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Can’t blame them for doing what they have to do in a desperate situation.
Of course, if Zelensky had been more pusillanimous / conciliatory to the Russians the same online dissident rightists would be decrying him as a disloyal Jew who sold out brave Ukrainian nationalists to Putin and the (((Oligarchs))) in exchange for shekels wired to his Israeli bank account, so ¯\(ツ)/¯
Do you mean before or after the war broke out?
After, as before he was comparatively pro-Russian by the standards of post-Maidan Ukrainian politicians.
Considering that Zelenskyy won the 2019 election in a landslide on a peace platform, committing to peace talks with the Russian separatists in Donbas, I wouldn’t call ‘following up on his campaign promises’ to be selling out the large majority who elected him for that purpose.
As John Mearsheimer has noted, it was only once Zelenskyy departed from his peace posture, sabotaged by NATO minion Boris Johnson in April 2022, that he no longer represented the wishes of the Ukrainian electorate and only then betrayed them.
Wait, so is supporting the hardcore Ukrainian Azov/Banderite nationalists who want to fight to the end and never surrender the democratic or non-democratic decision now? It’s hard to keep track with the endless flip-flopping of ‘realist’, isolationist and general contrarian Twitter takes. Should Zelensky have been a citizen-of-nowhere globalist who sold out to the Russians and expat-ed to Israel at the earliest opportunity, or should he have stayed and allowed the hardcore nationalists to fight to the end (and tried to get them more weapons) as he has done?
There’s no real consistency to criticism of him. His detractors can’t seem to decide whether he’s too weak, too stubborn, too much of a NATO cuck or too powerful and humiliating western governments who are trying to rein in his maximalism. Usually it’s whatever’s convenient for their argument. To me, he seems to be committed to doing what the people of Ukraine want, which is to exercise their bloodlust and to fight, whatever happens and whatever is strategically ‘right’, to the last man.
There is no such thing as popular will. Nor is there any such thing as the people, of Ukraine or anywhere else.
Zelensky is a fairly standard if aesthetically eccentric eastern european politician who will do whatever it takes to stay alive and in power, in that order.
To that end, and like every politician, he has to reach an equilibrium between the interests of national and international powers and factions, which leads him, like every politician, to seemingly contradictory policy and criticism for said policy. You should expect contradiction, since it's inherent to the exercise of power.
If you want to get an analytical answer as to why Zelensky makes a decision and if that was effective for his goals, you need to look at those actions in the context of interacting with those surrounding established factions and powers. Not ask theological questions such as "what do the people of Ukraine want".
What utter Thatcherite nonsense.
Remember September 11? Did Americans go "Huh, something happened over there in New York? How about that, good thing it's got nothing to do with me"? Or did they go "OH YOU WANT A FIGHT BOY, LET'S GO"?
Was that before or after they were told how to think about it by the authorities and who the object of their ire should be, at times on completely false pretenses?
The media demanded a war neocons had wanted for a while and they got it. Had the elite of the time been radically against the intelligence community instead of for it they probably would have asked for the dismantling of the CIA and got it on also perfectly justifiable grounds.
"Americans" are perfectly unable to "want" anything because they are a category made up by a civil religion whose "will" is tied to the interests of institutions. They "want" what the NYT says they want and if they do not are ignored and marginalized.
Individual Americans may have wanted a whole lot, including a full investigation of those events, but they only got what they were told they wanted and what few they could organize to make happen. Because that is how power works.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember that day, but...before. Absolutely 100% before.
Just because you have a nice, coherent model of how society works that fits neatly in your head, that doesn't mean your model is correct.
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