Volodymyr Zelensky is the president of Ukraine. John Kiriakou says he was directed not to publicly discuss Zelensky’s corruption, describing an unwritten rule that critics of Ukraine could work with certain circles only if they stayed quiet on the subject.[1] He claims Zelensky personally calls Ukrainian billionaires he publicly opposes to solicit large sums of money, predicting the recipients then relocate their wealth to places like London, Dubai, or Geneva.[2]
The White House confrontation
Kiriakou says the public dressing-down of Zelensky by Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office was “clearly set up in advance” — planned to embarrass and humiliate Zelensky in front of the press corps — and alarmed other European leaders about the reliability of the U.S. as an ally.[3][4] He says Trump deliberately kept the press in the room for the confrontation, breaking with the normal practice of escorting reporters out before substantive discussion begins: “Trump went after Zelensky with the media there. He did it on purpose.”[5]
Kiriakou, who draws on experience going back to the 1980s at the CIA and three years at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says he had never before seen a vice president speak up in a diplomatic meeting the way Vance did during the confrontation — the normal role of the vice president in such settings, he says, is to sit quietly and nod.[6]
At the Graham funeral
Zelensky appears in Kiriakou’s July 2026 account of Lindsey Graham’s funeral, which he characterised as a working diplomatic meeting rather than a memorial. “Zelensky was making the rounds with Netanyahu. What do they have in common? They both want more and more and more American missiles.”[7][8]
’He’s not an idiot’
Kiriakou’s assessment of Zelensky’s diplomacy is that it is deliberate. “We shouldn’t underestimate Zelensky. He’s not an idiot. Sometimes we like to portray him as one, but he really isn’t.”[9]
With the British, French, Germans, Poles “and a whole bunch of other allies quietly pushing Trump to keep up those Biden-era aid programs,” Kiriakou reads Zelensky as having “concluded that Trump can be manipulated, at least in the short term.”[9][10]
The mechanism is the fighting itself. So long as it stays severe, Zelensky can return to Trump and say “I would love to have peace, but the Russians are such ogres — they’re killing our people, they’re firing rockets at civilian areas, they’re hitting apartment buildings and parks and hospitals. The Brits and French and Germans are with us. We know that you want to be with us too.” Kiriakou’s verdict: “that argument might have a little bit of weight right now.”[10]
On Operation Spiderweb, by contrast, he declines to accept Zelensky’s account of Ukrainian and European self-sufficiency, arguing there is “no possible scenario” in which Washington was neither informed nor involved.[11]