How Con Man Arestovych Fooled the West
Appealing to the contrarianism against supporting Ukraine through abusing Western naivete.
In a recent piece for Unherd, humorously titled 'Oleksiy Arestovych: Zelenskyy’s Challenger', Editor-in-Chief Freddie Sayers conducted an interview with the former advisor to Ukraine's President.
During their conversation, Arestovych shaped a false narrative that prominent figures like Elon Musk’s tech entrepreneur friend David Sacks helped spread out to their vast audience, most of whom have already made up their mind about Ukraine before this, but can now feel ever more justified in their belief.
Such an illusion was accomplished by presenting the negotiation process at the onset of the war in Istanbul as being something that would have guaranteed peace, if not for President Zelensky or the Western puppeteers pulling Zelensky’s strings of course.
Even when bringing up the Bucha massacre as a possible reason for withdrawing from any such peace talks, Arestovych framed the negotiations themselves as so successful, they warranted popping open a bottle of champagne. This, in turn, has the effect of making Russia look like a reasonable world actor for a war-fatigued contrarian Western audience.
What the con artist Oleksiy Arestovych does not want gullible Westerners to know, however, is that he was falling out of his chair laughing at the Russian delegation's condition of only 45,000 maximum armed forces for Peacetime.
The second clip subtitled above was from Mark Feygin’s show with Arestovych seven months ago and highlights how much can be kept hidden due to the language barrier as well as the cultural barriers of our various social circles.
Further on in the Unherd video, Arestovych makes the unsubstantiated claim that while the (unmentioned amount) of troops was undecided, Zelensky said he would decide this question with Putin himself.
In truth, this “90% ready” negotiation did not see the Russians budging an inch away from their demands: Ukrainian neutrality in addition to what amounts to virtually no armed forces. In such a scenario, they could only put their faith in a Russia that promises to not invade their now defenseless country further than it already has.
Stating the obvious, Russia's former president and prime minister, Dimitri Medvedev said this past week, that there will "always" be a chance for another conflict between his country and Ukraine after the current war ends.
Who is Arestovych?
What ends up happening is that frauds like Arestovych can freely present themselves to the West as "Zelensky's Challenger" while back in Ukraine, he is well known as just an actor (with some military service) that Zelesnky hired to give the Ukrainians good pep talks towards the start of the war.
While serving his purpose at least in that regard, Arestovych is also well known to be a compulsive liar & charlatan who has made such claims as that women are in a pact with Satan and has performed exorcisms on dying children.
His only legitimacy was being privy to secret information about the war due to being in Zelensky's inner circle, but since parting ways, all these privileges have (obviously) been revoked, so anything he says about Ukraine after leaving would be something he'd know about as well as you or me.
Besides, any talk of "challenger" can be dismissed when seeing his level of popularity. A recent poll of 2000 people in Nov 2023 by the sociological Rating Company showed that 77% of the Ukrainian people do not trust Arestovych VS 11% trust, while 25% do not trust Zelensky VS 72% trust (and 39% deeply trust).
As an (important) aside, the winner of the poll in terms of trust is Valery Zaluzhny, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. While not a politician, Zaluzhny has been adamant about getting more weapons for Ukraine (which the Western media somehow inverted into him being critical of Zelensky).
Where Zaluzhny HAS been critical was in regards to the West preventing him from bombing Russian targets with their weaponry for fear of Ukraine "escalating" the war by actually winning.
But even more important here is that we get a feel for who the people of Ukraine support and what their positions are, since this is very much out of step with the false impression we get here in contrarian Western online circles.
Political Persecution & Exorcism
As far as these tales of "criminal investigations" against him, and how he's this poor victim of persecution, Arestovych is once again spinning a false narrative to Westerners who have zero context to question what he is saying, nor having any idea of just what kind of person he really is.
In Ukraine, there's been a rich history of people fighting miniature wars with lawsuits & calling for all sorts of investigations after getting pissed off at each other.
Such is the case with this call for criminal investigations due to the nature of Arestovych's lectures allegedly advocating violence against women, but in the greater context these kinds of lawsuits are a dime a dozen and usually come to nothing... one can say it's the Ukrainian national pastime.
What is unfortunate is that Unherd completely missed the opportunity to present their viewers with what kinds of things Arestovych claims to believe.
The aforementioned legal action had to do with a series of paid lectures where Arestovych claimed that women serve Satan.
This is not a one-off either, as he has spoken about these "Women Satan Alliance" views on other shows. What is even more disturbing is that this is someone who has claimed to have performed exorcisms on children right before they die (albeit without the supposed demons), referring to the first child as his "first patient".
Regarding the image many contrarian Westerners have of Ukraine as being "just as bad as Russia" when it comes to censorship, Arestovych is free to speak his nonsense in Ukraine on any show he wants to such as that of Ukrainian broadcaster Vasyli Golovanov or Yevgeny Kiselyov where he still makes regular appearances.
Nobody's arrested Golovanov nor any of the other people who regularly speak with Arestovych. Neither has there been any legal document calling for Arestovych's arrest, regardless of him throwing out some random number of "29 members of Parliament" out to get him.
Weaponizing Western Contrarianism
To sum things up, there is video evidence that Arestovych withheld key information about Russia's unbelievable demands to shrink down Ukraine's Army in "peacetime" for Western audiences.
This, coupled with his history of being a con-man appealing to superstition and having abysmal trust within Ukrainian society should be a wake up call especially to members of the press who are clearly aware of our problems here in the West.
Unlike many within the establishment press who jump on "The Current Thing", outlets like Unherd make room for heterodox views.
Elon Musk freeing up of once censored accounts likewise contributes to the marketplace of ideas.
But as I've pointed out many times on Break The Rules, being contrarian to every position of the establishment is something that Russia has used to its advantage, so as to associate supporting Ukraine with supporting all the things going wrong with the West.
Thankfully, there are new leaders who break this mold like President Javier Milei of Argentina, or Georgia Melony of Italy, Andrzej Duda of Poland, and Petr Pavel Czech Republic, but the damage has been done.
Those who are so right about some of our internal problems have been misled by shysters like Arestovych as there are few people within their social circles who would question what he has to say.
Even more troubling is how our content driven algorithm disincentivizes most online political influencers from considering they've been misled, as doing so makes you no money nor increases your followers.
This is to say nothing of people who have a monetary incentive in Russia winning all the way to those who would get paid by the Russian government directly to influence clueless podcasters into adopting their point of view.
There has already been much talk about these Istanbul negotiations with the contrarian hivemind framing what occurred as: Evil Western powers making Ukraine keep fighting Russia, even though they were ready to make peace.
But those who want to keep making money above anything else will keep appealing to their audience without a thought given to how wrong they are.
For the people reading this who understand what's at stake, however, there has never been a time like now when we can get in touch with the people engaged in this information war.
It's quite likely that most of these influencers contend with "current thing" zombies or their "anti current thing" fans as opposed to those who can actually have a thorough breakdown of the problems and how to solve them.
Time for a change.
I remember Arestovych from his better days, as he was quixotically trying to convince the Russophile European Right to see Ukraine as an ally. He made... a lot more sense back then. And I never spotted any misogyny in his hour-long interviews with Latynina. But I guess if one can do a 5-dimensional 180°-turn in one field, one can do the same in any other...
Too bad the "pro-Ukrainian moderate nationalist right" niche is now mostly unfilled (I mean, there is Visegrad 24 and there are Israeli Telegram channels, but they aren't even trying to reach into Western Europe).