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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.
Here's another motive. Zelensky might be surrounded by people who are anti-Russia and they might just make him "a devastating mistake made in the chaos of war."
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I guess not everyone is the kind of respectable elder statesman that Trump is.
It has been said that the west will defend Ukraine to the last Ukrainian soldier, and there is some truth in that. For NATO, Ukraine is a great geostrategic investment. We pay peanuts (compared to the NATO military budget) to weaken the primary opponent of NATO and get someone else to do all the dying for us. As a bonus, the country we support is much more sympathetic than the mujaheddin were back in the old days and seem much less likely to disrupt the NYC real estate market.
Obviously, Ukraine is going to take NATO aid as long as they want to resist Putin. But expecting them to be more grateful to NATO than the mujaheddin were would be unrealistic.
Now enter Trump. This dude starts "peace talks" with Russia, immediately makes big concessions to Putin while calling Zelensky a dictator. Then he invites him to the White House and expects him to grovel. Even if Zelensky did everything Trump wanted, signed the deal, wore whatever Trump felt was appropriate, rolled over on command and so on, Trump will not be satisfied and keep the military aid flowing. In the end, he expects Ukraine to accept some peace deal he is negotiating with Putin.
When you are fighting a war, national pride (however much I might detest the concept) is an asset. Zelensky getting humiliated by Trump would definitely affect the fighting spirit of Ukrainians, and is likely not worth the few extra bombs Trump might deliver before cutting their flow to force Ukraine to accept a deal he has made with his best buddy Putin.
Swallowing your pride to keep US intelligence assets feeding you information and some level of payment for your entire civilian infrastructure doesn't seem that bad a deal.
Everyone forgets that this mineral deal was Zelensky's idea. So on some level he was okay with it.
But it looks like he thought he could get security guarantees out of it, and when Trump told him no, he forced the issue despite having no leverage. Or simply misspoke his way into a diplomatic insult. (Seriously, who tells any head of state "you will soon feel [consequences]" to their face in front of the whole world and expects to get away with it?)
Either way, Ukraine is barely holding on as it is despite the immense bravery and sacrifice of its soldiery, if the US cuts support, even if the EU doesn't, it's over.
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I think that
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My image, as someone who had followed Ukrainian politics close enough to not have a particularly positive image of Zelensky before the invasion, is that when he was woken up and told that the Russians had started a full-scale invasion instead of a more limited op that they had probably been expecting, he probably freaked out a bit and then finally went "Ahh, shit, I have to 100 % commit to an image of a great wartime leader now, don't I?" and then did exactly that. Since he's an actor he found this relatively easy, and obviously when you act as something long enough there's less and less difference to being one, though it still doesn't make him a master tactician when he's committed to some military course of action instead of what the generals are suggesting.
Largely agree with this. In light of it, I wonder if something like that blowup wasnt inevitable. The image of the great wartime leader doesnt exactly gel with taking a deal where you accept you lost - and realistically, he will have to take territorial losses.
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Zelensky was elected to reconcile with Russia, ran on that platform and had many close contacts and business partners in Russia before entering politics. I would guess he hates Russia was than the average Ukrainian, although maybe that’s changed depending on what you believe about assassination attempts etc.
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Is it so hard to imagine that it might be the first one, and he simply fumbled? One thing that it is easy to forget, or might get lost in translation, is that Zelenskiy is not a strong politician. I still remember when I saw his address to the Russian people, which he released when Russia first invaded, and realised just how little he fit the mold of any successful or competitive politician archetype in the Eastern Bloc (or elsewhere). He does not have the cold judgmental mien of old-school apparatchik types like Putin or Mishustin, nor the artificial boorish anger of the People's Tribune types like Zhirinovsky, nor the slick scammy '90s businessman aura of Medvedev or Poroshenko; instead, in that particular moment, I really couldn't see him as anything other than a tired middle-aged Slav who got interrupted during a shirtless solo grilling session at his dacha by a bunch of thugs with baseball bats. Next to hawkish Russian Telegram channels gleefully posting mugshots of gentle-faced Ukrainian pilots to declare them "annihilated", this was probably the saddest moment of the early days of the war for me.
Everything he has done seems consistent with having the best intentions at every turn while fate takes improbable turns from bad to worse, but not having the cunning or foresight to plan further than one step ahead, nor the latitude to assert himself over the multitude of forces that are constraining and threatening him, nor even the people skills to see through or even just resist all the natural politicians* that he is forced to play ball with, nor any superhuman mental fortitude. Unfortunately, almost everyone either subscribes to the Western propaganda picture of him as a brilliant Churchillian leader, or the Russian propaganda picture of him as a wily actor wrapping people around his finger. He is not the former, and even though he is a former actor, the quality waterline of acting in the Eastern Bloc is very low (and Russians are probably blind to this). In this light, I would propose that he simply misjudged - everybody probably told him that Trump tests your mettle but ultimately respects nobody more than a tough negotiator, and between 8 hours of jetlag and three years of ducking around in bunkers and not knowing when you will be hit by a Russian missile or shot in the back by your underlings, he just may have been understandably too out of it to read any warning signs that this was not working out after all and stop himself from digging in deeper.
*Western politicians are scary. Almost every real-life interaction I had with one felt like a Voice of Saruman moment.
Can you give more detail on an example? I havent met any top-brass, but so far thats not my impression.
Hard to do more recent ones for opsec reasons, but as a schoolkid on a school newspaper I once somehow (fun story in itself, but unfortunately also an opsec issue) got to interview Otto Schily, then-minister of interior of Germany. Being your run-of-the-mill vaguely anarchy-sympathising student, I considered him a natural enemy, and he spouted nothing but the tritest platitudes on the subject of the interview, but I was enthralled in more or less exactly the LotR way (Wow. This kindly old man is so likeable. Surely he has $problem under control. I should just listen and thank him. Everything will be all right.) and completely failed to even try to question the non-answers. After it ended, I looked over my notes, reflected on the incongruous feeling that can only be described as afterglow, and wondered wtf just happened.
Hm. Any theories on why it happens in person, but not hearing them otherwise?
Apart from some really out-there ones like unusually agreeable pheromones, my best guess would be that it involves rapport-building body language. There are at least two schools of analysing and optimising microexpressions to control another person's impression of you (police interrogators and pick-up artists), starting with trickery like "mimic their posture" or "cross your legs so that the upper of the legs points towards them" that is not particularly subtle but already below the level of what someone not deliberately paying attention would notice. If any of this is effective, it would make sense to me if top politicians are pretty heavily selected for natural aptitude at it. As with the two "trickery" examples, the most effective tricks may require physical presence and attuning to an individual target.
I guess Im surprised that this worked on someone like you. Im a bit unsure if my own weirdness is more autistic or sociopathic, maybe that has something to do with it.
It would certainly help, but a lot of politics is also about doing well in impersonal interactions, more so the higher you go. Where you would really expect a lot of this is someone who sells things, but at a high enough level that you wouldnt just call him a salesman. Maybe someone like Trump.
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I was very good friends with a girl who was a die hard, life-long Democrat. Like, door-to-door campaigning in middle school, joking about how much she'd like to be Bill Clinton's intern in the mid-00s, etc. I went to college with her and she spent her days preparing to be Leslie Knope and tangling with [famous conservative firebrand]. Her first real job in politics was somehow as an intern for a red state Republican senator, and she came back absolutely gushing about him. They had fun chats and he gave her a cute pet name and everything!
I was just flabbergasted. "Senator [recognizable name]? Neocon, evangelical fundamentalist, anti-gay, anti-abortion, Iraq War-supporting Senator [recognizable name]? I'm not mixing him up with some other Senator [recognizable name]?"
And she'd just cheerfully go "Yeah, him! Great guy."
Voice of Saurman is a solid analogy.
Even famously poor charisma politicians like Al Gore will totally eat the ego of an average person, especially if the meeting is accompanied by the accoutrements.
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Every normie that I've heard talk about interacting with politicians seems to have had that experience.
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you have omitted the fact that he said he would resign in exchange for security guarantees, and giving away half of ukraines mineral resources doesnt exactly scream "wellbeing for the ukrainian people" either especially when trump insists the deal does not even bring security guarantees with it
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I generally found this post remarkably insightful, but I found this particular section of the analysis very weak, in a way speaking to heavy consumption of propaganda - and your overall point rests on it. I know that I'm going right for the weakest point made, but still - inappropriate attire, really? He's the leader of a country in the midst of an existential war; his presentation was as expected.
I disagree. I assure you that even if the war caused a shortage of suits in Ukraine, there'd still be more than a few left for the President, and I'm pretty sure even leaders of countries that got steamrolled by the Nazis during WWII were still wearing proper attire.
It was clear from day one what he's doing, his entire getup screams "I'd be wearing a uniform if I could get away with it".
I think there is a world of a difference between the plain military fatigues he is wearing and some generalissimo uniform (which Trump would doubtlessly have found more acceptable).
Every politician performs in part for the people at home. I guess the message he wants to convey to his soldiers in the trenches is "Like you, I had this war forced upon me. Like you, I am at the risk of Russian bombings. We are fighting for the same thing."
As every political messaging, it is a bit silly, but it is a brand which has worked for him so far. Zelensky decided that it is more important to stay on-brand for his people than to appease Trump by being his dress-up doll. I think he was correct.
'his dress-up doll'? That's some serious spin for being asked to wear a suit like a grown up instead of larping as Nick Fury.
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Churchill came to America dressed in war fatigues didn't he?
Once, or to the point you couldn't make him wear anything else? And didn't Churchill actually have a military career?
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I thought his attire was no big deal at first. Then I read that trumps aids informed him that Trump would prefer he wear a suit. This is basically a slap in the face. And Trump seemed to even take it in stride joking “all dressed up today?” I’m guessing it didn’t help him though when he continued to be an asshole by continually bringing up security grantees in front of the press - when he clearly had been told that’s not on the table.
Maybe security guarantees could be provided in exchange for a besuited Zelenskyy.
That but seriously! I don't think he's likely to suit up until the war is over at least on paper.
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Like a woman showing her cleavage, he knew what he was doing.
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You're also missing - the need to appease various institutional interests in his own government; the desire to not be seen to back down or "lose"; epistemic closure brought on by only interacting with friendly media; and others.
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I think this analysis misses the fundamental character of human beings. The Zelensky that acquiesces to this is the kind of Zelensky that flees Kiev.
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Why do you not posit Fear of Russia as a primary candidate?
Particularly since it can overlap and even supersede the framing of any of the other categories you do posit.
For an attempt to psycho-analyze a leader, or even discuss what a 'will of the people' would entail, it's odd to not address the role 'fear,' both collective and individual, would have in driving decisions. Particular for a war that will quite possibly qualify as a cultural-generational trauma event, if you believe such things can exist.
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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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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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Yeah agree. Surprised you don’t see this mentioned more. Ukraine used to be ranked one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and now we are sending them hundreds of billions of aid dollars?
Surely Z and his top guys have hundreds of millions to billions stashed away in offshore accts by now
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I don’t see this as about his country’s wellbeing. The war, at this point is doing more harm than good. The infrastructure is in tatters, he’s lost almost all of Donbas, and he’s only maintaining status quo by abducting men and women to send to the front. None of that helps the people of Ukraine.
Two doesn’t work either. Again, almost everyone who could have left is in Eastern European NATO countries. Th3 rest are dodging the press gangs abducting people in the streets. Ukraine hasn’t even had an election since the war started. If you have to kidnap your army, it’s highly unlikely that the people have the will to fight.
Arresting draft dodgers is completely normal behaviour, even in peacetime. And every country has had enough draft dodgers that if Twitter had existed there would have been enough material to make pictures of draft dodgers being arrested go viral.
It is electing draft dodgers President that is the exception, dear Americans. (This isn't a partisan dig - the Dems, GOPe and MAGA are all guilty)
The relevant question is not "Is the number of draft dodgers greater than zero?" It is "Are there significantly more draft dodgers in 2020s Ukraine than in other democracies at war?" And unfortunately any reliable statistics that exist on that point have not been published. But the battlefield performance of the Ukrainian army profoundly doesn't look like the textbook examples of an American client state army who doesn't want to fight (e.g. South Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan).
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Are they really abducting women too?
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What's with the way people use this point? Ukraine is engaging in a deliberate policy of recruiting older people because they don't want to kill off their younger generation. The minimum age for conscription was 27 until they lowered it to 25 in 2024. This is bad enough when people are using it make some "Ukraine is running out of manpower" point, which true or false is not supported by them recruiting people of the ages they are deliberately trying to recruit. However it seems even more ill-suited to make your current argument: if it's a mistaken policy, then it is one that if anything panders too hard towards the will of the people.
Because of demographic declines that happened before the war, the 16-18 demographic of Ukraine is tiny compared to the older ones. Drafting 18 year olds isn’t going to open vast new reserves of troops.
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I don't believe Zelensky's current position is enviable. It's fun to be a corrupt dictator of some backwater no one cares about; less so when your country's being bombed, including occasional shots at the capital, while your job requires you to scramble around Europe and USA playing beggar-slash-hero, and the ultranationalists within your power structure allegedly aim guns at your back in case you have any thoughs of defecting.
I think 'hold on to power' can be equivocated with 'hold onto life'. If he takes a bad peace deal (even if necessary or forced to do so) there's a good chance he'll be dead within a year.
Zelensky has had numerous opportunities to bug out, starting on day 1 of the invasion. If he wanted to bug out and surrender tomorrow, the Trump administration would help him do it, because that achieves their goals in Ukraine. He could just have told a suitably senior aide that he didn't want to go back to Ukraine.
I do not think the ultranationalist opposition in Ukraine is powerful enough to whack Zelensky outside Ukraine. OTOH the Russians are, and might be daft enough to try.
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Russia started this with a failed attempt at a decapitation strike on the Ukrainian government. Starting from that point, I see why Zelensky doesn't want "peace in our time".
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That sorta falls into the “do what you can for self preservation” which is understandable motivation even if not exactly noble
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