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This is nothing compared to other Ukrainian public relation efforts.
First there was picking American transgender woman as official spokesperson for Ukrainian army, who then went on unhinged rant threatening to kill "Russian propagandists" all over the world.
(speaking in English, not Russian, so it is clear that it were not Russians in Russia who were target of this threat)
This speech is there, it is something you will hear from mouth of cartoon Evil Mastermind(TM) in corny B movie, just before Action Hero(TM) storms in and drops the villain into his/her/their/zir/xir own shark tank.
Someone in charge then noticed this does not make Ukraine look exactly like Avengers team and decided to suspend Cirillo.
So sanity prevailed and all will be good (optics) from now?
Well, Zelensky just decided to make honorary "ambassador of Ukraine", of all people, Marina Abramovic, world famous performance artist.
It sounds like 4chan fake news prank, but it is real, reported by mainstream media(and then vanishing from their pages).
Ukraine knows well what it is doing, Ukraine tries hard to signal it is on the right side and win hearts and minds.
Hearts and minds of people who matter, not yours.
edit: links
No shit. They need cash and weapons now, not the support of internet contrarians who will always hate them because they had the audacity to be invaded by the Russians.
Zelensky is playing the American culture war. This isn't an indictment of Zelensky, who is in a desperate position. But it's an interesting glimpse into who really matters (and who doesn't). In Zelensky's belief, pandering to the most ridiculous beliefs of American leftists is a winning strategy. I think he's wrong about this, but it's revealing glimpse into the state of affairs.
Why do you think it is wrong? On the one side, he may gain some support from people to whom the White House may listen. On the other side, he loses the support of people who has repeatedly declared they hate him and won't give him a dime anyway. Why do you think his strategy is wrong? Not from American, but from purely transactional side with the goal of getting the most help possible the fastest way possible?
It is possible that part of the establishment does listen to the right. The movement shitting on vaccines and lockdowns was shut upon but eventually things moved a little bit more in line with their view.
By pissing plenty of people online, and acting unreasonably, Zelensky is influencing people who matter too.
Plus it matters to his country who he panders to. You aren't Ukrainian neither incidentally, and Ukraine is not a democracy.
Most importantly this kind of logic you are promoting of it doesn't matter what you do so long you pander to the far left leads to very dark path and it does imply that the people who you act as they don't matter have a license to act in a more brazzen way so they actually can matter. Just like you and the people you support like Zelensky, and the people who he aligns with have been acting quite aggressively.
People can be diplomatic with it, but we haven't yet degenerated to the point that no matter how unreasonable you are if you align with a certain faction, you won't lose support. Indeed, like most obsessions of parts of American establishment, whether covid, russiagate, or indeed foreign conflicts, eventually they will focus on a new current thing.
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I think he's losing mainstream Republicans who were firmly on Ukraine's side before.
I feel it's more the reverse - more Republicans are jumping on the bandwagon of "we are sending billions to Ukraine while (insert your actual point)" - which btw is a good example of "technically true as accounting goes but wildly misleading in substance" - mostly because it's easy and resonates with certain contingent. And that locks them into anti-Ukraine position, because you can't say that and then vote for sending more help to Ukraine - you'd be called a blowhard and a hypocrite (which most politicians are, but they hate that fact being highlighted). And given that, Zelensky doesn't have any incentive to take them into account anymore - if they are locked in into a position that doesn't help him anyway, they are lost cause, and there's no reason not to suck up to their enemies - with those at least there's a chance.
Misleading how? We now know for certain that billions are being spent to payroll Ukraine's entire civil service as well as provide direct subsidies to small businesses. It is definitively not all expired weapons writeoffs.
Again, these are very vague "billions are being spent". Which billions we are talking about? There are military aid packages. There are non-military aid packages. There are US money. There are World bank money. There are European money. If you want to audit that and point out certain spending you object to - fine, but you can't seriously discuss it in the format "our children are starving while Ukraine gets billions" - because children wouldn't benefit neither from stopping HIMARS shipments to Ukraine (children, even very hungry ones, can't eat a HIMARS rocket [citation needed]), not from stopping World Bank programs - because those programs, if not going to Ukraine, wouldn't be directed to the starving children you care so much about. If there's specific objection to specific spending - fine, it's completely OK to discuss it, but talking about all the financial help altogether as an amorphous blob of "billions" that can be freely converted and directed to any purpose is exactly what I call misleading. It doesn't work this way.
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Are you referring to the Ashton-Cirillo affair? I'm pretty sure Zelensky's not personally in charge of picking spokespersons for a minor branch of the Ukrainian army that essentially, if I've understood correctly, serves as the actual frontline army's farm team (or for getting rid of such spokespersons if they cause issues, either).
I suppose I am using the metonym. By Zelensky, I am referring to the war strategy for the country as a whole.
Are you suggesting that the transwoman was picked as the English spokesperson because she just happened to be the best person for the job? Clearly, there is a culture war angle at play here, and that whoever is calling the shots thinks that these cheap tricks will lead to more funding.
Similarly, Zelensky (actual Zelensky here) is not choosing to wear the ridiculous military fatigues because they are the most comfortable clothing available to him.
A show is being put on, and the audience is not the U.S. people as a whole, but only left wing of the Democratic Party. It's a strategy. I don't think it's the correct one personally. Zelensky should play it more straight. Ukraine is naturally sympathetic here and shouldn't alienate any of their natural allies.
A rather simple explanation for choosing Ashton-Cirillo as a spokesperson would be being one of the few native English-speaking volunteer fighters with media experience compounded with a distinct lack of military experience.
Sure, the military fatigues are a media strategy, but do you really think that the main audience for that one is "only left wing of the Democratic Party"?
Yes? This is literally Dylan Mulvaney of war propaganda, who else would take it seriously?
I meant the military fatigues, specifically.
Insofar as I’ve observed on social media, the online American factions really playing attention to Ashton-Cirillo are NAFO shibas, who would support anyone talking about killing Russians, and American conservatives who are casting out to find any evidence of Ukraine being ‘work’ for domestic culture war reasons and also probably because it makes them feel better about implicitly supporting the invading side.
Oh... Well, if the comment you're responding to mentions several things, and you only mean to respond to one, it's a good idea to quote the relevant part.
Yeah, the fatigues are funny, but don't move me either way.
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Actually Zelensky does need the support of the people funding his stupid war. It’s becoming a major issue in American politics, to the point where people are getting pretty annoyed with him.
Poland recently told him to pound sand, and compared him to a drowning person who is going to take anybody who tries to save him down with him.
Instead of playing war hero, complete with his idiotic green costume her wears all the time, and constantly referring to Russians as “invaders” like some sort of marvel movie speech, Zelensky should be negotiating a truce, or laying out reasonable pathways to ending the war, not making absurd claims like that he, who has been losing his war, is going to push Russia completely out of the LPR and DPR (areas occupied by Russians since long before Putin invaded), and somehow retake Crimea.
The whole thing is absurd. It’s a ridiculous, nationally suicidal vanity project by a former television actor, and an American president who seems to be looking for a surrogate to fulfill the fantasy version of his dead son.
This is entirely accurate, as Russian army invaded Ukraine. If Russians dislike being in position of villains, maybe they should stop invading, murdering, looting and raping.
Or at least stop being surprised why noone wants Russian little green men visiting and why everyone in regions funds Ukrainian defense. (that is because funding it now is preferable to covering both human and financial costs of being invaded by Russia)
Yeah, lets negotiate it in Budapest. Maybe call it Budapest Memorandum.
(in case above line is unclear: Russia has negative credibility and any promises of no invading they would make are useless. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum )
??? 2014 invasion was Putin's invasion. Also, right now Russia seems losing war if anyone is doing it
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Just double-checking here, but you do know that Putin did, in fact, invade Ukraine, correct?
Can you make your clear? Are you suggesting that the person you are replying to might genuinely not be aware of that, or are you just engaging in petty language policing?
I think it is likely that they know this fact, but pretend that reality is different.
Or rather, they understand that repeating words and formulations that give a one sided view of events is one of the classical principles of propaganda and you're pretending not to.
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Are you suggesting they're not invaders? "One who invades", and all that? Surely if an accurate description of actions makes them sound like Marvel villainy, the way to correct that is "don't take villainous actions", not "hope they won't be described accurately".
"Resist invasions by foreign armies" is almost definitional to being a nation. Don't do that and you're just prey.
Do you really not understand that it's not inherently ridiculous for a former television actor to stand up to Russia? This is even more obviously reaching than your sartorial complaints.
Reagan was ridiculous and he totally failed in the long run. Granted the other options were likely worse.
When I was a child, Reagan calling out the Soviet Union was ridiculous "cowboy diplomacy", anti-Communism was the hateful thing we read about in "The Crucible", the Berlin Wall had been helping imprison East Germans for a generation and a half, half of Europe was behind the Iron Curtain, the world had 60K nuclear warheads ready to obliterate half of humanity 45 minutes after someone got angry enough (or 45 minutes after a simple mistake, depending), anti-missile systems were "reckless Star Wars schemes", and tankies were still trying to get away with "both sides" false equivalences.
When I was a young adult, there was no Soviet Union, declassification was revealing more historical Communist spies and atrocities than we'd imagined, there was no Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall was a street party, the superpowers were dismantling thousands of warheads a year and no longer had the rest on a hair trigger, tactical missile defense was saving lives and theater missile defense was starting to make intercepts, and (at least for the next couple decades) it seemed like we'd seen the last of tankies.
In the long run maybe we're all dead anyway, but that was an unexpected reprieve for a couple generations at least.
Reagan's anti-communism was his redeeming quality, to be clear.
Well, that was the one quality I was referring to. And it's hard to fault him for less successful attempts to improve the country ... although if I had to pick one ticking time bomb I'd say it's a bit damning that his terms in office were (due to Congress as much as him, to be fair) when US fiscal policy stopped being "borrowing has been an indispensable tool during major wars and the Great Depression, so it's important to stay prepared by getting ahead of our debt burden the rest of the time" and transitioned to the more modern "haha T-bill printer go brrrr".
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How did Reagan fail? Reddit loves to act like he was the worse POTUS ever but he did contribute to USSR collapsing. His economic reforms caused growth to increase versus countries that failed to do the same.
He’s one of the great ones in my book.
Sometimes I just want to bash my head into the wall when people say Reagan was a failure. He was the first neoliberal/Milton Friedman back Potus. He was so incredibly successful Democrats became neoliberals and it’s now a slur against them. I had to quit being a neoliberal because my enemies stole the term. I’d argue they aren’t true neoliberals but ordoliberals would likely be more accurate but still.
The guy with the 1986 amnesty for 2.7m undocumented immigrants? Who as Governor signed the first No Fault Divorce law in the US? Traded the Hughes Amendment for the toothless FOPA? That guy is one of the greats?
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Reagan failed to roll back any of the 'civil rights' era disasters in any significant way. At a minimum, he should have been able to end with a period all of Johnson's "Great Society" nonsense, and destroy the entire 'civil rights' apparatus that had been built. Instead we got modest tax cuts and huge military spending.
What civil rights era disasters and/or apparatus are you referring to here?
The whole of the civil rights era was a disaster that broadly lead us to where we are today. The apparatus I'm referring to are the Justice Departments various offices that investigate and prosecute civil rights crap, the NGOs that feed them, etc.
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I think he means that he didn't deliver on what he was elected to do. Bush Jr. was a meh president all things considered, but if you consider "no nation building" that he ran on, he was an unmitigated disaster.
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I’m saying that constantly referring to them as “the invaders” instead of The Russians is performative.
Ukraine is prey now and their “resistance” to Russia’s invasion is going to lose them their nation, not keep it.
As soon as Americans have had enough of Zelensky’s adventure, it’s going to be over and he’s going to be left with a generation of lost men, every western investment bank salivating at helping The Ukrainians rebuild, and a bunch of destroyed cities.
No; it's precise. Most Russians, even considered by nationality, have not invaded Ukraine, and something like a third will admit to pollers that they don't even support the invasion. There's little reason, when concerned with the armies who have invaded Ukraine, to use a less precise term for them. When considering Russians by ethnicity the distinction becomes even more important: many have been among the victims of the invasion. It might be an understandable accident to lump them together with their killers when speaking imprecisely, but why would anyone ever want to do so on purpose?
That's not how game theory works.
Do you think that, if they'd allowed their capital city to be taken by the columns of invading tanks, that would have allowed them to keep their nation? Don't you think that's quite gullible? Putin made no such promises, and it's not even safe to trust agreements he does make.
This word choice is performative nonsense. Nobody thinks that shooting back at the people sending bombs and missiles and tanks and soldiers to try and conquer you is an "adventure".
It's weird that you assign so much agency to the Ukrainians here, and yet I haven't seen you assign any to the invaders. Since your concern for the Ukranian men isn't feigned, surely you agree that the choice to invade was an atrocity, right? Even the most ardent honest pacifists will agree that starting a war is more evil than fighting back instead of surrendering.
Ukraine has had those before. If we assume for your sake that the low death estimates there are correct and the high death estimates of the current war are correct, the war has to get about 30 times more deadly before the death toll of opposing Russia exceeds the death toll of being controlled by Russia.
Obviously there is no good reason to suppose that being controlled by Russia will lead to a new Holomdor. And a peace settlement does not result in Ukraine being controlled by Russia.
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I get it. Putin is the bad guy. Russia is the bad guy.
But in the real world: Zelensky has no path to realistically expelling Russia from the land they want, short of dragging the rest of the world into WW3.
If you really want to game it out: Zelensky has every reason to try and escalate this conflict. His best option is to drag my children into a war so that he can take some land back from Russia. The problem is: I’m not willing to send my children to their death so that Zelensky can have a little bit more land in the northeast of Ukraine. I’m also not willing to risk an all out nuclear conflict so that Zelensky can have more land in northeastern Ukraine.
Lock Zelensky and Putin (the bad guy Russia is bad Russia invaded Ukraine Russia bad) in a room together and demand that they hammer out a peace deal. That IS going to result in Russia keeping some of the land they’ve taken. In exchange Ukraine gets to keep a couple of hundred thousand young men alive.
As far as what is a nation: The United States is a nation too. It is not in our vital national security interests to escalate a regional conflict to the point where we are sending our children to their death. If Zelensky wants to continue his national suicide then go for it, but I’m not funding it anymore, and if he succeeds in escalating it to WW3, no promises he doesn’t end up on the other side when the US has gamed out her interests.
It's astonishing the level of dishonesty that goes into writing a paragraph like this.
It's not Zelensky doing this. If Zelensky negotiated a surrender to Russia right now, the Ukrainian people would toss his ass to the curb and probably kill him for it.
Ah so he has no option to negotiate?
Have you signed yourself up for the Ukrainian foreign legion yet or no?
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If by the "Ukrainian people" you mean the people in charge behind Biden and Zelensky. There's a surprising number of people in Biden's inner circle that seem to have ties to a certain region West of Russia.
Realistically speaking, the men getting sent to the meat-grinder at gun point are not a threat to Zelensky. Only people close to him, you know, whoever flies him around to Canada and the US etc.
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Making it a financial drain is all you need. Russia only has so many tanks, planes, etc. in storage that can be re-activated. While there are efforts to step up defense production, it's not easy and Russia is a thoroughly corrupt nation whose government hemorrhages money into the pockets of whoever holds it at every step.
Zelensky, meanwhile, gets the financial, material, and ideological support not only of many different powerful nations to keep the war going, but their populations as well.
It is 100% in the US' interests to ensure the world order isn't realigned to favor Russian tactics. Every country planning on doing something similar is going to realize that going to war against the combined power of the Western order must be done with far more care.
If you only care as that your own nation isn't invaded, so be it, but much of the prosperity America enjoys stems from America's export of security to the numerous smaller players. Take that away and you've got a poorer America. Those players each contribute to that defense in their own ways as well, even if they don't spend enough directly on their own militaries.
Yes but as few tanks and guns and ammo as Russia has, Ukraine has even fewer, it's why they are entirely depending on Zelensky flying around the world in his green outfit and begging/shaming other countries into funding his war.
Look it's horseshit that Putin invaded. That sucks for the Ukrainian people that are suffering, but Zelensky is only prolonging the suffering. This is not a marvel movie where the good guys win. The guys with more artillery, more land, more calories for their troops, more money, and more ability to threaten the rest of the world win. In this case, that is Putin.
Putin is going to win, the only question at this point is how long it's going to take, and how many young Ukrainian men are going to die.
The only way that doesn't happen is if Zelensky succeeds in starting WW3. I hope that nobody is deranged enough to think that is a reasonable sacrifice for the rest of the world so that he doesn't have to go to the negotiating table.
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It’s not about a little bit of land in the northeast of Ukraine. It’s the entire country. They would cease to be a people. It would be a choice between mass emigration and living under an Iron curtain.
It’s like the supposedly realist don’t know anything about how Russia has treated them historically.
I thought they wanted half, and that they periodically send messages through unofficial channels that they'd be ok with NATO rolling into the other half?
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Zelensky was always much more conciliatory to Russia than the vast majority of other post-2014 politicians, he seemed not to even believe an invasion was coming until it actually happened. Describing him as embarking on a
...is really weird, he was much less jingoistic or nationalist than Poroshenko. Ukrainian nationalists really didn't like Zelensky (and many still don't) out of perceived weakness versus Russia before 2022. He also has no real choice but to keep fighting, he'd be shot in the back if he pursued major concessions now.
Do you think US support for Ukraine would be different if Donald Trump was still President?
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