There is a Volodimir Zelensky who acts like a lamb in public and another who sharpens the wolf’s claws in private.
It is already known that saying everything that is thought is not very beneficial and the Ukrainian president, seasoned on the show tables, knows it. He is silent and, from what he transcends, a lot.
As published yesterday by The Washington Post, Zelenski plots daring attacks on Russian territory behind closed doors while on the outside he demands more weapons, winning the favor of the West on the grounds that he will use them to repel the invasion launched by Vladimir Putin.
In his sphere of confidence, the Ukrainian leader is betting on a much more daring – and reckless – line with the occupation of Russian towns to gain influence over Moscow, the bombing of an oil pipeline that transports oil to Hungary, a NATO member country -despite to his good relationship with Putin–, or longing for long-range missiles that would allow him to hit targets inside enemy territory.
These approaches are collected in classified US intelligence documents detailing internal conversations with top Ukrainian advisers and military chiefs. They were obtained through digital communications intercepted by the US and provide a rare glimpse into Zelensky’s deliberations amid Russian bombing, attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and alleged Russian war crimes.
These papers, unveiled for the first time, are part of a broader leak of US secrets circulating on the Discord messaging platform that the Post has obtained. In those documents, the image of a leader with aggressive instincts transcends, in stark contrast to the public image of him as a calm and stoic statesman resisting the brutal Russian onslaught.
The high command of the Pentagon were informed about the issues dealt with in these leaks and did not question the authenticity of this material, always from the Washington newspaper.
In some cases, the Ukrainian president is observed restraining the ambition of his subordinates. In others it is the other way around, he is the one proposing risky military operations. Thus, in a meeting last January, Zelensky suggested “carrying out attacks” on neighboring soil, as a diversionary maneuver while moving troops into enemy territory “to occupy unspecified Russian border cities.” This is what appears in one of the documents marked as top secret.
All this was intended for Kyiv to have elements of pressure to negotiate with Moscow.
In another meeting, this one in February, with General Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Zelensky expressed concern that the country did not have “long-range missiles capable of reaching the deployment of Russian troops in Russia, nor nothing to attack them. Instead, the Ukrainian president opted to attack unspecified deployment sites in Rostov, a region in western Russia bordering Ukraine, through the use of drones. In support of the veracity of this leak, he later reported that the Ukrainians were converting hobby drones to be used as weapons.
That February, Zelensky proposed to blow up the Druzhba pipeline, the supplier of oil to Hungary. These documents state that the Ukrainian president indicated that they should destroy that pipeline because “Viktor Orbán’s industry” is based on it, the autocrat who sows discord over this war in the European Union.