The Economics of Betrayal: Why Every Ukrainian Leader Sells Out the People Who Brought Him to Power

The team is made of people who took the risk with him, financed the campaign, stood beside him back when victory was anything but certain. And then, once he has the chair, the leader starts handing out positions. He does not hand them to the team. He hands them to yesterday's opponents, to situational allies, to business interests that need appeasing, and sometimes to outright enemies. The friends, the partners in success, get the second-tier posts at best, and often nothing at all.

Yushchenko did it with Tymoshenko, and went as far as returning Yanukovych to the prime minister's chair. Poroshenko did it with everyone who had stood with him on the Maidan, handing real control to shadow managers and old clans. Zelensky did it with his own mandate of "new faces," letting into his Office the very people surrounding those against whom seventy-three percent had voted. Klitschko did it with Kyiv, surrendering the city to the development groups that had been his opponents at the start. Four different men, four different political eras, one and the same pattern.

The temptation to explain this through character is a dead end. Four politicians this different cannot all be betrayers of friends by some coincidence of personal traits. When something repeats with this kind of regularity, it is not a feature of the person. It is a property of the system. And to understand it, you have to set morality aside for a moment and look at politics the way cold political science looks at it: as the distribution of rent among the members of a coalition that keeps power in place.

Who Actually Keeps a Leader in Power

The American political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita built a model that explains the behavior of any ruler - from a dictator to the president of a democracy - through a single concept: the winning coalition. It is not the voters. It is not the party. It is the narrow circle of people without whose support the leader physically loses power by tomorrow morning. In a dictatorship it is the generals and the heads of the security services. In a patronal state of the post-Soviet type it is the owners of major resource - money, media, coercive leverage, administrative networks.

The logic of the model is merciless and simple. The leader must feed his winning coalition with private goods, or it will betray him. Positions in the state apparatus, control over state enterprises, access to budget flows - that is the feeding. The only question is whom the leader is forced to include in his winning coalition. And right there is where the answer hides.

Friends, partners in success, loyal out of conviction or personal bond - these are the cheapest resource a leader has. They can go unfed. Or rather, fed at a minimum, because they are not going anywhere. Their loyalty is not transactional; it rests on a shared road, on faith, on personal ties. The leader understands this intuitively and behaves like any rational player: he economizes on what is cheap and spends on what is expensive.

And what is expensive is precisely the opponents and the owners of resource. They have a real bargaining position. An opponent can go into opposition and strike from there. The owner of a media holding can turn an information machine against the leader. An oligarch can cut off financing or redirect it to a rival. These people have to be bought, because they are not loyal - they are counterparties. And they are bought with the positions that, by any measure of fairness, should have gone to the team.

This is how something is born that looks like betrayal from the outside and is simply the arithmetic of survival from within. The leader does not betray his friends because he is a bad man. He betrays his friends because they are cheap, and the system demands paying the expensive ones.

The Short Gain You See Right Away

Look at it from the leader's side, in the moment of decision. In front of him is a position - say, a seat on the board of a state enterprise, or a post that gives control over a financial flow. What does he get by handing it to each of the categories?

Give it to a partner - and gain nothing visible. The partner is loyal anyway, he will not be especially grateful, because he considers it only fair; he will not bring any new resource, because all his resource is already in the common cause. In the moment, this looks like a null move, even a wasted opportunity.

Sell it to business, to a neutral player - and get money or a service, concrete and tangible. Now that looks like a gain.

Give it to an opponent - and buy his silence, his entry into the system, the neutralization of a source of criticism. The visible gain is larger still: yesterday's critic is now inside, now bound.

Give it to an enemy - and buy a truce where there was open war. In the moment, this can feel like the greatest win of all: you remove the sharpest threat.

If you count only today, the scale lines up unambiguously. The more hostile the recipient, the larger the visible gain from the deal with him. The partner, in this logic, is a loss, because he gave nothing. The enemy is the best investment, because he removed the biggest threat. It was by exactly this scale, consciously or by instinct, that all four Ukrainian leaders acted. And it is exactly this scale that is the trap.

The Bill That Comes Later

Because in politics there is a second column, one you cannot see in the moment of decision. What you got today has to be set against what you will lose over the horizon. And when you do that honestly, the picture flips.

The partner you gave a position to, a year on, is not an expense. He is a coalition insured against defection. He is a person who will not betray you at the critical moment, because his loyalty is by conviction, not bought. What seemed in the moment like a null move turns out, over the horizon, to be the only investment that yields a positive return. Systems where the leader feeds his partners last longer - not because partners are more effective, but because they will not betray.

The businessman who bought a position, a year on, has resource, appetite, and an understanding of how the system works from the inside. He may stay neutral. Or he may drift into the camp of your rivals - simply because it pays better there. Or become a new player altogether? A moderate, but real, loss.

The opponent you gave a position to, a year on, is your enemy with money and a state resource. This is the worst of all combinations, and here is why. The opponent does not lose the legitimacy of the "constructive alternative." The voter still sees him as an honest critic, not a bought man. But now this honest critic has access, information, a budget, and a network. You have capitalized your rival with your own hands. You made him stronger by exactly the value of the position you handed him.

The enemy you gave a position to, a year on, is - oddly enough - not always a catastrophe. Here a counterintuitive mechanism kicks in, the one political science calls co-optation. An open enemy, once inside the system, partly loses the freedom to be an enemy. He becomes a participant, he is bound by shared responsibility, his hands are now dirty too. The Ottomans spent centuries building conquered Christian elites into their own administration on exactly this logic. Putin's "deal" with the oligarchs in the early two-thousands worked the same way: you keep your assets, you lose the right to political agency.

And here is the conclusion that demolishes the intuitive scale completely. If in the moment of decision it seemed that the more hostile the recipient, the better the deal, then over the horizon the curve is non-monotonic. The worst decision is not to give to the enemy. The worst decision is to give to the opponent. Because the opponent hands you a clean loss with no compensating mechanism whatsoever: he got the resource and kept the legitimacy. The enemy, at least, is partly offset by co-optation. The partner, meanwhile - who stood last on the intuitive scale as a "wasted opportunity" - is in fact the only one who delivers a positive balance.

Whoever sells positions on the principle of "the more dangerous, the more important to appease" systematically buys himself the most expensive counterparties and robs the cheapest allies. He optimizes today and loses the horizon.

How It Looked in Ukraine

Now lay the frame over the facts, and it stops being an abstraction.

Yushchenko and the Universal of National Unity in 2006 is a textbook example of the worst possible decision. The leader of the Orange Revolution returns Yanukovych, the chief antagonist of that revolution, to the prime minister's chair. At the moment of signing it looked like the defusing of a political crisis, a compromise for the sake of governability. Over the horizon it meant that Yushchenko, with his own hands, returned to his enemy the full breadth of executive power, handed him the bridgehead for the 2010 revanche, and destroyed the meaning of his own mandate. And the dismissal of Tymoshenko a year earlier is the other side of the same coin: a break with a partner that turned an ally into an opponent. Yushchenko methodically handed out positions to everyone except the people he had won with.

Poroshenko chose a different style, but the same mechanics. Instead of loud deals with enemies - the quiet transfer of real control. Shadow managers in state enterprises, the old judges that judicial reform was supposed to replace but did not, the preservation of the cadre backbone of the very system the Maidan was supposedly made against. Poroshenko did not return Yanukovych to the chair - he kept Yanukovych's system, simply changing the nameplates. The anti-corruption mandate of the Maidan was traded away not by one dramatic decision, but by a hundred quiet ones.

Zelensky came with the most radical mandate in the country's history - a mandate of total renewal, of "new faces," of a break with the old political caste. And precisely for that reason his personnel decisions deliver the largest legitimacy collapse. People from Yanukovych's circle in the Office of the President. Cadres of the old financial-industrial groups in strategic energy. The governing of the state by a narrow circle, which by definition contradicts the slogan "servant of the people." Each such appointment could have been minor in transactional terms. But each one struck at the very heart of the contract Zelensky signed with seventy-three percent of Ukraine's citizens. He was not selling positions. He was selling the meaning of his own victory.

Klitschko repeated all of it on the scale of a city. An anti-system candidate who came as the face of renewal handed Kyiv to the development groups - the very ones that had been his opponents at the start. The co-optation of opponents into the city's vertical, the integration of people from the old mayoral teams. The same mechanics, simply a smaller geography.

Four leaders. If you lay their decisions onto a simple chart, where one axis is whom the position was given to and the other is how far this contradicts the mandate the leader came in with, the points cluster in one and the same place. In the zone where you give to the dangerous and strike at your own mandate at once. This is not coincidence, and not four separate mistakes by four separate men.

A Trap, Not a Fault

So what is it about, if not character? It is that Ukrainian patronal politics is built so that a leader with an anti-system mandate falls into a structural trap from day one.

He was brought to power by voters and a team. But he can be kept in power only by the winning coalition - and that coalition is formed not from voters, and not always from the team, but from the owners of real resource. And those owners are, for the most part, the very old system the leader campaigned against. The result is a closed loop: to fulfill the mandate, you have to destroy the old system. To stay in power, you have to integrate into it and feed it. And in that choice the mandate always loses, because the mandate cannot betray you by tomorrow morning, and the winning coalition can.

That is why the friends get sold. Not because leaders are cynical. But because in a system where power is held by rent and not by mandate, friends are the cheapest asset. They can go unfed. And they go unfed. They get discarded.

The worst thing about this construction is that it is self-reproducing. Every new leader arrives with the promise that he, at least, will be different. The voter sincerely believes it. And then the same mechanics kick in - because the mechanics do not depend on the surname. Yushchenko gave way to Yanukovych, Yanukovych to Poroshenko, Poroshenko to Zelensky, and every time the country's loss-making resource was choosing a new manager for the same system, convinced that this time it would be different.

It will not be. Not because all leaders are bad, but because as long as power in Ukraine is held by the distribution of rent among the owners of resource, and not by the fulfillment of a contract with the voter, every leader will rationally sell friends and buy enemies. And will call it statecraft, compromise, realpolitik. Anything at all, except its real name - the economics of betrayal, in which betrayal is not a deviation but a working mechanism.

The question that follows from this is not for any one leader. It is for the system. What has to change for the winning coalition of a Ukrainian president to become, at last, the people who elected him, and not the people he is forced to appease? Until there is an answer, the next leader is already drafting the next universal. With the next enemy. Against the next mandate.

Oleh Cheslavskyi is an independent historian, publicist, and investigative journalist based in Kyiv. He is the author of “The Russian Myth” and “2034”, and is completing a trilogy titled “Myths of the Third Rome”.