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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.
I thought it was fairly well established that he was originally given a sweetheart deal retiring to the Virgin Islands because he did have a network of backups. And over the next few years the people he was relying on as his dead-mans-switches were either turned or otherwise taken out of the picture.
Taken out of the picture why? Dershowitz, the Clintons, Gates, Black, Trump and plenty of other high profile allies certainly weren’t taken out of the picture. If they were turned, that begs the question of why? Is the deep state CIA really so moral, so ethical that they decided that they really ought to have him face real justice? That would appear unlikely. His longtime closest friend and confidante was free for a substantial period of time after his arrest herself, as were key alleged procurers or very close allies like the Dubins. In any case, the key with a dead man’s switch is obviously that your ‘friends’ (and or intelligence) have no idea how many copies there are or who has them.
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