“The cokehead who runs Kiev.”

And other tales of the Zelensky regime's corruptions—these as Ukraine and its Western sponsors escalate the war.

This is no longer about Ukraine. Serial attacks across Russia, May. (Screenshots, The Sun.)

27 MAY—You see very few blue-above-yellow banners on front lawns and porches these days, and those that remain are bleached pale by sun and rain. I like the ones the winds have frayed so they droop like worn-out kitchen rags. Flying a Ukrainian flag such that your neighbors knew of your brave commitment to democracy, liberty, “values,” and all that was for a long time the ne plus ultra in the virtue-signaling line. Have these people finally realized that the corrupt, Nazi–infested regime in Kiev offers no virtue to signal. This is a good thing if it is so: There are limits even to the pleasure one takes in the foolishness of liberals.

The war in Ukraine goes on, and, believe it or not, you can still read in the major dailies that the momentum has turned (again!) in the Ukrainians’ favor. O.K., the psy op people still grind it out as they have since the Russian intervention began five Februarys ago, and I will shortly come to a singularly over-the-top specimen of this stuff. But the propaganda is now as tattered and faded as the Ukrainian flags liberals and all the other lemmings used to favor.

Let this be a season of revelations across the board, I say, when the heavy drapes of mis– and disinformation that obscure so many 21^st century realities are at last rent. This is already happening as the terrorist regime in Israel proceeds on its disgusting way: Not all the hasbara the Zionists could ever create will any longer keep the obscenity of their sadistic crimes and abuses out of mainstream discourse.

By dint of the efforts of many, in the Zionist case the Great Unsayable has at last been forced into the Sayable, to put this point another way. This is a major advance. Clear sight, clear thinking, and clear language must always come before achievements in the cause of justice.

May the same now prove to be so with Ukraine. Let all the delusions and illusions of the past five years—or 12, if you begin your count with the U.S.–sponsored coup in Kiev back in 2014—finally fade like all the tired banners.

It is time—time to make even the most supercilious of flag-wavers see that the war in Ukraine has never had anything at all to do with “democracy,” or “the free world” or “the defense of European values.” It is time because the fraud-ridden kleptocracy in Kiev and its fraud-ridden Western sponsors are committing themselves to a dangerous escalation of the war even as Ukraine has lost it—by my reckoning, if not the reckoning of others, well more than a year ago.

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Ukraine is now expanding its drone and missile attacks to targets up to a thousand miles inside Russian territory, and it is launching these with alarming frequency. Overnight Tuesday Ukraine struck a military air base in Voronezh, southwestern Russia, the Tuapse oil refinery on Russia’s Black Sea coast, and reportedly the city of Sevastapol, the base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. “Overall, our long-range plan for May is being carried out largely in full,” Volodymyr Zelensky said boastfully last Wednesday. “The key targets are Russian oil refineries, storage facilities, and other infrastructure tied to these oil revenues.”

Strange, or not at all, Ukraine’s unelected president failed to mention recent attacks on St. Petersburg and residential apartment blocks in Moscow and its environs. These are dangerous provocations, and this is just how these attacks are intended. Strange, too, that Zelensky and his sponsors continue to pretend that these operations will have some consequential effect on the war in Ukraine. They will not. They are taunts, intended to prevent any possibility of peace breaking out. And each of them elevates the risk of another world war.

In a sign of what seems a changing mood in the Kremlin—and who can be surprised?—Vladimir Putin vowed Friday to retaliate after Ukrainian drones hit a vocational-school dormitory in Luhansk, formerly a Ukrainian oblast that Moscow, following a referendum in September 2022, has incorporated into the Russian Federation. Twenty-one students were killed and twice this number wounded.

The Russian president kept this vow last Sunday, when the Russian military launched an exceptionally powerful drone-and-missile attack on Kyiv. It is not confirmed, but the Russians appear to have sent one of their hypersonic Oreshnik missiles into an air base just outside the Ukrainian capital. If so, this reads as a clear warning that the restraint the Kremlin has displayed throughout this conflict is wearing very thin: The Oreshnik is nuclear-capable, and its range leaves much of Western Europe exposed.

Never to be overlooked: It has long been evident that the Ukraine Armed Forces could stage none of these attacks into Russian territory without the direction—technology, technical guidance, targeting, intel, and so on—of Western intelligence agencies, primarily M.I.–6 and the C.I.A. The most dramatic demonstration of this collusion was Operation Spiderweb a year ago next month, when Ukrainian drones—of British and French make—hit five air bases deep inside Russian territory.

What are we looking at? Whose war is it at this point?

Olivier Kempf had an interesting assessment in the April edition of Harper’s under the headline, “Has Russia won the war?” Kempf, retired from the French army as a brigadier general, answered his question in the last line of his essay:

It may be too early to say Russia has won the war. But it is possible, at this point, to assert that Ukraine will not win.”

Let it at last be spoken, then: However long Ukraine fought the Russians in defense of its sovereign territory, this is no longer what the war is about—if ever it truly was, I will add. Kiev’s corrupt leaders, abjectly careless of their own peoples’ lives, have turned the nation into a grotesque machine, something out of The War of the Worlds, solely to serve the West’s never-ending campaign to subvert the Russian Federation.

The suppression of radical honesty of this kind, which is the propagandists’ primary cause, is the No. 1 reason the war in Ukraine now grows more threatening to global stability.

To put this dreadful conflict in an historical perspective, the Ukraine war—or the war the West wages on Ukrainian soil, better put—is another reprise of what the United States and its European clients have done the whole of the post–World War II period. Again and again they have backed antidemocratic regimes, almost all of them dictatorial and often murderous of their own people, in the name of democracy. Ukraine is in this way an apotheosis of a kind.

Long before Nick Kristof published his May 11 opinion piece on the Zionists’ sexual abuses of Palestinian prisoners, anyone paying attention had to be aware of the sick perversions rampant among Israeli soldiers and prison guards. You had to be… what?... a Zionist or a Zionist fellow traveler—or simply Chuck Schumer, maybe—not to know of these depravities or deny them if you knew.

But it took Kristof writing in The New York Times—“the hometown paper of American Jewry,” as one of its prominent reporters described it some years back—to crash these ugliest of realities—trained rape dogs, for God’s sake—into the common consciousness.

The Israelis will never get this cobra back in its basket now that Nick has charmed it out. Kristof deserves a Pulitzer or a Polk or an Overseas Press Club prize for this piece, although he’ll never get one, so un-kosher (if you’ll forgive me) has his report proved since The Times published it.

Tucker Carlson has just done for Ukraine what Nick Kristof just did for Israel. There is no misunderstanding of what the Kiev regime is all about, not anymore. There is no taking seriously anyone slow-witted enough to continue waving the Ukrainian flag in the cause of “democratic values.”

Carlson’s interview with Iulia Mendel, Zelensky’s former press secretary, has had 1.4 million views since it came out 11 May; 26,000 viewers took the time to go to the comment thread. You will find no mention of Mendel’s account of her years with the Ukrainian dictator since Carlson aired “Cocaine, Cover-ups, and the Only Obstacle Preventing Peace.” But never mind that: This is an explosive hour and 38 minutes. It casts light on the fraudsters who run Ukraine just as Kristof has on the psychotics who run and defend apartheid Israel.

“Who is he?” Carlson asks of Zelensky as he begins his exchange with Mendel.

Iulia Mendel’s reply to this key question is lengthy, and in the course of it she repeatedly stresses her strong opposition to the Russian intervention and that she bears no ad hominem grudge against her former employer. No, she makes plain her intent right up top: “I believe he is one of the biggest obstacles towards peace today. So I wanted to tell the people who he is.”

I will use some ellipses to capture the gist of her account of Volodymyr Zelensky, TV comedian reinvented as president:

First of all, he’s not a person whom you see on camera. He’s a very different person. He changes masks all the time. He is emotionally uncontrollable, often hysterical, and he thinks that every person is disposable. He doesn’t have the empathy that he plays. He’s insanely great actor, and that brought us a lot of support in 2022, but his acting doesn’t have any substance. And everything that he is saying is so detached from the reality. And the majority of the things that he’s saying, it’s either manipulation or it’s a fact that is being taken from the context. Or it’s pure lies.

And millions of people still believe that supporting Zelensky means supporting Ukraine. But today it’s different…. This war is not black and white anymore. It’s dark and even darker. We just see Putin as an evil, but Zelensky is also an evil. He’s just a hidden one. He plays such a teddy bear on camera, but then when the light goes off, he’s a grizzly bear and he destroys the people.

It’s almost surreal to recollect that almost every Western leader and Western delegation that were coming to Ukraine before the war, they treated Zelensky as a political novice. They saw he was low-educated, unqualified, and low-depth. But then overnight he just turned into this great face of democracy….

It feels like the West created the myth, fell into it, and the West keeps ignoring the fact that beneath Zelensky’s heroic rhetoric, he keeps accumulating power. And I’m not afraid to say he keeps hollowing the very same people he claims to save….

This is who he was and is and how it went and how it is.

Zelensky won election in 2019, with 71 percent of the vote, with a promise to negotiate a lasting peace with Russia. Then the Western powers got hold of the poorly educated novice, he abandoned his promise in a matter of days, and the myth-making project began.

All the flags that eventually flew in towns and cities across the West are nothing more than a testament to how diabolically simple it is to bamboozle vast populations of people desperate for something, anything, in which they can believe.

There is a lot, lot more in the hour and a half Carlson spends with Mendel. She recounts the rampant deceptions—of Ukrainians, of the rest of us—the constant cultivation of imagery, the routine money-laundering schemes Zelensky directly oversees, the cocaine habit. (Mendel meets Zelensky’s dealer, a stoned goofball by her description, in the presidential office.)

On Zelensky’s cynical manipulation of appearances:

I believe that millions who still support Zelensky were looking for some great guy in politics. They wanted to believe that there is someone—Churchill or whatever—a guy who would really do something good for the people. And Zelensky is an amazing actor. He’s going to give you what you want.

On Zelensky’s politics:

He abused our belief in democracy. He abused our fight. He abused our sacrifice, Ukrainian sacrifice, and what the Europeans and Americans were doing for us. He abused the trust of so many people….

For two years, this guy was repeating two phrases which are very telling about him. One of them, he was saying, “Ukraine is not ready for democracy,” and this is a quotation. Another quotation was, “Dictatorship is an order.” So how on earth can a person who believes that Ukraine is not ready for democracy and that dictatorship is an order actually be the face of democracy?

There is, of course, the obsession with the running propaganda op that features so prominently in the Kiev regime’s daily routines.

By 2020, not one year in office, Zelensky’s gross betrayal of his electorate was already beginning to cost him. As Mendel recounts, “He was really scared that his ratings started dropping down.”

Here is Mendel’s account of Zelensky’s freak-out in front of her and others in his press office:

…. And my colleague started arguing with the president, very diplomatically, but she was saying, “Look, there are not so many positive things that are happening. You’re promising something but it doesn’t happen.”

And he said, “It doesn’t matter what’s happening. The most important thing—we need a thousand talking heads, and if a thousand talking heads tell positive things, then positive things are happening, and people believe that there are positive things.”

…. He leaned to the table, he looked at us, and he said in a very irritated tone, “I need Goebbels propaganda if you want. I need Goebbels propaganda. I need thousands of talking heads of Goebbels propaganda.” Yes, that was Hitler’s propagandist. And we were, like, so shocked we stopped breathing.

And on Ukraine as it is after years of this dissimulation, this cunning duplicity:

But okay, he’s got his thousands of talking heads globally, right? And many of us were not supposed to be his heads. We just, you know, we were standing for the country. We believed that he would stop the war soon, that, you know, we needed to be united. We believed in that. And four years later, Ukrainians don’t believe in Zelensky’s agenda anymore. But still, there are thousands of talking heads, and many of them just get paid for that, you know.

Mendel’s years on Zelensky’s “communications team”—a deception in itself given how it turned out to function—began after his election and ended in 2021. Having watched the interview and read the transcript, which is here, I see no question of her authenticity.

But the psy op, as earlier noted, goes on.

The Kyiv Independent, founded in 2021 with Western funds—the usual “civil society” bit—seems to be especially upset. It quotes one Alyona Hurkivska, who just finished eight years managing projects sponsored by the good old U.S. Agency for International Development—so incestuous, all this—to the effect that Mendel is merely a pretender posing as an insider. “This interview,” saith our Alyona, “does not just echo Russian narratives—it is intertextual propaganda, repeating them ‘within.’”

Nothing from The Kyiv Independent or its principal source on what Mendel actually said or the realities of the regime Zelensky runs. But “intertextual propaganda”: Wow, I must write this one down. Ms. Hurkivska, I ought to mention, specializes in “post-truth disinformation”—but of course—and takes money from all sides, from the European Union and the Kiev regime as well as U.S.A.I.D.

A spanking clean source, I’d say.

O.K., The Kyiv Independent is an utterly ridiculous enterprise, but what is there to say about David French? Roughly the same, I think, a ridiculous enterprise, but he swims in much deeper water. A lot of people take him to be a serious professional.

French has had a column in The New York Times since 2023. An army veteran who never quite took off his uniform, a professed homophobe, and a Christian fundamentalist of the hallelujah sort, French is a good measure of the steady drift to the extreme right of The Times’s opinion pages over the past however many years.

And on the Ukraine crisis French and The Times have lately outdone even Alyona Hurkivska and The Kyiv Independent. It was on April 26 that French put out a commentary under the headline, “Meet the New Leader of the Free World.”

Do you need a sec to think of who this new leader may be?

French begins:

A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine—a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion—has fought Russia to a stalemate. It has become an indispensable security partner in the Western alliance.

Are you listening? An indispensable security partner.

Having warmed up readers of this beyond-belief bit of silliness with the usual pabulum, it is immediately on to French’s satori:

Now, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post–American free world can preserve its liberty and independence.

Preserving liberty by word and deed and showing the West how it’s done: This is what the man said.

What exactly does David French know of Volodymyr Zelensky’s words and deeds? You have to ask, given the Carlson interview with Iulia Mendel came out two weeks later.

After cheerleading all the dangerous taunts and the beating of war drums in which the Europeans now indulge, and regretting the Trump regime’s step back from Kiev, French concludes with this stunner:

The moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington. It doesn’t beat in London or Paris or Berlin or Ottawa, either. It’s in Kyiv, where a courageous leader and a courageous people have picked up the torch America has dropped.

Breathtaking. Even better than “intertextual propaganda.” It is so kooky I actually liked reading it a couple more times after I finished the column. Future historians will cite French as a measure of our age’s radical delusions the way they do the worst of the Cold War’s commentators—the Alsops, Cy Sulzberger, et al.

There is no point smiling about the unfortunate timing of these assertions, or David French’s self-evident paranoia. This is not my point. My point is to suggest how desperately out of touch the orthodox line on Ukraine has become and—very important, it seems to me—how out of touch cretins such as French think the rest of us are.

I can’t see this kind of thing holding. We live amid a swift change in the zeitgeist. Some kind of dam seems about to burst, letting loose a swift, clear flow of truths.

Jackson Lears, the distinguished Americanist, wrote a letter-to-the-editor reply to that Olivier Kempf essay in Harper’s I mentioned earlier. After noting the long campaign to subvert Russia, Lears concludes, “There is no end to the impotent convulsions of an empire in decline.”

How true this has long been. How good it will be when the imperium’s convulsions and the messes they at last come to an end.

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This is an updated version of an essay that appeared in Consortium News.

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