The Zelensky road show comes to town
Congress fawns over khaki-clad autocrat, showers him with cash, denounces anyone who doesn't applaud
In a pitiful display of how low our politics have sunk, the Biden White House, Congress, and their media storytellers gave a hero’s welcome this week to visiting celebrity and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, likening him to Churchill and sending him off with billions more taxpayer dollars to disappear, unaccounted for, into the black hole of wartime Ukraine. American weapons manufacturers will get a good chunk of that back in Ukrainian orders, so I guess there’s that.
Zelensky can now bask in the afterglow of a successful sales trip. Not only did he secure money and weapons, he gave all the respectable blue-check commentators a new opportunity to bash dissenters over the head for not falling all over themselves in awe of him.
Nancy Pelosi declared, “the fight for Ukraine is the fight for democracy itself.” She said this about a man, Mr. Zelensky, who outlawed his political opposition and authorized the arrest of rivals. He’s the most recent beneficiary of the 2014 US-sponsored coup in Kiev in which a democratically elected president insufficiently hostile to Russia was overthrown with threats of violence and replaced by a man hand-picked in Washington. Everything that’s happened since has flowed from that event.
The US government admitted to having spent $5 billion pursuing regime change in the country in the years leading up to the Euromaidan protests. They didn’t admit responsibility for a bloodbath that ensued in which both anti-government protestors and police were killed by unknown snipers from nearby buildings, an event with shadowy undertones the blame for which is still disputed (if Netflix’s Winter on Fire is your only exposure to this, you should balance it by watching Ukraine on Fire, by Oliver Stone and others, but try not to let your prejudices run wild when you encounter Russian accents and lower production values).
Once the deed was done, ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians living in the country’s east refused to accept a US puppet as leader, having voted overwhelmingly for the deposed Viktor Yanukovich in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election. They took up arms. Russia provided covert assistance to the rebels, which was enough to confirm in the minds of the mandarins that fill all the important DC think tanks that those Ukrainians, the ones standing in the way of their long-term goal of extricating territories from Russia’s sphere of influence, deserved to get what was coming to them.
And get it they did. Ukraine launched an all-out assault on the eastern Donbas region, relying in large part on neo-Nazi paramilitary forces like the Azov Battalion, many of whom sometimes still wore SS insignia (and still do today — Ukraine has a long, complicated history with Nazi sympathizers). Cities and towns like Donetsk were intermittently bombarded for eight years, killing thousands of civilians and threatening complete subjugation, if not ethnic cleansing, of Donbas’ Russian-speaking population.
European politicians including Germany’s Angela Merkel eventually brokered a series of peace deals, called the Minsk Accords, that were ostensibly designed to end the bloodshed in Donbas and bring about a political resolution. Kiev would pull back its forces in the east and grant Donbas a degree of political autonomy within the Ukrainian state in exchange for the rebels’ acknowledging Kiev’s ultimate authority and ceasing hostilities.
While the accords brought a pause in the fighting, Kiev never implemented its main obligations under the deal, blaming the rebels, and intermittently resumed shelling of residential areas. Each time Russia would protest and call for full implementation of Minsk, and each time they would be ignored by Ukraine and its Western sponsors. It soon became clear that the agreement was a smokescreen, intended to buy Kiev time to rebuild its war machine and plan new offensives. Just this past month, a retired Merkel admitted that that’s exactly what the accords were, a ploy to buy time, nothing more. The relative stalemate lasted for eight years.
Finally, in December 2021, the Russians put forward to the US, the EU, and NATO formal proposals, including a draft agreement, for security guarantees and a new, mutually respectful relationship between NATO and Russia. Among other things, the proposal would have required treating Ukraine as a demilitarized buffer state between the two sides, one that would retain its autonomy as a neutral state and never be granted membership in the Western military alliance or used as a staging ground for offensive weapons aimed at Russia.
Russia’s leaders considered the latter point crucial. Since the end of the Cold War NATO had progressively expanded eastward toward Russia’s borders, in spite of assurances from Western politicians that, in exchange for the Soviet Union’s acceptance of a united Germany in 1990, NATO wouldn’t move “one inch” toward Russian territory. Now a hostile military alliance was just beyond Russia’s doorstep and threatening to take that last step up to the threshold, something the United States would never allow on its own borders.
NATO and its constituent states dismissed the proposals. Russia wasted little time. After resisting doing so for eight years, in February 2022 they officially recognized the the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics, shortly thereafter launching their “special military operation”, an invasion of Ukraine using mostly contract forces. Russia claimed that Kiev and its Western sponsors had themselves been planning an imminent new offensive in the east and that that their own operation was pre-emptive, but they provided no evidence.
The West was outraged. Drawing on latent prejudices from Soviet times, and forgetting America’s own recent wars of aggression, including the virtual destruction of Iraq less than two decades earlier, Russia’s operation was portrayed as a shocking and flagrant violation of international law. Apparently, the “rules-based international order” that American diplomats like to lecture about permits only America and its allies to deploy forces to, and drop bombs on, countries that don’t submit to them.
Following a brutal 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, the US in 2008 had recognized the breakaway province of Kosovo as an independent country, citing the right to self-determination of the Albanian majority there despite the move violating Serbia’s constitution and the country’s territorial integrity (not to mention the rights and wishes of the Serbian minority in Kosovo).
The US now makes the exact opposite arguments in Ukraine. Ignoring the self-determination rights of the Donbas people, it emphasizes only the interests of Ukrainian territorial integrity and compliance with its constitution. And they do this with a straight face, knowing the Kosovo example and knowing that the 2014 regime-change activities ignored that same Ukrainian constitution in toppling and replacing the elected president.
That’s because American foreign policy doesn’t operate off of any principle other than maintaining American political, financial, and military hegemony. That’s why blatant hypocrisy like the Kosovo and Ukraine comparisons provoke no second thoughts. Pursuing America’s interests abroad at the expense of all who stand in the way is deemed an end in itself, creating its own ethical justifications. That’s what the “rules-based international order” really means.
And that’s where Zelensky comes in. A former comedian and actor turned politician, he and his fashionable wife are just what Madison Avenue ordered. The olive-green military fatigues he dons at every appearance (a personal brand), the glossy Vogue photo shoots, the mythmaking profiles that fill pages in venerable American publications, and, most importantly, the sense of entitlement that leads him to constantly berate the world for never giving enough despite their having flooded what remains of his country with tens of billions in cash and weapons, not to mention logistical support. That Millennial-esque entitlement schtick (he’s a late Gen-Xer, but he doesn’t play one on TV) doesn’t hurt him one bit with America’s bicoastal elite, even if it makes Joe Biden pop off every now and then.
What Ukrainians think about all this is infinitely harder to gauge. They have more pressing matters to attend to. But one thing is for certain: being a political opponent of Zelensky in today’s Ukraine is a sure-fire way to get yourself killed, tortured, or imprisoned. He banned an array of left-wing and anti-NATO political parties and ordered Ukraine’s SBU security services to arrest his principal political rival, Viktor Medvedchuk, the founder of Ukraine’s second-largest party, charged with treason even though the party condemned Russia’s “aggression” against the country.
This was followed by endorsement of an assassination campaign targeting Ukrainian mayors in the south and east who engaged in negotiations with Russia for things like opening humanitarian corridors to allow civilians to flee. Zelensky’s forces don’t like that because it deprives them of potential propaganda material when Russian military advances result in civilian deaths.
None of the above dims Zelensky’s star in the eyes of the Western world. The only thing that will do that will be when he’s outlived his usefulness as fundraiser-in-chief for NATO’s proxy war and their goal of pinning Russia down and weakening it with an Afghanistan-style quagmire in Ukraine. If a steady supply of money and arms doesn’t keep flowing, Russia will inevitably prevail in securing its newly annexed territories and rendering Ukraine a rump state, less attractive to NATO as a future candidate for membership. By that point it will have already been “game over” for Zelensky. Perhaps he will find other roles. After all, once an actor, always an actor.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.