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What drives Zelensky? While surely a mix of motives coalesces into his behavior and decisions, I posit the following are primary candidates:
The first motive simply states that Zelensky is operating to maximize his country's well-being. This often means making difficult choices, and ones that may appear detrimental in the short-run. I think Zelensky's brave choice to remain in Kiev in the opening weeks of the war was a demonstration of this: risking his own life to inspire and lead his armies as they fought the invading force. However, if he now is truly attempting to maximize his people's well-being, he should have signed the rare-earth agreement with the United States. His childish behavior (inappropriate attire, attempting to alter the deal in front of the press, insolence to a nation responsible for his nation still existing) put the deal at risk, and seems to indicate that his country’s well-being no longer holds paramount sway in Zelensky.
The second frames Zelensky as a conduit for his people's will. In this sense he serves as an ambassador petitioning support for his people and their cause. Again, I think in the early days this objective clearly was a major motivator. He was able to transmute sympathy into aid, keeping his nation afloat with economic and military materiel as patriotic fervor swelled his armies with volunteers. Yet now we are three years into the war, and conscription has replaced volunteerism. The average age of the fighting man is over 40. Zelensky has resisted calls for an election, which while he has the legal right to do still undermines any claim to be operating with the people's mandate.
The third motive has been in the background for the entire war. Yet now it may be moving to the forefront. In his interview with Lex Friedman, Zelensky dismissed any idea of negotiating with Putin. He refused to speak in Russian (despite it being a common language between Friedman and Zelensky) and went out of his way to say Putin would be "forced to pay" for the things he has done. This could certainly be grandstanding, but such a hatred would also explain his recent behavior in Washington. If driven primarily by hatred for Russia, he would risk sacrificing his own people to reduce the probability of a cease fire. In this case, he may well have gone to DC with no intention of signing the rare-earths deal, and intentionally blew it up (though doubtless he didn’t desire the dressing-down he received).
The desire to retain power, while clearly the most damning for Zelensky, also fits the recent facts. If there was a cease fire or a peace agreement, Zelensky would risk deposition. His stature in the world and his ability to remain in quasi-dictatorial power comes from the war. It is in his best interests to keep the war going at all expense.
Many commentators seem to assume Zelensky is operating primarily under one of the first two motivations. Certainly those with Ukrainian flags in their avatars conflate Zelensky with the Ukrainian people. Yet given recent circumstances I can no longer assume the interests of the Ukrainian people and Zelensky are aligned. And the rest of the West shouldn't either.
I'm not sure this analysis can be complete without mentioning another possible motive:
Secondly, I would add that part of a desire to maintain power at this point might be out of a sense of self-preservation.
Now, people are generally complex, and I am not saying that greed is what motivates Zelensky, I don't claim to know his heart. I think it's quite possible that Zelenskyy disagrees with you, for instance, about what is best for Ukraine, and your analysis does not seem to give this possibility any of the weight it deserves. But whatever drives him, it's probably more than just one thing.
The kolomoisky thing is interesting. Guy basically bankrolled his run to president and then Z-man turns on him and jails him. Wonder what happened there.
Happens a loooot with patrons who don't keep enough leverage over a pawn they underestimated (or who got new patrons). And sometimes even what you thought was solid gold leverage disintegrates mysteriously when enough powerful people feel threatened by it, as Mr Epstein found out.
I don’t think Epstein ever had large numbers of tapes / hard evidence. If he had, he would have been smart enough to have backed them up with a dead man’s switch, this was 2019 not 1967 when it was conceivable to have kompromat all stored in hard copy in one location on tape. If you have material on some of the most influential people in the world you don’t store it with zero duplicates / backups in the basement of your New York townhouse that can be raided by 3 professional burglars you hire for $4000 from Staten Island and which everyone knows the location of. Epstein’s relationship with intelligence was tangential or limited rather than planned, if he assisted in exchange for the authorities turning a blind eye it was conditional and case-based, not an elaborate program. And he almost certainly did kill himself, as many people would in that situation facing guaranteed life in solitary confinement with no possibility of parole.
Why? Those tapes are still very useful to the intelligence services he was working for.
Of course, so why did they turn on him? He was an old man and his main ambition was to keep doing what he was doing and have 100 kids via IVF. The theory has a lot of holes.
Did they turn on him, or weren't able to bail him out this time? The material he gathered is probably more valuable than his life, so why waste it to save him?
I don’t think the idea that the FBI said “fuck you” to the CIA is unreasonable, it’s happened before. But there’s no evidence for the centrality of the CIA or Mossad to Epstein’s trafficking scheme other than the throwaway comment that he “belonged” to intelligence.
For example, imagine this (in my view much more likely) scenario. Epstein had longstanding connections to Western intelligence because he was tangentially a bit-player in the Khashoggi arms sale game in the 1980s (as has been relatively widely reported). He always had a thing for teen girls (going back at least to his time as a prep school teacher) and indulged increasingly in sexual trafficking and coercion as he got richer after he cut (again) a deal over the Towers financial scheme. While he was seducing notoriously confirmed bachelor Les Wexner to the tune of billions of dollars, he then set about becoming a socialite because social recognition and society status was his other great love, and relentlessly climbed the manhattan and then greater American social scene. All the while, he was increasingly procuring girls for himselves and his friends, since that is a great way to ingratiate oneself with powerful and famous men. At times (again, as Epstein himself said in life) he brokered intelligence and other under the table deals between agencies as a side hustle and to protect himself. His additional interest, though, was being seen as a really smart guy, which is why he did things like hang around with physics professors and philosophers with no real hard power as well as the Clintons and Gateses of the world.
Eventually, public pressure and endless Reddit posting about the 2005 deal he had cut with friendly local Florida officials led to the FBI reopening the investigation and the subsequent arrest. The CIA is the senior agency and could certainly have shut it down if it perceived him as actually vital to national security, but the reality is that billionaires fucking 17 year old teen prostitutes really isn’t very exciting to them, Epstein’s support had been situational at best (ie he wasn’t a plant or an agent, just a broker), and so there was no reason to stop them.
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