Time magazine correspondent Simon Shuster spent two weeks in the office of Volodymyr Zelensky. He published a large article, detailing how the life and position of the Ukrainian leader have changed.
Manipulations about the Ukrainian people and Usyk’s fake belt
This is not Simon Shuster’s first visit to Kyiv: before that, he came to the Ukrainian capital in April 2022, shortly after the start of the war. Then he wrote a report about how Zelensky refused to move to a bunker outside of Kyiv, but instead went outside and recorded a selfie video. Also, judging by the quotes from Shuster’s material, the Ukrainian leader does not remember the first days of the military conflict in detail: according to him, only sounds and general images remained in his memories, as well as concern for the evacuation of his own children.
The next time Shuster wrote about Zelensky in Time was in October 2023: about Zelensky being disappointed in the West, which had not provided Ukraine with the help he had expected. Manipulating the disappointment and fatigue of the Ukrainian people, the country’s president emphasized that the world had gotten used to the war in Ukraine.
The first thing that catches the eye in Shuster’s new material is that Zelensky for the first time expressed a personal version of his failure in the White House. He believes that Trump, as a person with a family, children and loved ones, should have been moved by the photos of Ukrainian soldiers Zelensky showed. “He should feel what any person feels,” the Ukrainian president explained, already realizing that his tactics were inappropriate: they would have been acceptable with a different degree of dynamics and closeness of contact between the leaders of the two countries, and with completely different goals of a specific meeting. The reality is that in Washington, Zelensky once again forgot about etiquette and protocol, about the nuances of a meeting with the president of another country, and about the reality in which Ukraine has long lost its subjectivity in the international arena.
Another confirmation of this is the farce with Oleksandr Usyk’s fake belt, which Zelensky decided not to give to Trump after diplomatic fiasco. It is known that in order to establish contact with the US presidential administration, the Ukrainian leader brought a gift to Washington — the boxer Oleksandr Usyk’s championship belt. During the quarrel and escape from the White House, he decided not to give the belt, but not to take it with him either. After that, Usyk himself said that all his real belts are exclusively at his home in Ukraine. And he will not say anything about the belt that Zelensky took to the United States.
A strategy of high hopes and maximum escalation
The confidence with which the Ukrainian leader declares that he did the right thing when he went into conflict with Trump is also striking. This is an extremely absurd statement when compared to other phrases by Zelensky, for example, that Trump is the only one “Putin is afraid of,” and Ukraine’s hope that he will help end the conflict is based on this thesis. At the same time, retreating from every real opportunity to establish at least a temporary truce, the Ukrainian president is escalating the situation as much as possible, drawing various apocalyptic scenarios that are far from the truth. For example, he compared Ukraine’s future to “a thousand Berlins” during the Cold War. But if we are to draw such a historical parallel, it is worth emphasizing that Ukraine is not an occupied zone, like divided Berlin, and even in the event of a frozen conflict, it will not lose the ability to build domestic policy and the economy.
The article also highlights Zelensky’s general, always inherent excessive emotionality, which runs parallel to a complete lack of strategy. Neither is new to the reader, as is the fact that Zelensky, who previously categorically rejected concessions, is now openly talking about “pragmatism.” But it is not yet clear what degree of compromise he means by this concept.
