waisworld | Today, in the middle of the biggest military operation undertaken during this war by the Ukrainians, about which nothing, bizarrely, is reported in the Western press, the official spokesman of Zelensky, Oleksiy Arestovich, published a remarkably passionate (possibly not sober) diatribe against Ukrainian nationalists on the same Russian-language Telegram feed where he publishes Zelensky's daily briefings (which I read every day), among other things blaming them (Ukrainian nationalists) for the Russian invasion.
Some excerpts:
"The ‘patriotic forces' of Ukraine (as they proudly call themselves) have never gained more than 1.5% in elections.
"The [Ukrainian] people are gray, but wise. The people understand that these comrades should not be entrusted with state power under any circumstances. In general, in none. There is simply no such case.
"Yesterday, I noted with true satisfaction how wise our people are--watching the reaction of the ‘patriotic spirit' to the creation of the Political Center of the Russian militant opposition to the Putin regime, headed by Ilya Ponamarev.
"I didn't fully understand before how you can be headless and narrow-minded at the same time. They managed to show me, bravo.
"I got a sensual understanding of how Ukrainian statehood has been f***d up until now--over and over again, for several hundred years in a row.
"It's very simple--they allowed ‘this' and ‘these' [Ukrainian nationalists] to make real state decisions.
"The reaction is simple:
"--‘we don't need opposition to Putin here, f*** off to the Russian Federation, and we will close ourselves up here in the Motherland, we will love each other and write.'
"These, God forgive me, motherf*****s [I struggle to translate the colorful and fundamentally untranslatable Russian obscenity "dolboeb"--CS], are the quintessence of eternal Ukrainian defeats.
"You say--‘motherf*****s' is too strong. These are volunteers, activists, patriots.'
"Yes. These are volunteers, activists, patriots. And--mother****s.
"It's good that not all volunteers, activists and patriots are morons.
"I would even say that the morons are in the minority.
"It seems to you, and most importantly--to them, that there are a lot of them. It's an illusion.
"They are just loud. And they are noisy because the weakest screams the loudest.
"These are jerky, weak-willed, extremely selfish creatures, shriveled up in a strange mixture of hatred and envy for each other and a terrible resentment for the rest of the environment.
"The political center of militant opposition to Putin in Ukraine is influence. Our influence on the Russian Federation.
"Only a mother**** can voluntarily renounce influence.
"They renounce. Everything is logical.
"At one time, Skoropadsky [the puppet Hetman of Ukraine at one point, appointed by German occupiers during WWI, a weird reference--CS] was ashamed to wipe his boots on this audience. As a result, we got here the Kiev Cheka, and a little later--the Holodomor.
"We could have become Finland. Instead we became a republic of the USSR.
"Today we have Putin's invasion, because it is this herd that poisons Ukraine and deprives it of real strength and influence--a small, farm herd trying to escape from reality under the plausible pretext of ‘patriotism'.
"They decided that they had a monopoly on patriotism here.
"What do they have the right to determine here--what is patriotism and what it should be.
"Idiots, complete idiots.
"To remove the sign--with Bulgakov [great Russian writer--Master and Margarita--born in Kiev--CS]--is to pinch off some of your influence.
"To close the Bulgakov Museum is to tear off a piece of influence from oneself.
"To abandon the Russian language [Arestovich, like Zelensky, is a native Russian speaker--CS] by the method of total bans is to lose influence--on our main enemy.
"Exactly in this way, exactly under these slogans and from this picture of the world, the largest military grouping in Europe, which we inherited in 1991, was destroyed.
"All these dreams of isolation from the enemy, with whom we have thousands of kilometers of a common border--and without natural obstacles (!), hundreds of years of common history and an eternal desire to devour us--nothing more stupid, infantile and helpless can be imagined.
"They have not just imagined--they are trying to make it a strategy and still impose on us. And this is good.
"It doesn't even occur to them, dumb-headed, in their frog fuss (once, the need is puffed up) that their weakness and inability to influence real events are directly related to the voluntary rejection of influence--through the constant desire for isolation.
"Influence is the ability to cause a backlash.
"If you seek to break the feedback from the main adversary, you are not affected.
"You create ideal conditions for the enemy to influence you.
"The snail strategy humiliates Ukraine. It demonstrates that Ukraine has the brains of a snail.
"I won't allow it. I need a Ukraine that plays across the entire chessboard. Affects Moscow, Vladivostok, Beijing, Washington, and the Martian settlement of Mask. And only in this way will Ukrainian culture rise and be realized. Only in this way the Ukrainian language will become fashionable--and studied. Only in this way will they want to imitate us. Isolation is not imitated. Strength is imitated."
https://t.me/O_Arestovich_official/2533
An odd thing indeed to appear in such an official channel. One thing we don't see in the Western press is the remarkable diversity of Ukrainian society, which is made up of different cultures, languages, and points of view, some of them very eccentric. Zelensky and most of his team are Russian speakers from the East, and as I have written before, they were elected on a platform of compromise and peace with Russia, a sharp break from the confrontational policies of the previous US-sponsored regime. The tension between Zelensky's party and the nationalist factions in Ukrainian politics is huge, and as I have written before, Zelensky is constrained in his actions by these elements. The nationalist factions have little support among the people (as Arestovich emphasizes in the quoted post) but they have a great deal of muscle--they possess various far-right militias, which were used to overthrow the Yanukovich government in 2014, and which can be used to overthrow Zelensky. So you might imagine that Zelensky has a gun to his head. I think these elements keep relatively quiet and line up behind Zelensky only because Zelensky controls the pipeline of Western aid, without which the country would collapse in a few minutes. But this can change in a flash.
I'm not sure what this weird Telegram post portends--is a rupture coming between Zelensky and Ukrainian nationalists? It's hard to say; the proximate subject of this post is a relatively minor issue (in the context of a big war)--whether or not to harbor the Russian dissident Ilya Ponamarev. I have been afraid for a long time that Zelensky might meet his end at the hands of his own nationalists.
It is possible that the current military situation is causing this stress. There is a media blackout in the West, which was requested by Ukraine, so we're not reading about it, but there are a lot of dramatic events occurring right now on the ground. Yesterday, for example, it is reported that Ukrainian commandos, in a large force, attempted to storm the Zaporozhia nuclear power plant just before the UN inspectors arrived, and large-scale Ukrainian attacks are going on in the outskirts of Kherson, some of them achieving significant breakthroughs according to Russian sources. Weird we don't read about it in our press.
Arestovich himself is a, well, strange figure. To say the least. He was himself involved in far right (but not Ukrainian nationalist) causes, and was even some kind of follower of Dugin at one point (there is a video from the early 2000s where Arestovich appears on a panel with Dugin at one of Dugin's "Eurasianism" conferences). Arestovich was the deputy head of the far-right group "Bratstvo" at one point, an organization described by its founder (the even stranger Dmytro Korchynsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmytro_Korchynsky ) as the "Orthodox Taliban" [!!]. Arestovich's professional background is in acting, then psychology, a student of psychology and astrology, and oddly seems to have found work as a military advisor [!], then military intelligence officer, then propagandist. See: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-president-adviser-arestovych/
JE comments: This is the head-scratcher of the day. What exactly is Arestovich trying to achieve? Even more confusing, his interpretation of how things got to this point makes no sense. It all seems to hinge on Arestovich's notion of "influence," but how? That the ultra-nationalists rejected Russian culture itself (as in Bulgakov), thus sparking the invasion? Or that they are destroying the moral influence they have in this war (hence Moscow, Beijing, Washington), which undermines the Ukrainian military effort?
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