I find it relatively easy to separate my appraisal of Volodymyr Zelensky from my view of America’s interests in Ukraine. I don’t know why so many others can’t.
A lot of rhetorical bomb-throwers decided to spend yesterday focusing their fire on how Zelensky dresses and brands himself. This is a pitiful distraction from the conversation that needs to happen.
Zelensky has never been above criticism. In Ukraine he is criticized much more freely by the people than he is in American media. His campaign against Ukrainian political corruption was selective, for instance. In fact, I think he suffered from too much criticism at first. Go back into the New York Times archives and look at the snickering tone of the coverage before the war. America’s foreign-policy blob and its mouthpieces tended to view him as too amateurish and too soft to deal with Vladimir Putin. He received criticism like this mostly because he was elected to settle the ongoing dispute in the east, and he was initially open to Putin’s diplomatic offensive. The blob tended to side with Zelensky’s right-wing ultra-nationalist critics.
Zelensky has done, what looks like to me, a very difficult job of holding a government together under tremendous stress and pressure. While the Western media have made something of a cult around him, he has done good work in maintaining the link between his personal popularity and his nation’s cause.
Focusing on his dress sense, or speculating about his home in Italy, is beside the point.
It’s a distraction from such hard questions as: What are the limits to U.S. support in Ukraine? What kind of responsibilities for rebuilding Ukraine will the United States have? Given the paucity of European support during the war, it sure looks like rebuilding Ukraine will be left to the U.S. taxpayer. Does that give us an incentive to see the war end sooner rather than later, when more of the country’s productive capacity is destroyed and more of its people are killed or have established long-term plans outside of Ukraine? What kind of economy can Ukraine really build for itself post-war? Eastern Europe, even the part that has been in the EU for over a decade, still relies on infrastructure that ties its economic fate to Russia’s to some degree. And joining the EU has been a mixed bag for those countries, as it encouraged a brain drain — where the best and brightest migrated to Germany and London. Such pressures would be even more severe on a post-war Ukraine.
Lately, it seems that the only person talking any sense on these matters is Joe Biden himself, who did more than I expected him to do in delineating and distinguishing America’s interest from Ukraine’s. Zelensky talked of “total victory,” but Biden warned that giving Ukraine certain weapons would “have the prospect of breaking up NATO” and that other NATO members “are not looking for a war with Russia.”
Critics of the war want to be taken seriously. They should offer serious criticism.