In his Telegram channel, a former Ukrainian parliamentarian in exile, an ally of Russia, announced that he had returned to Ukraine and had begun to position himself as a leader who could replace and replace Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“Friends! As I promised you, we are taking action! The operation to denazify Ukraine has begun, “Oleg Tsarev wrote in the press service. “I am in Ukraine. Kyiv will be free of fascists! ”
After more than a day of fighting, Tsarev promised his followers: “We are now close.
But two days later, when the Russian military faced unexpectedly fierce resistance, Tsarev addressed his messages to those who “for some reason have begun to lose heart,” promising that “everything has just begun.”
If the Kremlin believes that the introduction of someone like Tsarev – seen as a traitor by the vast majority of Ukrainians – will provide an easy path to indirect governance of the country or large parts of it, Moscow may underestimate the difficulty of securing a nation with foreign change. of the regime, according to scientists who have studied similar scenarios.
Russia carried out similar setups in Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, raising peripheral pro-Russian elites to control territories detached from Kyiv’s control. But this time the scenario is quite different, with Ukrainians in many cities view Russia as an aggressive invader. Moscow will try to impose control on Ukrainian cities, recently destroyed and occupied by its forces and seething with a hostile population – a far different proposition.
“Even if you can catch Zelensky and say, ‘OK, we have one and the other who will get on the back of our tank and take over,’ this is just the beginning,” said Alexander B. Downs, a political science professor. at George Washington University. “This is what the changing regimes are not looking at. They focus on the short term. ”
Historically, when an outside force tries to impose a leader of the opposite ideology or ethnicity on a resistance population – as did the Soviet Union in Poland and Hungary after World War II or the United States in Iran in 1953 – the usual way to maintain control after that is to rely heavily on brutality and repression, Downes said. But even that can only work in the short to medium term, he said, because it is expensive and involves a prolonged occupation that Moscow may not have foreseen in Ukraine.
Ukrainians, backed by Western weapons and funding, have signaled that they are ready to launch a revolt in what could turn into a severe and protracted conflict that would increase Moscow’s spending on maintaining control.
“There will be no Vichy Ukraine,” said John Herbst, senior director of the Eurasian Center of the Atlantic Council and former US ambassador to Ukraine, given the regime in southern France that cooperates with Nazi Germany. “There may be an effort to create it, but the Ukrainians will not rush into the night. They will fight like hell. “
In his writings and speeches, Putin portrayed Ukrainians as fraternal people taken hostage by Western countries in a conspiracy to destroy Russia and must now be released. This misinterpretation – along with an underestimation of Ukraine’s sense of nationality – may have led the Kremlin to speculate that Ukrainians will embrace a new Russian-backed leader with minimal resistance.
“I think the biggest obstacle for Russia is the fact that Ukraine is a real nation and there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who are ready to give their lives in defense of Ukraine,” he said. Mitchell Orenstein, Professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Orenstein said that even if Russia managed to take over all the big cities in Ukraine and form a puppet government, “this government will have a very, very difficult time controlling the territory.”
Foreign-imposed regime change does not usually improve relations between the intervening country and the target nation and often worsens or provokes civil war, according to a study published by Lindsay O’Rourke, a professor of political science at Downs and Boston College.
Nearly two-thirds of the leaders installed in the face of apparent changes in foreign regimes have either been killed, swept away in revolutions or forcibly overthrown, their study shows. including Carlos Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Laurent-Desiree Kabila in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Shah of Iran.
O’Rourke said all the new authorities have a huge motivation to collect and remove any remnants of the previous regime and its supporters – an incentive for Russia there would be in this case if he continued with the occupation.
“They will have good intelligence and the means to suppress it,” O’Rourke said. “It kind of paints a scary picture.”
Tsarev is part of a small cadre of Ukrainians who have spent much of the last decade in exile or political aging, deepening ties with Russia.
The former owner of a factory in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro was a member of President Viktor Yanukovych’s Russian-friendly Party of Regions. Then, in 2014, a pro-European uprising in Kyiv forced Yanukovych to flee to Russia and launched a Western-oriented government. Tsarev has emerged as an opponent of the protest movement, pursuing a strong pro-Russian stance.
While trying to run for president in 2014, Tsarev was beaten by a mob in Kyiv, forcing him to withdraw from the race. Ukrainian authorities have accused him of violating the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. He escaped into exile.
In mid-February, the Financial Times, citing a Western intelligence official, said US spies believed the Kremlin might try to appoint Tsarev as Ukraine’s new leader. Tsarev rejected the report in later interviews. He did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post.
The assumption that Tsarev could take power was rejected as ridiculous by many Ukrainians. In an interview with the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta in 2014, Tsarev acknowledged that he was “the most hated man in Ukraine after Putin,” but noted: “You see, people respect those who fall and then rise.”
In January, the British government uncovered similar intelligence on another Russian conspiracy to install a different Ukrainian politician, Yevhen Muraev, also widely dismissed as an unlikely leader by Ukrainians. Muraev denied the allegations and called them absurd.
In recent weeks, the United States has informed the United Nations that it has reliable information that Russia is compiling lists of Ukrainians to be “killed or sent to camps” after military occupation.
Ukrainian tycoon Viktor Medvedchuk, who sees Putin as his daughter’s godfather and runs a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine, is often seen as an obvious choice for a leader installed by the Kremlin – or if not him, someone else from his party. Medvedchuk was under house arrest in Ukraine on charges of treason, but Ukraine’s chief prosecutor said in a television interview that Medvedchuk may have escaped during the invasion.
Any of Russia’s elected leaders would face an unsympathetic population in much of Ukraine.
In a February 5-13 poll conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, 58 percent of Ukrainians said they were ready to take up arms or engage in civil resistance in response to the Russian invasion. In a December poll by the same organization, 67% of respondents said they wanted Ukraine to join the European Union, and 59% said they wanted the country to join NATO.
Putin could try to overcome that resistance by using the same brutal force he did in Chechnya in the early 2000s, or do something worse, Herbst said.
“For me, the big question is: is Putin ready to make a complete barbarian of Ukraine or a complete Strangelove with nuclear things?” That’s the first question, “Herbst said. “And the second question is: will the military apparatus follow such instructions?”