The general and the warmonger: Why Ukraine’s commander-in-chief met a notorious French proxy-war philosopher

Ukraine’s top general, Aleksandr Syrsky, should have his hands full: Russian forces have been advancing, slowly but steadily, for half a year. Hardly a day passes without news of this or that settlement falling to them (the next will be under the unusual name New York, also known as Novogorodskoe). And all the while, Ukraine’s forces are being ground down by a relentless process of attrition that the country cannot demographically afford, while its energy infrastructure has been degraded by a systematic Russian air campaign. Western aid, as before, may slow down these processes, but it cannot stop or reverse them.

And on the horizon, there is November, when Donald Trump will most likely take over as US president and confront Ukraine with the choice of either coming to terms, that is, largely Moscow’s terms, or losing American support, that is, collapsing. And, according to Hungary’s prime minister and a friend and messenger for the Republican, Viktor Orbán, Trump won’t even wait for his inauguration in January 2025 but move rapidly to end the war.

While thinking through the consequences of the next Trump presidency may be above Syrsky’s paygrade, the general does not shy away from the occasional sally beyond strictly military matters. He has most recently done two things that have little to do with poring over staff maps and issuing orders: He has met with the French propagandist Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL), and he has posted about the meeting on his Telegram channel.

The post itself was studiously anodyne, showing Syrsky and BHL standing somewhere among trees, the general in camouflage and the “philosopher” in his trademark I-am-an-urban-intellectual-from-Paris suit and open shirt; the general is making an energetic fist (athlete-style), the “philosopher” the sort of face you show when your buddy shows you his new super large flat screen TV. Syrsky’s text boils down too, in essence, thanking Lévy for the opportunity to “talk about our struggle” and for using his “artistic talent” to make the world know about Ukraine.           

Despite Syrsky’s claim that “history is written now,” neither the meeting nor his post have received much attention. Western media, including in Lévy’s native France, have ignored it; and even in Ukraine, the echo is very faint at best. The only thing that is being reported there – and not very much, either – is the reason why Lévy was in Ukraine in the first place: One of his “documentaries” – really, propaganda movies – about the war in Ukraine, long released in the West, got its Ukrainian premiere in the city of Kharkov.

But this media neglect, arguably, is not quite fair. Lévy, it is true, is a professional attention seeker, whose main occupation in life is to shill for every single Western war and, in the case of Israel, the Gaza genocide as well. He has, as you would expect, a sideline in Russia Rage hysteria as well, displayed recently in its full symptomatic splendor when he informed the French public that Macron’s real opponent in the elections that he himself had called was – yes, you guessed right – big bad Moscow. In that sense, the less attention paid to BHL, the better. 

Yet, in this case, his presence at Syrsky’s wooded headquarters and the general’s need to post about it may point to more interesting issues: For one thing, Syrsky may be looking for some publicity because he is under fire, at home. Like his predecessor as commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, Syrsky is being blamed for Ukraine’s military distress. And as with Zaluzhny, one of Syrsky’s main detractors is the Ukrainian media personality and politician Mariana Bezuglaya. Bezuglaya is a well-known polarizing figure in Ukraine. 

A member of parliament and, until recently, President Zelensky’s “Servant of the People” party, Bezuglaya has achieved national resonance by criticizing Ukraine’s military leadership. Her main instruments have been social and traditional media; her main institutional perch – her position as deputy head of the parliament’s committee on national security, defense, and intelligence. As her critics deplore, this has also given her special access to classified information.

Bezuglaya’s motives are, it seems, unclear to everyone, perhaps including herself. She may even be sincere. In any case, her ambition is obvious, and so is the fact that her public attacks helped Zelensky eliminate General Zaluzhny as a political competitor. Now she has started going after his successor, Syrsky.

A few weeks ago, Bezuglaya filed complaints against both Zaluzhny and Syrsky with Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigations, a special body ostensibly set up to fight corruption but, in reality, to serve lawfare purposes in Ukraine’s power struggles. 

At the same time, she used her Facebook account to make her attack as public as possible. She called the “system of the higher military staffs” a “swamp,” accused the generals of maintaining a closed culture of “incompetent, old leaders,” “disrespect for the truth,” and, of course, massive and costly failure. Costly, that is, in human lives. Classic Bezuglaya.

Recently, she has also warned her fellow Ukrainians not to expect any “magic storms” from the F-16 fighter planes that others are touting as the latest miracle weapons to turn the tide of war, denouncing, in the same breath, the head of the air force, General Mykola Oleshchuk for not doing his job and showing parliament contempt. According to Bezuglaya, both the necessary infrastructure and the “attitude of the military leadership to the training” of pilots for the F-16s are “beneath criticism.”

“Perhaps,” she added, Ukraine’s Western “partners need this, but we do not.” There, of course, she broke another taboo of Ukraine’s streamlined political culture under the Zelensky regime: the mere thought that something that costs Ukrainian lives may be good for Kiev’s “partners” but not for Ukraine is strictly verboten. After all, once people start thinking along those lines, they could begin to suspect that their regime and its Western backers are using them in a proxy war.

And there are signs that, whatever her true intentions and who her supporters are, she may have gone too far this time. Parliament has removed her from a sub-committee for democratic oversight, which Bezuglaya now says doesn’t really matter because that subcommittee was fake and never met anyhow (so much for democracy in Ukraine). More worryingly, perhaps, for her is that the Ukrainian blacklisting site “Mirotvorets,” a doxing outfit built to threaten and suppress critics, such as, for instance, British politician, George Galloway, has put her in its sights.

What is all of this about? We do not know. Because Ukraine is neither a democracy, nor a state with even halfway independent media (or a functioning opposition), nor a society in which the rule of law is real. Instead, we are dealing with an opaque, corrupt, and personalistic regime that, at the very best, can be classified as semi-authoritarian. Is Syrsky on his way out? For his own mistakes but much more so as a scapegoat for Zelensky’s team?

Bezuglaya has also charged the general with secretly considering capitulating. It is very hard to imagine the generally submissive and rigid Syrsky as so daring. Indeed, one reason he was chosen as Zaluzhny’s successor was that he is more obedient and much less of a media player. Never mind that Ukrainian troops call him the “butcher.” But maybe the issue is not really with Syrsky personally? A recent poll has shown that a plurality of 44 percent of Ukrainians now favor negotiating an end to the war. It is true that, at the same time, many are not ready to do so on realistic terms: 83 percent, for instance, disagree with the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions. In short, as many Ukrainians as never before are now ready to openly state that they can imagine the war ending with negotiations (instead of insisting on the illusion of a Ukrainian victory), but their sense of what concessions might be necessary is out of sync with reality. 

Nonetheless, over time this as well may change. The number of Ukrainians ready for negotiations and who dare say that such talks will require real concessions, has grown. That may be a thought that is also occurring to Zelensky regime insiders. In that sense, Syrsky may really just serve as a symbol for something else, namely a general mood change.

For, ultimately, making concessions would also lead to a blame game: If Ukrainian society should one day, soon perhaps, look back and feel that it lost an avoidable war at horrific costs, it will certainly start blaming the West, and rightly so. But it will also look for those responsible inside Ukraine. And there, roughly speaking, there will be only two options: the politicians or the generals.