In the years after the 2014 coup that overthrew President Viktor Yanukovych the Pentagon backed Ukranian paramilitary Neo-Nazis had a stranglehold on the government and the military in Ukraine and had been waging a CIA backed civil war against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. Zelensky ran for office on the peace token, promising to end the fighting that had already killed thousands of civilians, but shortly after Zelensky's inauguration, former UVA leader Dmytro Yarosh made it clear and openly threatened, Zelenski would be killed and hung from a tree if he tried to end the civil war between the far right and the Russian seperatists in Eastern Ukraine.
This all means if Zelensky really did want to bring peace to Ukraine he was going to have to remove those neo-nazis first but as they were now so well integrated into the Ukranian military his options were severely limited. He could not dare to try to use Ukraine's own security forces against them and as the Pentagon were the ones funding them and training them he could not expect any help from the US or NATO so who is left? The enemy of my enemy is my friend and surely no one could be more repulsed by the neo-nazis that were attacking ethnic Russians in Ukraine than the Russian President himself and not only that, Putin actually has the means to remove them.
That all makes Putin, Zelensky's most obvious ally but there could be no chance of Zelensky surviving if he formed an alliance with Putin openly so now, look what they did. Zelensky pretends to form alliance with the far right in Ukraine. They then plan a renewed offensive against the Russian seperatists in Donbass and move all the far right elements of the Ukranian military to the east for that operation. In the meantime Putin sends 150,000 troops to the border and once all those nazis have assembled Putin sends in his forces in a pretend attack on the major cities while what he is really doing is cutting off and surrounding all those Neo-Nazi troops and he spends the next month destroying all their equipment and softening them up with artillary. The nazis keep fighting back but they start running out of ammunition and they can't understand why they never get resupplied....
"having a picture taken with somebody proves, without a doubt, that they are controlled by them"
/s -_-