Arestovych is certain that at the talks with the U.S., the Kyiv delegation is discussing Zelensky’s personal security

The negotiations that Ukrainian representatives are currently conducting with the Americans mostly concern the personal security of Volodymyr Zelensky and other people in power.

Former adviser to the President’s Office Oleksiy Arestovych stated this in an interview with YouTube blogger Oleksandr Shelest.

In Arestovych’s opinion, the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has already been “sentenced,” and in Ukraine he faces the fate of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, since the Americans are seriously intent on stopping the war in the near future.

“I think the conversation is about security guarantees for Zelensky. They will give them to him, and then they will deceive him. He faces Saakashvili’s fate in the best-case scenario. In February 2025 he had the last offer to reconsider, and he did not do it. After that he was sentenced. They will let him leave under guarantees, otherwise he wouldn’t go, he would thrash around and interfere until the very end. And then over two years, maybe a bit less, it’ll go bang-bang like this. His accounts will be frozen. He’ll be made persona non grata somewhere. In the end they’ll drive him into a cage, and he’ll either sit in a little house in Israel, or they’ll extradite him to Ukraine, and it will simply convict him and put him in prison,” Arestovych believes.

He predicts that the war will be halted in the near term: “Maybe not tomorrow and not by the end of the year, but it will be stopped; our American partners have gotten seriously involved in this.”

“Corruption in Ukraine has long been investigated, and the facts are presented to the public when it is necessary to put pressure on the Ukrainian authorities. The negotiations that members of the Ukrainian delegation are conducting largely concern their personal safety and security guarantees, rather than defending Ukraine’s interests,” Arestovych said.

In his opinion, the “28 points of the American peace plan” cannot be regarded as capitulation.

“This is the price for incompetent policy and theft throughout all 34 years of independence. And this price is quite small compared to the crimes that have been committed against the country. It should be understood that with every month the war continues, this price only increases. Ukraine’s problem is not only that it chose the ‘anti-Russia’ project as the only correct one. The main problem is that all these years an ‘anti-Ukraine’ project has been cultivated in relation to its own country and its citizens,” Arestovych believes.

The main question, in his view, is what will happen after the war ends and what kind of country will be built.

“The foundation of a country that wants to have a future can only be a broad centrist project. The basis for recovery can only be a strong economy, strong armed forces, and normal relations with neighbors, including Russia and Belarus. Any attack on a citizen on any grounds—language, culture, religion, ethnicity—must be stopped and publicly punished by the state. This is what equality of all before the law means. If Ukraine does not move toward creating a broad centrist project, we face another war (and possibly more than one), the final result of which may be that very capitulation,” Arestovych believes.