On Zelensky's failure. It's worse than you knew

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Sorry, didn't reach the list...

> The current war is a prolongation of the war of 2014, which started when Kiev sent troops to Donbass to suppress anti-Maidan rebellion under the premise of the so-called “anti-terrorist operation.” The acknowledgement of this broader context does not presuppose the approval of Russia’s “military operation,” but it implies the acknowledgement that Ukraine is also responsible for what is going on. Framing the issue of the current war in terms of a fight of civilization against barbarism or democracy against autocracy is nothing else but manipulation.

I believe WW III de facto started on February 20, 2014. Strange, how nobody is interested in who fired the shots heard around the world on that day.

In defense of Zelensky: At least he made an attept to implement the Minsk Accords. The Banderites told him that they would hang him from a tree if he continued on this path, and that was that. I asked Martin Dietze to comment on this report, also by the Grayzone, as he can read the original sources, but he did not:

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/04/nazis-ukrainian-war-russia/

The Western powers did nothing to implement the Accords, not even the signatory states showed much interest.

The Pinochet comparison is apt. Some state that Ukraine is being "denied agency" (how neatly woke lingo and geopolitics can fit together) by critics. Ukraine's agency, i.e. the democratic will of its people, was denied in 2014 ("Yats is the guy").

Zelensky's world tour was not everywhere as successful as in the US and the UK. The Greek parliament was not amused when an Azov commander appeared on screen, the Knesset found the comparison between Ukraine's plight and the Holocaust quite inappropriate. His script writers should have stuck to the equivalents of those he quoted elsewhere: Churchill, Shakespeare or, unbelievably, Martin Luther King.

This might be of interest for some:

-- As the death toll in Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine continues to rise, there have only been a handful of Westerners publicly questioning NATO and the West’s role in the conflict. These voices are becoming fewer and further between as a wave of feverish backlash engulfs any dissent on the subject. One of these voices belongs to Professor Michael Brenner, a lifelong academic, Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins, as well as former Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas. Brenner’s credentials also include having worked at the Foreign Service Institute, the U.S. Department of Defense and Westinghouse, and written several books on American foreign policy.

(...) Brenner recently declared that, aside from having already said his piece on Ukraine, one of the main reasons he sees for giving up on expressing his opinions on the subject is that “it is manifestly obvious that our society is not capable of conducting an honest, logical, reasonably informed discourse on matters of consequence. Instead, we experience fantasy, fabrication, fatuousness and fulmination.” He goes on to decry President Joe Biden’s alarming comments in Poland when he all but revealed that the U.S. is—and perhaps has always been—interested in a Russian regime change.

On this week’s “Scheer Intelligence,” Brenner tells host Robert Scheer how the recent attacks he received—many of a personal, ad hominem nature—were some of the most vitriolic he’s ever experienced. The two discuss how many media narratives completely leave out that the eastward expansion of NATO, among other Western aggressions against Russia, played an important part in fueling the current humanitarian crisis. Corporate media’s “cartoonish” depiction of Russian president Vladimir Putin, adds Brenner, is not only misleading, but dangerous given the nuclear brinkmanship that has ensued. --

https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/15/michael-brenner-american-dissent-on-ukraine-is-dying-in-darkness/

I'll repeat that: "[I]t is manifestly obvious that our society is not capable of conducting an honest, logical, reasonably informed discourse on matters of consequence. Instead, we experience fantasy, fabrication, fatuousness and fulmination.”

It is the same here in Germany.