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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.
In that case it's clear that your assumptions about dissident rightists bear little resemblance to reality.
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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.
I would hazard a guess that a peace platform with "Russian separatists in Donbass" in 2021 and a peace platform with Russia shelling you and rolling the tanks in in 2022 are two different peace platforms.
Politicians should follow election platforms blindly without regard to changing circumstances like enchanted broomsticks from "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" until an election gives them the opportunity to adopt a new platform.
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There is evidence Russia was positioning for a large scale war and being isolated for years. They cleaned up their finances a lot since 2014. Still had 350 billion to be claimed out there but they had positioned their budget to be able to handle being cutoff.
The whole peace thing makes sense if Russia was willing to take a deal on Crimea plus breakaway republics but their actions indicate their peace condition was Ukraine not being in the EU and orienting their trade to Russia instead of the richer west.
I don't understand why this makes them less likely to want a peaceful solution. If I wanted peace and felt threatened that's what I would do, were I big or small.
It’s evidence that Russia wasn’t looking for a “reasonable” peace deal but were always angling to conquor the whole thing.
Yes Ukraine should want peace. Nobody disagrees with that but it feels a bit like a Jew wanting peace with Hitler. He was only offering them the gas chamber.
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Once you've invested sufficiently in military build-up, you need to somehow translate that buildup into some sort of gain for yourself, or you've wasted a lot of money for nothing. Armies have inertia.
That's fair enough, although one would expect that using them as leverage in negotiation and the odd colonial intervention would be enough right?
This is why I didn't expect the war to happen in the first place. Sustained wars have the ability to sap your military standing and it is almost always better to use strength as a diplomatic tool if you can.
I guess Boris was sent to call the bluff, and not without reason when we look at the Russian performance.
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Do you think that Zelensky's attitude to Russia changed because a disgraced British politician sat on him, or because the Russian army invaded his country and committed the normal (i.e. large) number of atrocities that ill-disciplined armies commit when they invade a country.
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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.
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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.
To be sure. But I was alive then and it coheres with my own experiences.
From what I could gather then people were in a haze of confusion and horror for a long time and what crystallized it into what it became was Dubya's legitimately great speech. I'd be willing to stake a lot on the idea that had he spun it a different way than it being an attack on freedom itself the war in Irak may never have happened.
Unfortunately we can't test that. But the reason I believe in my model is that things as shocking as 9/11 I've seen happen elsewhere in countries where a war on terror wasn't in the interests of the ruling class, and those somehow failed to materialize the will for such a thing despite clearly fertile ground.
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Somehow the Ukrainian electorate has no idea about it... That's no problem, there are enough Americans who can explain Ukrainians what they really want.
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