While President Volodymyr Zelenskiy maintains a show of defiance, Ukraine is being steered towards a difficult postwar period by the new presidential office chief who might also rule the country one day. 

These days, Kyrylo Budanov is acting presidentially. The former Ukrainian military intelligence chief is currently president Vololdymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff which suggests the image of a tight-lipped political strategist working in the shadow of the national leader and loyal to him 100%. But Budanov is anything but.

Even before his appointment to the presidential administration, Budanov emerged as a political leader in his own right. In a recent poll conducted by Socis, he ranked third in the list of presidential contenders after Zelenskiy and former army chief Valery Zaluzhny.

In his present capacity, Budanov keeps promoting his public personae, at times contradicting the policies Zelenskiy’s administration has been promoting throughout the four years of all-out conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. 

On Easter Day, Budanov appeared before cameras at a church with his wife Marianna, her unnaturally voluminous pout causing a blast of commentary on Ukrainian social networks. Public appearances like this are usually reserved for political leaders, not for their staffers, however senior.

The setting and the timing were also curious. Ukraine has recently switched to celebrating Christmas in December as it broke up with the Russian (and its own) centuries-old tradition of celebrating it in January, according to the Julian calendar. But Easter is still celebrated on the same day as in Moscow. This year, it fell on April 12, a week later than in the West.

On the day before Easter, Budanov surprised many in Ukraine by defending the formerly Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the country’s largest religious organisation by the number of parishes by far. This contradicted the divisive policy of gradually outlawing that church, which Zelenskiy’s administration pursued in recent years. 

The political agenda behind this new rhetoric reveals itself in Budanov’s recent interview, which to a large extent focused on Ukraine’s postwar future. “Eventually we will arrive at something in the process of [peace] negotiations [with Russia],” he told the government news wire Ukrinform. “It could be either a very good or a very bad outcome for us, but it doesn’t matter, because even with the best of outcomes we will not be able to reach any decision without unity.”

He went on to say that he could recall three instances when Ukraine demonstrated national unity in the face adversity — during the collapse of the USSR, during the second Maidan revolution and when Russia launched its all-out aggression in 2022. In all these instances, it was unity which allowed the government to adopt necessary decisions, Budanov insists. 

Another crucial moment in Ukraine’s history, he claims, is just around the corner. “We are again approaching a so-called trigger event, which will demand that we show unity,” he said.

That “trigger event” is obviously a peace an agreement with Russia which will inevitably betray most of the rosy expectations Zelenskiy’s government and its Western allies worked hard to instil in Ukrainian society, as well as among Western audiences, over the last four years.

Russia's Doomsday prophet

For much of this period, Budanov was one of the loudest megaphones of pro-Ukrainian optimism in the current conflict. The Ukrainian news portal censor.net has recently compiled a list of predictions he made over the first three years of war. 

On April 18, 2022 he claimed that the siege of Mariupol would be lifted and that the city would be liberated from Russian occupiers. Mariupol fell to the Russians a month later.

Around the time when that happened, Budanov told Sky News that the war would be largely over by the end of 2022 with Ukraine recapturing Crimea and Donbas. He also insisted that Putin was dying from cancer as well as a number of other grave illnesses. He said that at the end of the day Russia would either fall apart or at the very least, there would be a regime change.

In September 2022, Budanov prophesied that Ukrainian troops would reach the national border in Donbas and liberate Crimea by the end of the following spring. In October that year, he said that the war would be over by the summer of 2023. In December he said that “Russia’s defeat was predetermined”.

Throughout the following winter, he kept predicting Ukraine’s victory by the end of 2023. In March that year, he claimed that within three months the Russian economy would no longer be able to sustain the war effort. In April 2023, he claimed that Russia was facing “seismic changes”. Talking to the ABC, he described Russia as “an artificially created mistake” and claimed that “now, the moment has come for this country to collapse”.

Alas, none of these prophesies came true, but one — from the same ABC interview — did. "Without victories, sooner or later, questions will be asked whether it's worth continuing to support Ukraine,” Budanov said. Many questions are indeed being asked now, especially by the Trump administration as well as by many Ukrainians.

The beginning of 2023 was the time when the pro-war lobby in the West and much of the Western media were advertising the Ukrainian counter-offensive planned in close coordination with US and British top brass. By the end of that summer, the plan had failed, which is when Budanov curbed his enthusiasm somewhat.

However at the end of 2024 he was still predicting that the new year would bring about “many of the very good events that we’ve been expecting for a long time”. But things changed for the worse instead. The beginning of 2025 was marked by the re-elected Donald Trump moving into the White House and the US virtually reneging on its role as Ukraine’s chief ally and the main cheerleader of its war effort.

At this point though, Budanov changed tack.

CIA trainee

Perpetually sporting a mysteriously unsmiling look, Budanov emerged at the at the helm of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the HUR, in 2020. He turned 40 this year.

The New York Times and other American media reported that Budanov was among several Ukrainian officers trained by the CIA as part of the very close partnership between US and Ukrainian secret services forged in the wake of Maidan revolution and the Russian occupation of Crimea. As part of that cooperation, the CIA helped to set up the 5th directorate of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) which was hermetically sealed from the rest of the SBU out of fear of Russian infiltration. 

People from SBU’s 5th directorate subsequently took over Ukraine’s military intelligence (the HUR), recreating it from scratch, according to the Washington Post. The newspaper’s CIA source called the HUR “our little baby”.

Given the role of the CIA in his career, there has always been a question over which side of the Atlantic Budanov’s loyalties might lie. 

Ominously, his political position visibly changed with the second coming of president Trump. A few months after predicting positive developments in 2025, he reportedly appeared at a closed hearing in the Ukrainian parliament and told MPs that Ukraine could face “the loss of statehood” should it fail to negotiate peace with Russia fairly soon (officials later either denied that it happened or claimed his words had been taken out of context). 

By that time Budanov had grown into a political heavyweight with a serious potential for winning a presidential election. 

The EU-based fugitive Ukrainian media outlet Strana claimed on various occasions that Budanov was siding with David Arakhamia, an important power broker who heads the pro-Zelenskiy constitutional majority in the parliament. A reputed dove when it comes to negotiations with Russia, Arakhamia was key negotiator during Istanbul talks in 2022 and the initial source of the claim that former British prime minister Boris Johnson was instrumental in derailing the peace process in the early months of Russia’s all-out invasion. 

Unlike Zelenskiy, who fell out with Trump during the 2019 presidential campaign in the US, Arakhamia reportedly maintained good relations with Trump’s administration since the start of his second term.

In the course of 2025, Arakhamia and Budanov reemerged at the helm of Ukraine’s negotiations team which was previously headed by Zelenskiy’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak, known for his rigidity, extreme views and a lack of diplomatic skills. 

Yermak was ousted at the end of last November in the aftermath of a groundbreaking corruption investigation that targeted Zelenskiy’s close entourage. Yermak’s demise has radically changed Ukraine’s political landscape, turning Arakhamia into a kingmaker whose political skill is crucial for maintaining the pro-Zelensky “mono-majority” in the parliament. The latter hinges on just two MPs, perpetually remaining under the threat of collapse.

After a prolonged period when Zelensky couldn’t find a suitable replacement for Yermak, Budanov was appointed the chief of presidential staff. Commentators speculated at the time that his appointment allowed Zelenskiy to either neutralise a key contender in future elections or to groom a successor who would guarantee his postwar immunity in the manner that Putin guaranteed a trouble-free life for his predecessor Boris Yeltsin.

In both scenarios, maintaining a semblance of political unity around the current political regime is crucial for all of its members, notwithstanding their internal contradictions. All of them, arguably except Zelenskiy, understand that the prolongation of the conflict will only bring Ukraine more misery and no respite. But they see peace with Russia as a moment of impact when their political and personal future will be in maximum jeopardy. 

There might still be some very limited room for Ukrainian negotiators to bargain with the Russians. But by all means the outcome of the war will be nowhere close to what Zelenskiy, as well as Budanov, promised in the early months and years of Russian aggression. 

Ukraine will have lost more territory than it controlled prior to February 2022, including the access to the Sea of Azov. Nato as well as EU membership will be out of the question for decades to come and there will likely be no security guarantees from the West to speak of. That’s on top of immense population and infrastructural losses over the last four years that will also take decades to replenish.

What did we fight and die for will be the main question Ukrainian voters will be asking in the next election. Dealing with public backlash will be top priority for Ukraine’s postwar government, which is why the subject of unity comes to the forefront.

A semblance of that unity will be hard to maintain without Putin-styled coercion, given Ukraine’s dire predicament. This is something Zelenskiy’s government has been doing anyway for years, using war as an excuse. Budanov comes across as the most suitable Putin-esque strongman figure with a reasonable chance of steering Ukraine through the postwar period without civil strife or a radical regime change.