“Zelensky was elected in a landslide victory in 2019 on the promise of easing tensions with Russia and resolving the crisis in the breakaway republics in east Ukraine. He has made no attempt to keep his word on either issue.” https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/the-man-who-sold-ukraine/#comment-5212744 He betrayed the electorate.
slate | Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the public response from pundits and online observers alike has largely involved going bananas over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. For a guy who used to be a comedian, his leadership has demonstrated qualities many people—particularly in the military subreddits I’ve been reading, full of young service members and vets—just haven’t witnessed except in movies and history books. Having come of age in a world where major world leaders are so insulated from personal risk that they’re whisked away by security teams at the first whiff of danger, many members of the American military are stunned that a commander in chief would actually risk his or her own skin—let alone brashly announce, when the United States offered him safety, that he needs “ammunition, not a ride.” The U.S. Marine Corps subreddit contains a post titled “Volodymyr Zelensky is about as motivating of a leader as I’ve seen in our lifetime,” with one sample reply reading: “Yep. I’d follow that guy into hell.” The idea of a political leader willing to die with his people has struck many outside the military, too, as unthinkably brave. And more than a little thrilling. Zelensky has become a hero to much of the world—even inspiring citizens of other nations to ask how to volunteer to fight for Ukraine. To the extent that this has been an information war for hearts and minds in much of the world, Ukraine has undoubtedly won.
An information war that successful deserves to be examined, both for its own sake and in order to better understand the desires the Ukrainian spectacle seems to be so spectacularly satisfying in the international audience (beyond the natural moral sympathy the country is receiving). The Zelensky legend, while not being false, also isn’t purely organic. It’s being quite skillfully produced. This is a mediated war, calibrated to appeal to a specific brand of international solidarity—of sides in a global struggle—that hasn’t been around in a very long time.
And it’s working: There’s a drunkenness to the explosion of pro-Ukrainian sentiment. Public anger on behalf of Ukrainians has gone beyond official sanctions and into a plethora of bizarrely small-bore initiatives—like bars no longer serving Russian vodka—intended to recognize the aggressor’s villainy. Pro-Ukrainian observers are saying some wild things as they try to explain their outrage and grief at the invasion, and the expressive extremes are telling. One journalist said, for instance, that “the unthinkable has happened to them. This is not a developing Third World nation. This is Europe.” CBS News foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata said last Friday that Ukraine “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European—I have to choose those words carefully, too—city, where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.” Civilized. He later apologized, but it’s essential that we understand exactly what he meant, because it may not be elegant or inclusive, but it is telling. These aren’t isolated episodes. Something weird is happening, and I think it’s this: Pro-Ukraine feelings in search of an organizing principle are coalescing around a category of identification that hasn’t enjoyed real, popular international relevance in a good long while. I’m speaking of “the West”—a category Vladimir Putin has long railed against, but which Westerners themselves haven’t, at least in recent years, claimed with much personal attachment or ideological loyalty.
And these are feelings being shaped and inspired in part by the “cinematic” quality of the media coming out of Ukraine.
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