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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 do you call the 1991 independence vote in which 84% of people voted and 92% of those voters voted for independence?
A justification ritual.
Only someone who believes in the metaphysical claim that votes can reveal the will of the people feels bound by them. Since I understand the mechanics of democracy, I believe no such thing. People can be made to vote for anything.
Voting is a justification ritual. The question is if that's only what it is.
What, in your world, does it mean Ukrainians to overwhelmingly vote in favor independence? Is the concept incoherent because Ukrainians, like all others, are not collectively anything?
What it means is that Ukrainian nationalists, a small organized minority with preexisting goals that had existed in various forms and been trying to get independence by any means since the later 1910s finally managed, without the imminent threat of Soviet retaliation looming anymore, to hold enough of the levers of power to enact it and arranged for a ritual to announce that they could do it. Since they were ideologically democrats, this took the form of a vote.
I do not see the vote as instrumental to their ability to enact their agenda, only as a form of triumph.
In this sense it it wrong to see the voters (be they or be they not the "people") as significant actors. Had the nationalists obtained their nation through other means, such as through previously favored fascist vanguardism, they would have simply organized a different form of triumph than a vote.
But Ukraine didn't become independent because people voted on it. People voted on it because independence had been secured.
How do you square "small organized minority" with the overwhelming numbers on the independence side of the vote?
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