The timing of these events is remarkable. Almost so remarkable that one might think they are intentionally sequenced.

It started yesterday when the very popular former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov issued a striking warning about Ukraine’s government, corruption, and the need to develop an immediate mechanism for elections even while the war against Russia continues.

There is a great deal of support for Mykhailo Fedorov within Ukraine, as many people see him as a stronger and yet more pragmatic representative of the people.  Fedorov holds strongest support from those under 50 years old, and yesterday he diplomatically called for Ukraine to organize elections in order to retain position as a democracy.

VIA CBS – The former defense minister acknowledged the difficulties of holding a vote during the war, including how to ensure soldiers, people who live near the front line and Ukrainians who fled the war can cast their ballots.  “This is complex. … But complexity does not mean impossibility,” Fedorov said. (Citation)

In the background, the frustration of the Ukrainian people is bubbling up to the surface. In part because the hunters the Zelenskyy regime has hired to go find conscripts are now seen as living a life of indulgence.  The conscript hunters who take the men off the streets are earning $150k targeting their own people for forced military service. The people are furious.

Simultaneous to this public statement about elections released by Fedorov, the anti-corruptions agencies in Ukraine announced investigations directly related to Zelenskyy’s government itself.  It looks like Fedorov knew this was coming.

UKRAINE – Ukraine’s ⁠anti-graft agencies ​said on Wednesday ​they had uncovered a group including a presidential official ​that ‌had laundered ⁠150 million hryvnias ($3.35 ‌million) used to pay for bail ⁠in an energy corruption scheme.

Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies launched a ​special operation against lawmakers and presidential advisers on Wednesday, hours before a key vote in parliament for a new defence ​minister ‌aimed at cementing a shake-up by President ⁠Volodymyr Zelensky.

The NABU ​and SAPO ‌agencies said in a YouTube video the ‌group comprised a deputy head ​of the presidential office, a former lawmaker, heads of ​the management ​and supervisory boards ​of a state-owned bank and ​others.

[…] The probe ‌poses a fresh headache for Zelensky after ousted defence ⁠chief Mykhailo Fedorov called for wartime elections in a bombshell statement late on Tuesday. (read more)

As if that wasn’t bad enough, even more news broke that puts a very negative light on the Ukrainian government.

BERLIN (AP) — A Ukrainian man was arrested Wednesday in Croatia in connection with the 2022 undersea explosions that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany, Germany’s federal prosecutor said.

Ukrainian national Vladimir Z., whose last name was not given in line with German privacy rules, was arrested in Pula, Croatia, by local police acting on a European arrest warrant.

“Vladimir Z. is a trained scuba diver who was part of a group of individuals who planted explosives on the ‘Nord Stream 1’ and ‘Nord Stream 2’ gas pipelines near the (Danish) island of Bornholm in September 2022,” prosecutors said.

He was “strongly suspected of jointly causing explosions, anti-constitutional sabotage, and destruction of buildings and structures,” they added.

Undersea explosions on Sept. 26, 2022, damaged the pipelines, which had been built to carry Russian natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. The damage added to tensions over the war in Ukraine as European countries moved to wean themselves off Russian energy sources after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. (read more)

When I combine these events with the recent effort by western intelligence to shape a very specific narrative about the current status of the war, my sense of the landscape is that things are more tenuous and urgent than Zelenskyy and his loyal defenders would like to admit.

The psychology of war is as brutal on the citizens as the battles, and it has looked for two months like NATO/EU, western intelligence and elements in media have been trying to support a specific psychological narrative inside Ukraine that defies the reality of what is visible.   That’s the only way I can make sense of the difference between western claims and the reality I saw in Russia.

Inside Russia there are signs of the war, indications that conflict impacting their economic status is taking place, but nothing even remotely close to what western media and NATO politicians have claimed.  Support for Putin still seems exceptionally strong, and the stuff being promoted on MSM and social media about problems inside Russia are not based on reality.

If NATO wants to expand the conflict with Russia to engage in a direct military effort to support Ukraine, they are underestimating the strength and resolve of what you can literally feel inside the Russian Federation.

Russians are brutally pragmatic and hard and the past three years of battleground experience in modern warfare has built out the mechanisms of hard and callous combat readiness.  Other than a few thousand Ukraine and special forces, the NATO alliance does not have combat soldiers with the intensity of hardness you see in the Russian people.

The west has to rely on technological advantages, and I honestly sense right now the NATO group are finding out that a digital war against an analog enemy doesn’t flow the way it might be planned in Brussels, London or Washington DC.

The alliance that has supported Ukraine the most is now facing a Ukrainian people who want this to end.  As Fedorov politely notes – and his supporters vocally attest, you cannot claim to be a defender of democracy while simultaneously suspending the very systems of democracy, like elections.

President Zelenskyy is increasingly disconnected, not from his support base(s) in Brussels, DC or London, but increasingly from the people within his own nation.  I’m not sure if Zelenskyy could win an election based on the sentiment I see carried outward toward Fedorov.

Again, if you stand back and look at the totality of events, a picture emerges that something is going to change very soon.