Zelensky’s Groveling PR Offensive Hits The DC Uniparty’s Sweet Spot

Many have compared the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Winston Churchill. The comedian-turned-politician is not the avatar of democracy that his legion of American admirers think he is, let alone this generation’s savior of Western civilization. But it’s doubtful that Churchill’s star addresses to joint sessions of Congress during the Second World War were received with any less adulation than Zelensky’s speech in the week before Christmas.

The question of whether it was appropriate for Zelensky to appear on the podium of the House in a variant of the GI Joe costume he’s been sporting on Zoom appearances throughout the year misses the point. This may have been his first foreign leader to act in this manner since Yasser Arafat, a terrorist from the Palestinian Liberation Organization, arrived at the White House in 1993 in a military uniform to sign an agreement with Israel. He never intended to keep it. It was normal for a man who knows his role is to be the hero at all times.

It was interesting to note that most Republican congressional leaders seemed equally eager to praise the enormous amount of U.S. Aid heading to Kyiv.

Many Americans sympathize with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. The notion that “Providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States,” Mitch McConnell, Minority Leader put It is quite another. The same can be said for doubling the amount of money the United States was spending on Afghanistan in its last years for this war’s first year.

This is what the governing classes seems to be telling you. The Russian seizure in 2014 of Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine was not seen by any of the parties as an existential threat. Nor did they consider it the most pressing issue facing the country. Since then, a lot has happened.

Democrats, who were opposed to almost all American military interventions abroad, except for Korea, now find a war they love. That’s largely because Ukraine — and Zelensky — played a central role in the Democrats’ first impeachment of former President Donald Trump.

The fallacious claim that Trump had conspired with Russia in order to steal the 2016 presidential election was linked to the myth that Trump was blackmailing Ukraine. The country was a symbol of both Trump and Putin’s struggle for power, as well as the main focus of left-wing NGOs dedicated to their cause. “human rights” that are, regardless of its often-undemocratic behavior, deeply committed to Zelensky’s government.

The Republican congressional leadership is also displaying a certain Cold War nostalgia, acting as though Russia poses the same threat as Soviet Communism to the West.

Once Putin’s war began and Ukraine became a plucky