IT was during the 1960s that the American CIA analyst and head of the Directorate of Intelligence, Ray S Cline, succinctly summed up the key to a successful covert regime change.
According to Cline, it was all about “supplying just the right bit of marginal assistance in the right way at the right time”.
In the decades following – just as in those that preceded them – that “assistance” in various guises would be readily forthcoming. By then though, most analysts agreed however that meddling in foreign elections was by and large the most successful covert tactic, even if the resulting regime change rarely worked out as the instigating state hoped it would.
This questionable success rate has not stopped a continuation of the practice with many going about it a lot more openly than might be expected.
The latest example according to some assessments, came only last week after reports surfaced that four senior US officials held “secret” discussions with some of Ukraine’s top political opponents to the country’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Having done all in their power to publicly brow-beat and undermine the Ukrainian leader recently during that now infamous Oval Office encounter, far from easing off, it would appear that the Trump administration simply changed tack.
These US efforts should come as no real surprise perhaps for as we pass the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the chorus of voices calling for new elections in Ukraine has grown louder.
But as Peter Dickinson, editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service, recently pointed out, what’s important to recognise is that “these calls are not coming from the Ukrainians themselves, but from the Kremlin and the Trump White House”.
While the official line from the Trump administration is that it is not interfering in Ukraine’s domestic politics, reports last week in Politico magazine suggest otherwise.
It cited three Ukrainian parliamentarians and a US Republican foreign policy expert, detailing how US officials held talks with Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister, and senior members of the party of Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy’s immediate predecessor who was president from 2014 to 2019.
The discussions according to the report are said to have focused on whether Ukraine could hold quick presidential elections.
Poroshenko and Zelenskyy’s political rivalry goes back years. Only last month, Zelenskyy approved sanctions against Poroshenko for what Ukraine’s domestic spy agency described as “national security reasons”, without giving details. Poroshenko said the move was politically motivated.
For their part, both Poroshenko and Tymoshenko – the country’s most influential opposition figures – were quick to rule out the idea of holding a wartime election in the wake of their meeting with the US officials.
In a written statement published on Telegram, Poroshenko said elections should only happen after peace had been established. He added that a vote should take place no later than 180 days after the end of the war.
He said also his team was working with US “partners” to maintain support for Ukraine – but added that he was opposed to a “wartime election”.
“The essence of our conversations with representatives of the American side has always been reduced to two principles – security first and peace through strength,” Poroshenko’s statement read.
“Our team has always been and is categorically against elections during the war,” he added.
Kostiantyn Yelisieiev, a former Ukrainian diplomat and close associate of Poroshenko’s, told broadcaster RFE/RL that the former president and his team are “important and interesting interlocutors” and that they “keep contact with many people from around the globe” despite alleged efforts he says from Zelenskyy to push them away from “the political landscape of Ukraine”.
“Our goal is to keep Ukraine in the agenda of both parties,” he said, adding that Poroshenko’s team maintains contacts with both the Democratic and Republican parties in Washington.
“We do not push for early elections as our main goal is to ensure that any such elections can be free and fair and in accordance with European electoral standards.”
Meanwhile, former prime minister Tymoshenko, a politician known to be fiercely ambitious, echoed Poroshenko’s view, saying her own team “is talking with all our allies who can help in securing a just peace as soon as possible”, but also insisted that elections should not take place before this had been achieved.
Despite the Ukrainian opposition leaders’ assurances that any elections should not be undertaken during wartime, the US moves have unnerved many who see Trump’s branding of Zelenskyy as a “dictator without elections” as coming straight out of the same playbook as Russian president Vladimir Putin’s claims that Zelenskyy is illegitimate because his five-year term ran out in 2024.
Pavlo Klimkin, a former Ukrainian foreign minister, told RFE/RL that he doesn’t “see anything sensational” in the idea of US officials meeting Ukrainian political leaders to gauge the possibility of holding elections in the future and that such discussions had been under way even before Trump took office.
“This is actually a conversation that has been going on for a long time in the United States,” he said.
Klimkin added that holding elections appears to be on the table as peace talks advance, but the issue will be first establishing a sustainable ceasefire.
“They say it should be as fast as possible,” he said. “This is an image issue for Trump and an issue of political respect for his administration. But after the ceasefire, I think they will want to hold elections.”
For his own part, Zelenskyy has already offered to vacate his post in exchange for peace and Nato membership, but what is important to remember here is that under the terms of Ukrainian law and constitution, elections cannot be held anyway while the country is engaged in war and under martial law.
Oleksandr Vodiannikov is a member of Ukraine’s Law Reform Commission and previously served as a member of Ukraine’s Judicial Reform Council and of the Constitutional Commission.
In a recent article entitled Ukraine’s Constitutional Order In Wartime: Elections, Continuity And Legitimacy, he argued that while wartime elections are neither feasible nor constitutionally required, legitimacy is upheld through constitutional provisions, political consensus, and international recognition.
“Historical precedents show that democratic states have only held wartime elections when security allowed – unlike in Ukraine now. Understanding these principles is crucial to countering external misinformation and reinforcing Ukraine’s democratic resilience in times of war,” Vodiannikov explained.
He warns too that the tricky question of the next elections in Ukraine continue to re-emerge outside the country as highlighted by Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special representative for Ukraine and Russia.
In an interview last month, Kellogg reiterated that the US would like to see elections in Ukraine, possibly by the end of the year, following a potential ceasefire agreement.
“Most democratic nations have elections in their time of war. I think it is important they do so,” insisted Kellogg.
But as Vodiannikov explains, while some wartime elections have occurred historically, they were held only when hostilities did not disrupt the entire state and security allowed proper electoral processes.
Moreover, it’s important to see Kellogg’s statement and that of others making the same case against the background of “Russia’s allegations of President Zelenskyy’s ‘illegitimacy’ and its propaganda attack aiming to sow discontent and instigate a power struggle in Ukraine”.
It’s this fear of “instigating a power struggle”, that lies at the root of the wariness as to America’s real motives in meeting with leading Ukrainian opposition figures.
To put this another way, is the Trump administration really concerned about upholding Ukrainian democracy and if so, why then echo the views of the Kremlin which is out to destroy that very same democracy?
Lesia Vasylenko is a member of Ukraine’s Holos Party and the country’s parliament. In a recent interview with the Financial Times (FT), she highlighted two scenarios whereby elections in the immediate wake of a ceasefire could play into the hands of those seeking regime change in Kyiv for their own nefarious political ends.
In the first, she sees the possibility of Russia instantly respecting a Trump-brokered ceasefire, respecting it “for as long as is needed for Ukraine to lift the martial law, to call on elections into which Russia would, of course, meddle in to positioning their technical candidates, placing political parties that would be backed by Russia and run in Ukraine.”
Essentially, says Vasylenko, the result of the elections will either be a Russian candidate winning. “This is the best-case scenario for Russia. That would lead us to the signing of a peace agreement with Russia, which would essentially hand over all of Ukraine to Russia.”
The second scenario, she says, is one in which the “Russian” candidate, doesn’t win and a Ukrainian candidate does instead.
“This means that Russia will not sign a peace agreement and will simply restart the war, but restart the war in much, much stronger positions because they would have had the time to regroup, to rearm, possibly in that period, since martial law would be lifted.”
Like many Ukrainians, be they for or against Zelenskyy politically, Vasylenko also highlights the obvious impracticalities of holding elections right now.
The fact, for example, that so many soldiers are in the trenches that they cannot leave to vote, or that territories of Ukraine are under Russian occupation, how it is possible to organise elections there?
Then there is the fact that there are seven million Ukrainians abroad, says Vasylenko. How do you get them to vote? Do you organise voting stations in their respective countries? But who is going to pay for that? Who is going to guarantee their security? Who is going to guarantee that the elections there are held according to Ukrainian laws? “Those questions have no answers,” Vasylenko points out.
Yet, despite all these obvious challenges and potentially disastrous outcomes in terms of the war, such is the desire of the Trump administration to see the back of Zelenskyy that it is pushing to have elections as soon as possible following any ceasefire.
Almost at every turn, Washington appears to be wilfully piling the pressure on Zelenskyy’s government. The last few days, for example, have seen the US cut off intelligence sharing with Kyiv, a move that could seriously hamper the Ukrainian military’s ability to target Russian forces.
This comes too after the decision last week by the US to suspend military aid deliveries and the dramatic breakdown in relations between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart.
Speaking to Fox Business, John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA said: “Trump had a real question about whether President Zelenskyy was committed to the peace process, and he said let’s pause.”
But right now, argue many observers, what’s not pausing are Russian airstrikes on Ukraine and the Trump administration’s continued efforts to oust Zelenskyy – including last week’s visit by US officials to discuss elections.
Writing recently on the website of the US think tank Atlantic Council, Peter Dickinson editor of its UkraineAlert service noted that the lack of appetite for wartime elections in Ukraine is anything but a product of apathy or oppression.
On the contrary, Ukrainians are fiercely proud of their country’s democratic credentials, Dickinson argues, which were hard-won during two separate pro-democracy revolutions in 2004 and 2014.
“This grassroots embrace of democratic values has become central to modern Ukraine’s sense of national identity,” Dickinson added.
Trump’s push for elections along with his administration’s other recent actions have again thrown into sharp focus questions about the true relationship between Trump and Putin over Ukraine’s future.
If, as CIA analyst Ray S Cline, suggested back in the 1960s, that the key to a successful covert regime change is “supplying just the right bit of marginal assistance in the right way at the right time”, then it would be hard to refute that America right now is doing just that.
That Trump now wants regime change in Kyiv is almost certainly a given, and that change he envisages chimes exactly with what the Kremlin desires too.
