Taking into account comments on the article “US Citizens and Media on Russia’s Actions in Ukraine,” published by the New Eastern Outlook, and readers’ inquiries about what Americans themselves and the American media are saying about the Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, the following selection of materials on this issue is proposed.
As Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder recently stated in writing, the United States has already provided more than $15.5 billion to Ukraine through this military department alone since 2014, although this figure appears to many experts to be significantly understated. After all, in just the first four months of Moscow’s special operation in Ukraine, the administration of US President Joe Biden and the MPs of both parties of the United States, who promised to resist Russia in the Ukraine crisis, have allocated more funds to Kyiv than the US spent in Afghanistan in the first five years, according to the Americans and their messages on the social media.
However, against the background of the successful development of Moscow’s special operation to denazify Ukraine, representatives of the military and political elite and the US media finally began to think about the justification of American support for the Nazi authorities in Kyiv. As The New York Times noted on July 9, US officials and analysts said that it would be difficult to maintain “the same level of material support” for Kyiv amid “growing conflict fatigue” “on both sides of the Atlantic.”
“The Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian state apparatus are actually on the payroll of the United States,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson noted on July 26. And in these conditions, Americans do not understand the behavior of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who in his yet another interview demonstrated a complete disregard for the interests of American taxpayers suffering from high inflation, the channel stressed. And the guest of the program TV – the founder of CD Media L. Todd Wood expressed his belief that the elite of Ukraine and the United States benefits from the armed conflict in Ukraine.
Under these circumstances, US citizens sharply criticize Zelenskyy’s behavior and his calls for the US to further increase its financial and military support to Ukraine, despite the fact that the United States themselves has recently experienced significant financial and economic difficulties. As National Review columnist Nate Hochman noted on July 28, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should not simply dismiss US domestic problems while demanding further support from Washington. At the same time, he recalled that in a May Pew Research Center poll, 7 out of 10 Americans called inflation “a very big problem for the country,” which is why this issue is most pressing for the public in the United States. “It is not Zelensky’s place to determine the foreign policy of the United States … [This policy] must look first and foremost to the interests of the American people,” Hochman stressed.
While billions of dollars and euros from the US and EU regularly flow into Ukrainian coffers, Ukrainian corrupt officials, and the US and European military-industrial complex benefit from the conflict. They do not care about the suffering and death of the people. Neither Zelenskyy nor his cabinet care about Ukraine’s stability and integrity, writes the American Thinker. Zelenskyy and his inner circle only care about the billions in financial aid. Ukraine received $51.3 billion from 2014 to 2020, but most of this huge sum was embezzled by the country’s economic, military, and political elites. With their moral code, Zelenskyy and the ruling elite want to turn Ukraine into a black hole where billions of dollars and euros disappear without a trace. The greater the devastation in Ukrainian cities, the greater the civilian casualties, and the more extensive the territorial losses, the stronger the Ukrainian image of victimhood and the better for Zelenskyy in the political sense.
Former US intelligence official Scott Ritter on August 8 described the threat to cut off arms supplies as an important lever of pressure on Kyiv. He stressed that the United States could use it to deter Ukrainian forces from making any unjustified or dangerous decision if it wanted to, pointing to the shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as an example. In this context, he said that US President Joe Biden could influence Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by threatening to deny aid to Kyiv. “This can be stopped today if President Biden picks up the phone and calls Zelensky,” he told RT.
In light of these circumstances, sharp criticism of Zelenskyy is growing in American society, just as it does among citizens of other Western nations. As the New York Post notes, against the background of the above-mentioned financial problems, as well as the publications about the destruction of Ukrainian cities and the death of civilians in Ukraine, after seeing the glamorous photos of their family that Zelenskyy showed to the media, Americans openly regretted the money spent on them. After this photoshoot for Vogue magazine, Americans were very critical of it, comparing it to the photo shoot of “Hitler and Eva Braun.” “Do heads of state of other countries do fashion photo shoots during armed conflicts?” asked a reader who identified herself as “The Duchess of Canada”.
The glamorous life of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his wife Elena is openly criticized by Republican Party member of the US Congress Lauren Bobert. In a post on social media, she claimed that the Zelensky couple considers American politicians “a bunch of fools.”
In their reactions to Zelenskyy’s behavior, Americans emphasize that Washington likes to include peculiar political “clowns” in its campaigns in the post-Soviet space, such as Saakashvili and Zelensky. But their end will be equally sad: The former Georgian leader is already a political relic that no one cares about; the same awaits the current Ukrainian president.
Former US intelligence officer Scott Ritter, speaking on the Judging Freedom channel, predicted a very quick fall of the Kyiv regime, as the Ukrainian head of state will lose his authority. Ritter is certain that Ukraine’s president is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. Understanding this, Western leaders no longer believe in the fake image of Zelenskyy and increasingly refuse to support the Zelenskyy regime. He stressed that the Ukrainian people are unhappy with the deaths of civilians and the refusal of the country’s leadership to sit down at the negotiating table with Russia. And this does not exclude the imminent escape of Volodymyr Zelenskyy from Ukraine, nor his death at the hands of his own citizens. In this context, some observers do not rule out the possibility that Zelenskyy will meet the sad fate of the Ceausescu family, shot dead by angry residents of the country in 1989.
The American media also recall the investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the so-called Pandora Papers, which opened the largest database to date on offshore and financial fraud by heads of state of several countries, including the Ukrainian President. Zelenskyy. It’s hardly a secret that upon landing in the presidential chair, Zelenskyy suddenly “came into possession” of more than $1.2 billion, numerous mansions in Miami and hidden bank accounts, which were replenished by Ukrainian oligarchs through First Union Bank, Deutsche Bank, and Banque Nationale de Paris.
Recently, the former head of Israel’s Nativ intelligence agency, Yakov Kedmi, advised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to beware of his entourage, as he was now useful to them as a “sacrificial lamb.” Immediately after that Zelenskyy unleashed a wave of political repression against his inner circle, removing a number of his former “friends” from leadership positions. “Zelenskyy at the head of an orgy of murders, kidnappings, and torture of the political opposition,” writes the American publication The Grayzone about the darling of the Biden administration.
Against the backdrop of the irrefutable facts about the crimes committed by Zelenskyy, the American and, in general, the Western press has suddenly stopped writing about the Ukrainian president as “an exceptionally effective politician and a true patriot of his country.” Recently, various investigations have been appearing with increasing frequency in various publications, on TV, and even among human rights organizations: Revelations about Western weapons disappearing without a trace in Ukraine, reports of war crimes committed by the Ukrainian armed forces, unprecedented levels of corruption and money laundering by Zelenskyy’s entourage. Once this started, individual Western politicians also began to make similarly critical statements.
It is unlikely that anyone in these circumstances doubts today that the West is already preparing the ground for Zelenskyy’s removal from power in Ukraine. However, in order not to repeat the scenario with the revelations about the activities of Joe Biden’s family in Ukraine, it is unlikely that the current US political elite will agree to an open trial against him so that the numerous crimes of the West committed recently with the help of Zelenskyy will not come up. And therefore hardly anyone will envy the future fate that the “Western curators” have prepared for Zelenskyy…
Vladimir Odintsov, political commentator, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook“.
