PC

Zelensky, Brussels, 2023: “We cannot follow Russia’s example and force people into war with sticks. We are not that kind of country, because that would be a paradox. We are fighting for European values.” In the video from Rivne👇, you can see Zelensky’s press gangs trying to drag a man out of his car to send him into the meat grinder. They beat him with sticks and eventually crack his head.

If you haven’t read my new piece about Zelensky, who has become the boss of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis and all sorts of ultranational fanatics, you’re very welcome to check it out. Celebrated as the Jewish face of Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression, Volodymyr Zelensky is often presented as the ultimate rebuttal to any discussion of neo-Nazism in wartime Ukraine. This article challenges that comforting narrative. It traces how, under Zelensky’s presidency, far-right military formations have expanded, foreign neo-Nazis have found a battlefield and a networking hub in Ukraine, and the rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators has entered the political mainstream. substack.com/@martahavryshko…

⁉️“Why don’t you, Ukrainians, just overthrow Zelensky’s regime and end the war?” I get asked this a lot. Because Zelensky does not exist in a political vacuum. His power rests on several pillars: 🎲Western sponsors. They have every reason to stick with a Ukrainian leadership willing to wage what I regard as NATO’s proxy war against Russia — with Ukrainian lives supplying the manpower. 🎲Heavily armed, NATO-equipped far-right formations. There are Azov-based units, now organized into major military formations, along with other right-wing units such as Reid, Karpatska Sich, DUK, and other neo-Nazis under the HUR umbrella. Their ideological hard core consists of people committed to confrontation with Russia for as long as it takes — apparently including until the heat death of the universe. Hence the tendency to describe virtually any negotiated peace as “capitulation.” 🎲The oligarchs and the military-industrial complex. War is also a business, and for some people, an exceptionally good one. Companies such as Fire Point have every commercial incentive to keep the orders coming. If the war lasts another decade, there will always be another grandiose strategic objective to sell — the defeat of Moscow, the collapse of Russia, victory just over the next horizon. 🎲“Civil society.” Ukraine has hundreds of NGOs funded by Western governments and foundations. They present their mission in the language of democracy, reform, “decolonization,” and every other wholesome item on the NGO tasting menu. In practice, this network also functions as an enormous apparatus of Western influence, helping turn Ukraine into a Western military outpost while calling the process liberation from Russian imperialism. The irony is doing some fairly heavy lifting here. So tell me: how exactly are ordinary people supposed to get rid of this whole merry fraternity of bloodsuckers in vyshyvanka, shouting “Slava Ukraini” while bleeding the country dry?🙄