Zelenski’s becoming a has-been. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:
You are feted by Washington’s most celebrated and powerful and featured as Time magazine’s Man of the Year. You return home in triumph bearing pledges of tens of billions of dollars in support for your war against a feared and hated invader. But a year later, everything looks a lot different with all the backslappers and glad handers curiously unwilling to get together to talk strategy. You are angry and show it, leaving with little more than a lot of promises that you know to be empty. When you get home, you realize that the end is coming. What a difference a year makes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky!
The decline and fall of Zelensky has been detailed in a lengthy Time magazine article entitled “‘Nobody Believes in Our Victory Like I Do.’ Inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight”, the same journal that was celebrating him over a year ago. The article is extraordinary in terms of what it reveals about the inner workings of the Ukrainian war effort. It was written by Simon Shuster, a Time journalist who covered Zelensky’s visit to Washington and New York in September and then returned with the president back to Ukraine for follow-up interviews and inquiry. Shuster was given extraordinary access both to Zelensky for in depth interviews and to Ukrainian senior officers and other officials and he was able to enter into frank exchanges about what was happening to the country, its army and its government as the war continues well into its second year with winter weather looming and doubts surfacing about NATO and US continuing support for Kiev.
The tale begins with Zelensky’s planned visit to Washington after his stop in New York City to attend the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. Zelensky’s actual message to the General Assembly was not quite so incendiary and impulsive as some of his other interactions while on his visit, but he offered little new. He reportedly received an obligatory “warm welcome” from those in attendance, but “he delivered his address to a half-full house, with many delegations declining to appear and listen to what he had to say.” He warned those present that “The goal of the present war against Ukraine is to turn our land, our people, our lives, our resources into a weapon against you, against the international rules-based order. We have to stop it. We must act united to defeat the aggressor.” Zelensky did go overboard when he referred to Russia and Russians as “evil” and as “terrorists” and accused them of carrying out a “genocide” against Ukraine.
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