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Posted
6 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

As it happens, Elizabeth Montgomery probably had an affair with actor/dancer Alexander Godunov, who played Karl in Die Hard.

And he died in 1995 at only age 45.  Yeah, you can figure it out.

Posted

Was blown away by this quote I just read:

Poland's Donald Tusk put it like this: “500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians. [...] Europe today lacks the belief that we are truly a global force.”

C'mon Europe!

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Posted
48 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

Was blown away by this quote I just read:

Poland's Donald Tusk put it like this: “500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians. [...] Europe today lacks the belief that we are truly a global force.”

C'mon Europe!

do I dare say it... but..

Did Trump just throw Europe in the deep-in forcing them to sink or swim?

Posted
4 minutes ago, yoladu said:

do I dare say it... but..

Did Trump just throw Europe in the deep-in forcing them to sink or swim?

I'm not sure if that was his intention.  But during the fallout of his embarrassing meeting with Zelensky, I've been hearing reports of other European countries banding together with commitments to increase their aid to Ukraine.  I'm sure it's a matter of time before Trump claims credit for that and tells us it was all part of his master plan.

Posted
Spoiler

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 9/2025 (February 22nd, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.

Three Years after the Invasion: The Churchill of Ukraine Seeks a New Role
Christian Esch, DER SPIEGEL
28–35 minutes

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It’s the second day of the Munich Security Conference when the Ukrainian president and former actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy is forced to admit that he does not know the play in which he is now supposed to act. He is sitting in front of a wood-paneled wall facing journalists in a room in Munich’s Bayerischer Hof hotel, crammed between a chair and a bookshelf. There is a video of the February 15 briefing.

Zelenskyy has just been through one of the most difficult weeks of his life, and his tired face clearly reflects the setbacks he has experienced. He has had to absorb one blow after another, each time from the U.S. government.

First, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in Brussels ruled out an American security guarantee for his country. Then, U.S. President Donald Trump held a long telephone conversation with Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin without Zelenskyy’s knowledge. And U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent presented a demand for Ukraine’s natural resources to compensate for past aid. In an interview with Fox News, Trump made Ukraine sound like a failed business deal: "They may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday. But we're going to have all this money in there, and I say I want it back.”

On this Saturday evening in Munich, a journalist asks the Ukrainian president who will be participating in the peace talks that are set to begin in the coming days.
President Zelenskyy speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month

President Zelenskyy speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month
Foto: Ronald Wittek / EPA

"I don’t know,” Zelenskyy says helplessly, shrugging his shoulders. "Something about that was published in the media. Somebody said in Saudi Arabia. They apparently even put up a Ukrainian flag.”

Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it has been said that the future of the country may not be decided without Ukraine’s involvement. Even Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, repeated that message at the Security Conference earlier that same day. But now, Zelenskyy – the Ukrainian president and commander-in-chief of his country’s military – is in the dark. He looks powerless and vulnerable.
The Reversal

It has been three years since Putin’s Russia launched the largest war in Europe since 1945. Hundreds of thousands have been killed and wounded, millions of people displaced, and entire cities reduced to rubble.

And for three years, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been the embodiment of his people’s will to resist. He has been the face of a nation that refuses to let its independence be taken from it, appearing at international conferences and in his nightly video messages to his own people. Zelenskyy has successfully led his people through the war. Many have compared him to the British wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, who courageously, resolutely and unwaveringly defended his country against Hitler’s Germany.
Residents in the destroyed town of Bucha, where retreating Russian troops shot and killed dozens of civilians, in April 2022

Residents in the destroyed town of Bucha, where retreating Russian troops shot and killed dozens of civilians, in April 2022
Foto: Roman Pilipey / epa
Zelenskyy at a commemoration in Kyiv in 2023

Zelenskyy at a commemoration in Kyiv in 2023
Foto: Ukraine Presidency / ZUMA Wire / IMAGO

But now, circumstances are forcing him into a different role. In the East, the front is crumbling, with the Russians on the advance. In the West, support is crumbling, with U.S. policy undergoing a breathtaking U-turn. Donald Trump doesn’t just want an immediate deal with Moscow, he even talks like the Kremlin. He praises the aggressor and rebukes the victims of that aggression. Russia wants to "stop the savage barbarianism,” he claims, and the Ukrainians "should never have started” the war.

Zelenskyy now faces the task of leading his people to a peace deal even though he doesn’t trust this peace. He must prepare himself and Ukrainian society for ugly, painful compromises. What must this new role look like? How can he play it without knowing the script?

These questions don’t just concern him as president, but also the Ukrainian nation, its hopes and fears, its relationship with the West, its ideas of peace and the price it is willing to pay. Ukraine’s survival as a nation, its future, now depends on Zelenskyy.
Servant of the People

Even his entry into politics in 2019 began with him playing a role. The effect exceeded all expectations, including his own. Zelenskyy called his political party Servant of the People after his popular television series, the protagonist of which – a history teacher from Kyiv named Vasily Goloborodko, played by Zelenskyy himself – is catapulted into the office of president by a student prank. As a man of the people, he begins to shake up the world of professional politics.

The television role transformed into a promise to the voters: Zelenskyy, the most popular comedian in the country, would take a leading role in politics as the anti-politician, as a master of disruption – not unlike Donald Trump, who also leveraged television stardom into a political career, and who Zelenskyy identified as his role model in 2019.
Zelenskyy during the 2019 presidential campaign

Zelenskyy during the 2019 presidential campaign
Foto: Pyotr Sivkov / ITAR-TASS / IMAGO

Like Trump, Zelenskyy gave simple answers to complicated questions, such as corruption, which he promised to defeat, and the war in Donbas, which he pledged to end. That war had begun in 2014 and been formally concluded in 2015 with a treaty signed in Minsk, but it continued nevertheless.

How did he intend to do so?

"You just have to stop shooting,” Zelenskyy said during the campaign.

He spoke just like Trump talks today about the war in Ukraine: as if the solution was essentially easy and previous officeholders were just too dumb, fearful or cowardly to make a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"Zelenskyy didn’t just speak like a populist, that’s how he actually thought,” says a former staff member.

"Still today, he has the worldview of a schoolchild,” says a high-ranking government official in Kyiv.

For somebody who spent years making jokes about politicians on television, Zelenskyy knew shockingly little about politics.

Two years after his triumphant election victory in 2019, few of his promises had been implemented and little of his popularity was left. Zelenskyy had not put an end to the war in Donbas, with his well-meaning attempts being foiled by Moscow’s intransigence, but also by protests in Ukraine against any concessions. Many fighters at the front didn’t accept him as their president and commander-in-chief. They didn't like his unmilitary manner and they resented the fact that he moved troops back from the ceasefire line to avoid skirmishes.

Ultimately, relations with Russia grew worse than ever under the placatory Zelenskyy. Apparently, there were no simple answers to complicated questions.
Munich, February 2022

In February 2022, Volodymyr Zelenskyy sat at a table with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. It was, even though he didn’t know it at the time, one of his last days in his old role as "servant of the people” – as the unconventional president of a peaceable country. Since the previous fall, Russia had been amassing troops on the border and Washington was warning of an imminent invasion.

But Zelenskyy continued to cling with all his might to the role he had chosen for himself. He wanted to build roads through the entire country, that was one of his pet projects, and he had just opened a new bridge across the Dnipro. He didn’t want to plan a defensive war. He was convinced that the alleged Russian invasion was just a bluff.

It was Kamala Harris’s task to wake him from his reverie.

"Some of our foreign partners in Munich offered to let him stay,” says Oleksii Reznikov, who was Ukrainian defense minister at the time and, as a close Zelenskyy confidant, at his side in Germany.

The Americans had come to the conclusion that Putin had already made his decision, and they wanted Zelenskyy to accept that fact.

"Zelenskyy responded: 'What’s the point of me acknowledging it?’ Then, there was a long pause.”
Former Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov in Kyiv

Former Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov in Kyiv
Foto: Fedir Petrov / DER SPIEGEL

The Ukrainians, says Reznikov, asked the Americans why they didn’t immediately impose sanctions if Putin had already made his decision. "We didn’t trust the situation,” Reznikov recalls. "It seemed odd, as though everyone was trying to force us to make concessions, to agree to a new Minsk deal. You start wondering: Are they just trying to scare you or do they really intend to warn you?”

Today, he knows better. Not long ago, he went to the cinema to watch "Golda,” with Helen Mirren playing the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who in 1973 refused to believe that Israel’s Arab neighbors were planning an invasion. Right at the beginning of the movie, the discord in the Israeli cabinet is on full display, the disagreement between the generals and the secret service agents as to whether an attack is actually coming. "Exactly like it was with us!” says Reznikov. "Some of our people were saying: They’re going to attack. Others said: No, we don’t think they will. Our generals said: They can’t attack, they still need at least a month to build up their troops.”

By then, they figured, their Western partners would do something.
The Attack

With the Russian invasion, the world got to know a new Zelenskyy: a determined warrior, who exchanged his suitcoat for olive-green fleeces and grew a beard, which would soon start graying. A man who remained in the capital even though he was a target of the Russian attack. Contrary to what many expected, the Russians advanced rapidly on Kyiv. The model for Putin’s invasion plan was Operation Danube, with which Moscow crushed the Prague Spring in 1968 – a rapid strike carried out by airborne troops to remove the Czechoslovak political leadership.

The Ukrainian president left no doubts that he intended to resist. He displayed courage and encouraged others. Nothing embodies the Zelenskyy of that period better than the nighttime selfie video he took together with his closest aides on the second evening of the invasion with the simple message: I am here. We are here. These few words were perhaps his very best speech.

February 24, 2022, became the moment that would define his entire political career. That’s how biographies work sometimes: One single day outweighs several years, one right decision outweighs many wrong ones.
President Zelenskyy on February 25 in Kyiv with his team, including Defense Minister Reznikov (2nd from left)

President Zelenskyy on February 25 in Kyiv with his team, including Defense Minister Reznikov (2nd from left)
Foto: Newscom / ddp

"That was when Zelenskyy became the president of all Ukrainians,” says Kyiv-based political expert Volodymyr Fesenko – including those who had initially rejected him.

If you ask Ukrainians today what they remember about the Zelenskyy from that period, most still express nothing but respect. Others are less effusive. "He had no choice,” they say, or: "Many would have done the same thing.” After all, it wasn’t just Zelenskyy, it was broad swaths of society that showed the world a different side of Ukraine. In Kyiv, people stood in long lines when weapons were handed out.

"Like Churchill, you’ve understood that you are not yourself the lion, the Ukrainian people are the lion, but you have been called upon to give the roar,” is how British Prime Minister Boris Johnson put it, Zelenskyy’s most vociferous supporter in the West and whom Zelenskyy was the first to call on the morning of the invasion. Johnson is also the author of an enthusiastic Churchill biography. "I can imagine Churchill’s spirit walking with you,” he told Zelenskyy from London. It was a comparison that many drew. Michael Waltz, now Trump’s national security advisor but a member of Congress at the time, called Zelenskyy a "21st century Churchill” in early March 2022.

Churchill was Zelenskyy’s new role. It stood for defiance and determination in the face of superior power, for the defense of democracy, for standing shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. and the West.
Peace Talks

And it would soon also stand for the rejection of peace talks. The comparison with Churchill implied that the enemy resembled Hitler, that a compromise with Putin was neither possible nor desirable. And, more than anything, that a complete victory over Russia was an achievable goal.

That, however, was not Zelenskyy’s assumption as the war began. It took until April 2022 before he fully took on the role of Churchill.
Commander-in-Chief Zelenskyy awarding a medal in 2023

Commander-in-Chief Zelenskyy awarding a medal in 2023
Foto: Ukraine Presidency / Planet Pix / ZUMA Press Wire / picture alliance
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill visiting the troops on Cyprus in 1943

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill visiting the troops on Cyprus in 1943
Foto: Fotosearch / Getty Images

From the first days of the invasion, Zelenskyy’s team engaged in negotiations with Russia over the end of hostilities. After a month, a breakthrough was achieved – or so it seemed at the time when the delegations met in Istanbul. A tentative agreement foresaw Ukraine giving up its hopes of NATO membership and committing to neutrality. In exchange, it would receive security guarantees from the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, including Russia. It wasn’t yet a deal, but it was the outline of one.

Why did nothing come of it?

The explanation often heard in Kyiv is Bucha. Even as talks were ongoing in Istanbul, the Russians announced an extensive withdrawal from the Kyiv region. In the town of Bucha, just northwest of the Ukrainian capital, they left behind rows of bodies belonging to civilians who had been shot to death. Ukrainian society was shocked by the atrocities. Zelenskyy was visibly shaken when he visited Bucha on April 4. Nevertheless, when asked about the negotiations with Russia that day in Bucha, he expressly reaffirmed his commitment tso the talks.

The other explanation is Boris Johnson. The British prime minister visited Kyiv on April 9 and took a walk with Zelenskyy through the abandoned city. Ukrainian negotiator Davyd Arakhamia would later say in an interview: "When we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we would not sign anything with them at all, and let’s just fight.” Russian propaganda twisted those words into: The West has forbidden Zelenskyy from agreeing to a peace deal.
Then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson strolling through the Ukrainian capital with Zelenskyy during his visit on April 9 2022

Then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson strolling through the Ukrainian capital with Zelenskyy during his visit on April 9 2022
Foto: EPN / Newscom / SIPA / action press

"Nobody can tell me that anyone can simply talk President Zelenskyy out of something like that, not even Boris Johnson. His closest advisors can’t even do so,” says Reznikov, the former defense minister.

"The conditions laid out by the Russians were completely unrealistic,” says Mykhailo Podolyak, one of the Ukrainian negotiators.

Yet Johnson’s visit still had a strong effect. He would also have had to agree to the Western security guarantees that the Istanbul deal called for. "Johnson allegedly said: 'Great Britain will not sign on the same sheet of paper with the criminal Putin,’” one participant in the process recalls. At the same time, Johnson pledged support and spread confidence.

In early May, Zelenskyy’s security advisor at the time, Oleksiy Danilov, boasted on Ukrainian television: "With Russia, we can only sign a capitulation.” He meant: the capitulation of Russia, not of Ukraine. Suddenly, a Ukraine that was facing the abyss transformed into a Ukraine that trusted in its superiority over Russia.

That fit well with the mood in the population. Kyiv-based sociologist Yevgen Golovaha refers to it as "shock euphoria”: the sense of elation stemming from the country’s success in standing up to a vastly superior opponent, a feeling that wasn’t obscured by the grief over what it had suffered.
Blood, Sweat and Tears

"Zelenskyy is consciously playing the role of Churchill, and he plays it well,” says historian Yaroslav Hrytsak. "But he won’t play it to the last consequence because he still can’t utter one sentence that Churchill said: 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’”

The Ukrainian president enjoys speaking of victory, not of sacrifice. He has thus elevated the expectations of his people. That was the case in 2022, when the Ukrainians first stopped the invaders and then drove them back. That was the case in 2023, when the grandly heralded counter-offensive began and quickly flamed out. That was the case in 2024, when the enemy advanced alarmingly fast in Donbas.

When the military urgently requested a large mobilization in fall 2023 because Ukraine was running out of soldiers, Zelenskyy demurred for months. He didn’t want his name associated with unpopular policies. To this day, he has yet to ensure a fair distribution of the burden of war. The average Ukrainian soldier is a middle-aged man from the village with calloused hands. Those living in the anonymity of the big city have a much better chance of avoiding service in the armed forces.
The Maximalist

On the international stage, Zelenskyy achieved great acclaim, just as in December 2022, when he delivered a speech in U.S. Congress and received such a long and enthusiastic ovation that many were reminded of Winston Churchill’s 1941 appearance there. He compared the fighting in Donbas to the U.S. Revolutionary War, he invoked U.S. patriotism in fluent English, he reveled in the role of a champion of the free world.

His confidence grew. In summer 2023, on his way to a NATO summit in Vilnius, Zelenskyy railed in advance about the pre-drafted final communiqué, which made Ukraine’s ultimate membership in the alliance more uncertain than ever.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following his speech to U.S. Congress in 2022

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following his speech to U.S. Congress in 2022
Foto: Francis Chung / POLITICO / AP

Zelenskyy had been hoping for more. He referred to the communiqué’s formulation as "unprecedented and absurd” on X and demanded "respect” for his country. His reaction was a diplomatic scandal, and the Americans were surprised and angered. "The American people do deserve a degree of gratitude,” said Jake Sullivan, the U.S. security advisor under President Joe Biden, on the sidelines of the summit.

"Zelenskyy felt completely betrayed,” says a Ukrainian diplomat in hindsight. The president, he says, had understood the encouragement he had received in spring 2022 such that the West was considering real guarantees for Ukraine. He was disappointed and he showed it. The outburst was consistent with his demeanor: emotional, maximalist, often reproachful in tone.

"Zelenskyy is like a child. He thinks: If you only wish for something hard enough and really believe in it, you’ll get it,” says a person who used to work closely with him before the war.

But often, wishing did actually help. The West taught Zelenskyy that the allegedly impossible becomes possible if you just insist. The German government initially refused to supply any Leopard 2 battle tanks – but two years later, Berlin merely shrugged when Zelenskyy ordered his German tanks to rumble into Russian territory.
Putin Demands Elections – in Ukraine

"Bully diplomacy,” is how former parliamentary chairman Dmytro Razumkov describes Zelenskyy’s approach. Once the president’s spin doctor, Razumkov is Zelenskyy’s political adversary today. "Bully diplomacy achieved something in the first few months. But at some point, you have to return to normal diplomacy, take off the green uniform and exchange it for a suit. You have to work in the role of president again, not the role of Che Guevara.”

Razumkov has grown bitter, like many politicians in Kyiv. Whereas the president has found a new stage for himself abroad, they have lost their stages back home. Once the war started, there was no longer any room for politics. A pro-government unity program is broadcast on television. The power of the parliament has been reduced while that of the president and his omnipresent chief of staff Andriy Yermak has grown significantly through martial law. Elections are not allowed in a state of war.

Vladimir Putin, who has eliminated all vestiges of democracy back home in Russia, accuses Zelenskyy of being an illegitimate leader and has called for new elections in Ukraine. Donald Trump’s rhetoric has moved closer to that of Putin. The U.S. president called Zelenskyy a "dictator without elections” and claimed: "I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4 percent approval rating.”

In fact, according to a recent poll, 57 percent of Ukrainians trust their president and a majority believes that elections cannot be held in wartime, a view that Razumkov agrees with.
President Zelenskyy at his residence in Kyiv

President Zelenskyy at his residence in Kyiv
Foto: Ukraine Presidency / ZUMA Wire / IMAGO

A peace agreement with Russia, though, would result in the lifting of martial law – and thus new elections. The opposition and the government are accusing each other of already preparing for such an eventuality and thus dividing the country. In mid-February, Zelenskyy took the step of eliminating one political adversary: He imposed extrajudicial sanctions on his presidential predecessor and rival Petro Poroshenko for allegedly threatening the country’s security.

Ukraine is not a dictatorship, as Trump recently claimed. But its democracy has been badly damaged by the war.

Zelenskyy has a reason to fear new elections. He has a powerful challenger in Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the former head of the armed forces, who everyone believes is going to go into politics.

Second, once this war ends, Zelenskyy will have to take responsibility for an odious deal with Russia, which is likely to force Ukraine into difficult concessions. "Sixty percent of people want a deal. But when he signs, even these 60 percent will gather in front of the president’s office and protest against it,” says a close associate of the president.

"Zelenskyy will become a scapegoat. Everyone will pin their dashed hopes on him,” says Golovaha, the sociologist.
The Tunnel

Third, there are superior reasons to fear elections from a statesman's perspective. Ukrainian society is held together by the war effort. What if, though, everyone starts attacking each other in a political campaign and Russia takes advantage? As great as the desire for peace is, the fear of a ceasefire that doesn’t hold up is just as significant. Everything for which hundreds of thousands were injured or killed could be lost.

"I think Zelenskyy is not yet psychologically prepared for the end of a war in which he is not the victor,” says Fesenko, the political scientist. The president, he says, has literally become one with this war, Zelenskyy demonstrates this by his beard, his paramilitary outfit and his evening addresses. "If he were to suddenly stop giving speeches and start wearing a suit and tie again, it would come as a shock to the Ukrainians.”

For Zelenskyy, emulating Churchill meant striding boldly through the war as if through a tunnel, his eyes focused on the light at its end, mobilizing the forces of an exhausted society that does not see that light.
Zelenskyy visiting the front lines in the Zaporizhzhia region

Zelenskyy visiting the front lines in the Zaporizhzhia region
Foto: Ukraine Presidency / ZUMA Wire / IMAGO

Now, it turns out that this tunnel doesn’t really have an exit, that at its end, a new tunnel begins – a tunnel which will be called peace, but won't be a true peace and in which new disappointments and hardships await. How can you explain to your people that the promised light was an illusion? What historical figure exemplifies such a thing?

Perhaps it isn’t Churchill after all, who had the courage in 1940 to reject peace talks even though Hitler’s troops were romping through France. Perhaps it is the Finns, who that same spring 1940 admitted defeat and had to sign a peace deal with Moscow. The country’s courageous resistance to the Soviet invasion, led by Finnish Field Marshall Gustaf Mannerheim, was unable to prevent the failure. But little Finland did not disappear and today is a member of NATO.

"Zelenskyy played Churchill very well. Can he also play Mannerheim? I don’t know. I hope so,” says a high-ranking security official in Kyiv.
Trump as Life Ring

Ukraine survived the third year of war with great difficulty. In Donbas, the Russians advanced faster and faster. In November 2024, Putin’s troops recorded their most significant territorial gains since the beginning of hostilities, while in faraway America, Donald Trump won the presidential election.

"For Zelenskyy, Trump as peacemaker was a life ring,” says the political scientist Fesenko. Now, there was someone to take over the task of acknowledging the need for concessions to his own society. Zelenskyy could now tell the Ukrainian people: It wasn’t me who gave up. It was the West that left us in the lurch. You can see for yourselves that the situation has now changed. Suddenly, someone else could be the scapegoat.

Ultimately, Kyiv was disappointed in the Biden administration. It was reliable, but overly cautious, and its promise – support "for as long as it takes” – sounded increasingly hollow the longer the war went on. Many in Kyiv began thinking: better a painful end, better Trump, than unending pain with the Democrats. Sure, Trump was a risk. "But our president loves risk,” says a high-ranking official.

Zelenskyy eagerly courted Trump, praising his strength and flattering him by saying Putin was afraid of him. In late December, he spent three hours speaking to the American podcaster Lex Fridman – a friend of Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner – in an attempt to reach the world of Trump supporters.

The conversation, conducted in Ukrainian, English and occasionally Russian, left the naïve interviewer clearly at a loss. He had thought he would be able to dispassionately explore options for a peace deal with Putin and found himself confronted with an emotional outburst instead. Zelenskyy compared Putin to a child murderer, to the evil Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, to a prehistoric mammoth and to someone from the Stone Age. He recalled Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson in which the Russian president delved deep into human history. "Musk is about technology, Mars and AI, and that guy stands bare-assed and mumbles about tribes," he erupted in Russian.

Zelenskyy spoke about Putin in the way most Ukrainians do, and they have every reason to do so. He didn’t speak about the Russian leader as though he was interested in negotiating with him.

In early February, the same Zelenskyy said that, if necessary, he would sit down at the negotiating table with Putin.

"He knows that Putin wouldn’t sit down at the same table with him anyway,” says Kristina Berdynskykh, a journalist in Kyiv. "He’s only playing the negotiator so that Ukraine isn’t blamed. That, too, is a role.”
The Europeans

A lot has happened since the beginning of February. It’s as if time is moving faster than ever since Trump moved back into the White House. We are living at "on Trump time,” as the president’s special envoy Kellogg said at the Munich Security Conference. The world has come apart at the seams and no one is feeling this as strongly at the moment as Zelenskyy. What does he have to hold onto? Maybe Europe, which seems to stand still in time with all its rhetoric about values, its inertia and its weakness.

In his speech at the Munich Security Conference, Zelenskyy made a passionate plea for Europe, speaking of a joint European army. It sounded like: If you will only let me into the EU but not NATO, then let’s turn the EU into an ersatz NATO. Perhaps that is the role that Zelenskyy is now going to play, even if it may be out of a lack of options or even desperation: the convinced European who is no longer looking at the EU from the outside, but who wants to shape it from within.

Zelenskyy’s attempts to get on Trump’s good side have failed for the time being, as illustrated by the U.S. president’s hateful tirades. The situation has grown too acrimonious for Zelenskyy to sugarcoat it. On the morning after Trump cast doubt on the Ukrainian president’s popularity ratings, Zelenskyy held a press conference in Kyiv. He accused Trump’s team of providing the president with inaccurate information and said that he would, in the coming weeks, survey public trust in his leadership in addition to polling how Ukrainians feel about Trump and other partners.

It was an attempt to turn the tables, a populist reaction in the style of the former television comedian: surprising, entertaining, amusing. It was also unstatesmanlike, frivolous and provocative. It’s as though the Ukrainian president has reverted to his first role – the one that he long since set aside in wartime.

But maybe he’s not playing a role this time. Maybe it is the true Zelenskyy – emotional, combative and thin-skinned in the face of attacks. A man who, like his country, is fighting to be seen as a subject in its own right, just like on February 24, 2022. That day, Vladimir Putin denied Ukraine any agency, seeing the country not as an independent subject but purely as a territory. As an object over which he fought with the West. He did not expect the country to put up any serious resistance.

Now, it is Donald Trump who is treating Ukraine as an object and who hopes to reach agreement with Vladimir Putin over its pacification, apportionment and use.

For Zelenskyy and Ukraine, there is no role left to play. A prop that is pushed around on stage has no lines. Just like on the day of the invasion three years ago, his aim is to prove himself as a protagonist with his actions, without considering the consequences. To say – just as he did back then – for his own people, for the whole world to hear, for the man in the Kremlin and the man in the White House: I’m still here.

With reporting by Fedir Petrov

 

 

Posted (edited)
30 minutes ago, yoladu said:

do I dare say it... but..

Did Trump just throw Europe in the deep-in forcing them to sink or swim?

What he did was announce to the world that the United States is no longer the World's Police and what we say is not the final word. Instead, we're going to allow other countries to increase their influence in the world while we retreat. We are no longer the boss of bosses, we're choosing to just be another family at the table. 

Edited by gernblansten
  • Rage+1 1
Posted

also, considering how dysfunctional and unstable we currently are, the world will almost certainly be safer without us as boss. we're like the Tesla of nations now. 

  • Haha 1
Posted
2 hours ago, gernblansten said:

What he did was announce to the world that the United States is no longer the World's Police and what we say is not the final word. Instead, we're going to allow other countries to increase their influence in the world while we retreat. We are no longer the boss of bosses, we're choosing to just be another family at the table. 

Except that we're trying to dictate Ukraine's terms of surrender to Ukraine while the fighting is still at a stalemate.   And exploiting their minerals for the privilege like a 17th century colonist.  It's fucked.

  • Rage+1 1


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