“All glory is fleeting,” a long-dead sage once said. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:
Volodymyr Zelensky may have been the perfect president to lead Ukraine through the war with Russia. But he may not be the perfect president to lead them out.
Zelensky has made it difficult for himself to get out of the picture he felt he needed to paint to get Ukraine through the war. To maintain the support of Ukrainians and of Ukraine’s partners in the political West, Zelensky promised, not only that Ukraine would reclaim its territory up to its prewar borders, but that it would claim all its territory to its 2014 borders, including the Donbas and Crimea. He also promised – even decreed – that Ukraine would not negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both promises now make it very difficult for Zelensky to negotiate an end to the war. And were he to try, the same ultra-right nationalists who persuaded him off his campaign peace platform are there to persuade him from returning to it.
Zelensky now finds himself fighting a war on two fronts: one a military one on the battlefield against Russia and one a political one in Kiev. Both are becoming more difficult.
In a war that is being fought largely on the US and NATO’s insistence that Ukraine not surrender the right to join NATO, Zelensky has recently had to admit both that “unfortunately, we did not achieve the desired results [in the counteroffensive]. And this is a fact” and that he doesn’t know if Ukraine will ever be allowed to join NATO.
Once untouchable, Zelensky’s political situation in Ukraine is becoming more threatening. “A prominent MP” in Zelensky’s party has said that political “jostlings [have] already made Ukraine ‘unstable’,” according to reporting in The Economist. Zelensky, according to the report, has attempted to “shut down dissent” by “centralis[ing] decision making.” But the strategy is “having the opposite effect.”
