

Such a deal would have to take into account all sides of the problem; Russia does not feel itself to be secure; and neither do the Central European states and the Baltics, Arestovych said.

“We can laugh about this and say that we never had an aggressive approach towards Russia, but Russians think so. And they are ready to kill for this security question,” says Arestovych. “So we need a huge negotiation, with both sides, all Nato members, all EU neighbours, all natural states which are interested in the security in Europe, to create a new so-called Potsdam/Yalta system, because the alternative will be ten or 15 years of war,” he added.

Istanbul peace deal

Asked directly if a peace deal was agreed in Istanbul in March 2022, Arestovych, who led the Ukrainian delegation, once again confirmed a detailed deal was agreed.

“Yeah, I was a member of the Istanbul process, and it was the most profitable agreement we could have done. They concluded the two previous agreements that were extremely dangerous for Ukraine: Minsk one and Minsk two. This agreement even contained the question of Crimea,” Arestovych said.

Arestovych said the delegation was so happy and was asked if he thought they were concluded successfully.

“Yes, completely. We opened the champagne bottle. We had discussed demilitarisation, denazification, issues concerning the Russian language, Russian church and much else. And that month, it was the question of the amount of Ukrainian armed forces in peacetime and President Zelenskiy said, “I could decide this question indirectly with Mr. Putin”. The Istanbul agreements were a protocol of intentions and were 90% prepared for directly meeting with Putin. That was to be the next step of negotiations,” Arestovych said.

Then it all fell to pieces a few days later. “Mid-agreement in Istanbul we came to Kyiv and after [the Bucha massacre] we heard from the President that we had stopped the negotiations. The next meeting was to be on April 9 and on the second of April it was declined.”

Many have opined that the massacre of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha played a decisive role in Zelenskiy's decision to cancel the deal.

“The President was shocked about Bucha. All of us were shocked about Bucha. I was in Bucha on the second day when the Russian forces were repelled. Zelenskiy completely changed face when he came into Bucha and saw what had happened,” Arestovych said.

Others have suggested that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson played a key role in dissuading Zelenskiy from doing a peace deal. Johnson has said on record that if Ukraine continued to fight the West would support it “one thousand%,” but he recently denied that he scuppered the deal. What remains unclear is what Johnson said about the West providing Ukraine with bilateral security deals that Ukraine was calling for in earlier peace talks held in Belarus.

Britain has since announced Ukraine’s first security deal with the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on January 15, however, a few days later Sunak warned not to call the £2.5 ($3.2bn) arms supplies commitment a “security” deal as it includes no commitment by the UK to send troops to Ukraine to protect it against Russian aggression.

Arestovych sheds little new light on what was said between Johnson and Zelenskiy. “A lot of people say it was the Prime Minister Boris Johnson who came to Kyiv and put a stop to this negotiation with Russia. I don’t know exactly if that is true or false. He came to Kyiv but nobody knows what they spoke about except, I think, Zelenskiy and Boris Johnson himself,” Arestovych said. “Something happened in those five days [between April 4 and April 9 when the next round of peace talks were due to resume]. But the members of the negotiations group stopped any negotiations. When we asked how it could be restarted, the President said, “somewhere, sometime, but not now”.”

Arestovych has been accused by some commentators of being insincere in relating this tale as he is now in “open conflict” with Zelenskiy and aspires to be president himself. Other detractors believe that Putin was not sincere in the negotiations and only playing for a pause in the fighting so Russian forces could regroup. At the time of the Istanbul talks, Russian forces had been beaten back from Kyiv after its initial assault was rebuffed. But Arestovych insists that the peace talks in March 2022 were sincere but admits things have changed since then.

“The Russians showed their readiness for continuing the negotiations, and we declined. But now, after two years, I think it would be unreal to make an agreement this time. Putin has changed this Russian-Ukrainian war into an anti-colonial war, the Global South against the Global West. And the systemic oppositions between West and South are so huge. It includes the question of the Israeli-Palestinian war, the question of Taiwan. It could not be solved by an agreement between Ukraine and Russia. It needs to take place at a much higher level,” Arestovych argued.

Arestovych also takes issue with the idea that the war has created a new idea of Ukrainian statehood that was at best confused before the annexation of the Crimea in 2014. While a political identity has clearly been reinforced as the polls show that even the inhabitants of the Russophile eastern regions overwhelmingly want to remain Ukrainian, distinct from Russia, Arestovych argues that culturally the picture remains more confused and suggests that is adding to the AFU’s recruitment problems.

“I think Ukraine has to be one political nation but poly-ethnic and poly-cultural. Because if we want to hold Ukraine in its 1991 borders, even officially we have 58 nationalities here in Ukraine. Unofficially it’s more than 100: a lot of languages, a lot of different cultures, a lot of different histories, of regions. Ukrainian is a state which was created from the parts of great empires — Austro Hungarian, German, Polish and Russian — and we have absolutely different traditions. You can imagine, because for Great Britain it is easy to understand. It’s like Wales, Scotland, Ireland,” Arestovych said.

Russia has a similar confused religio-ethnic identity, but Putin, who has always been careful to laud Russia’s diversified population, also a Soviet tradition, has successfully rallied the people behind the idea of fighting for a “Great Russia,” says Arestovych.

“Ukrainian nationalism is the idea of less than 20% of Ukrainians. This is the problem,” he concludes, adding that the war has caused a linguistic bigotry where Russian-speakers have been relegated to second class citizens, which makes them reluctant to fight for the government.

Arestovych’s solution to this problem is to create a “fifth project.”

“We have had four political projects in Ukraine: Russian, Soviet, nationalist and euro-integration projects. My idea is to collect the best from all four projects and recreate a so-called Fifth Project, the main idea of which is to unite Ukrainians, to recognise all Ukrainians in our history, in our modernity, in our future,” he said.

US support

Arestovych criticised Ukraine’s reliance on US support, highlighting the conflict between Democrats and Republicans on continuing the financial support. But that support remains crucial to Ukraine’s war effort.

“The stopping of financial aid would mean we lose macro-economic stability. It would endanger social payments and pensions and the provision of social aid for our people. We have insufficient gold and currency deposits in our National Bank — we could face massive inflation. And on the frontline, it would mean we start to lose territory because Russians still have superiority in artillery shells, rockets, personnel, armoured tanks. We would face two forces against the building of a Ukrainian state: interior problems and Russian aggression. It’s a very dangerous situation,” said Arestovych.

“For me, one of the main mistakes of President Zelenskiy was to appeal to the West using an emotional argument. We will have to change this policy. We have to place a calculator between us and the collective West and start to think: what are the real profit calculations? For the United States, it’s mostly the titanium industry and lithium industry, which they were very interested in within Ukraine,” he added.

Conscription

Arestovych related that while in office he was told four and a half million men, around half of the whole fighting age male population of Ukraine, had avoided registering at the recruitment centre, before going to touch on the sensitive subject of the current recruitment drive.

“Now we are trying to recruit half a million troops using mostly a repressive campaign, not positive motivation,” said Arestovych, comparing the Ukrainian campaign with Russia’s much more successful recruitment drive. “We have to present a positive motivation to take arms. We should talk about principle. It has to be man-centric, human-centric. The recruitment has to be about how one person can change his fate by getting into the war. He has to be well-recruited, well-selected, well-trained and well-used on the frontline.”