AMAC Exclusive – By Herald Boas
The surprise visit of Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelenskyy to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Joe Biden and address a joint session of Congress was an event full of drama, tension, and ceremony befitting both the circumstances and the individual who performed it.
Like Ronald Reagan before him, Mr. Zelenskyy had a previous and considerable career as an actor. As Mr. Reagan did so many times, the Ukrainian president demonstrated the skill and value of his professional career, and created a short but powerful international moment in political public relations.
Wearing his iconic military-green sweatshirt, speaking excellent if heavily accented English, quoting the words of past statesmen, and citing a canny choice of past events in world and U.S. history, Mr. Zelenskyy brought the otherwise warring legislators of the two major U.S. political parties together in repeated standing ovations.
That is not to say that there was unanimity in support for Mr. Zelenskyy and his presentation. Some members of Congress and several pundits have questioned his record in Kiev and his expectations of financial and weaponry aid from the U.S. Some commentators have said Mr. Zelenskyy’s stated aims to recover all territories seized by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his armed forces are unrealistic, asserting that Ukraine cannot ultimately prevail in a drawn-out war with its much larger neighbor. Other commentators have criticized Mr. Zelenskyy’s government for its apparent suppression of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and alleged continued corruption, which had been rampant before he took office in 2019. Still other critics acknowledge Mr. Zelenskyy’s personal courage and leadership, but say his endless appeals for U.S. aid are an unacceptable blank check.
Mr. Zelenskyy’s supporters have rebutted the criticisms by noting that the Ukrainian armed forces have repulsed the larger Russian army for many months, that Russian Orthodox clerics in Ukraine are often sympathetic to Russia in the conflict and pose a security threat in wartime, and that Zelenskyy has made serious efforts to remove corruption in his country.
The seemingly endless requests for financial aid and weapons, however, appear to be the primary argument against President Zelenskyy and his visit — which featured, in addition to his expressions of gratitude for assistance already given, an aggressive request for more money.
It is on this latter issue which reveals the largest perspective, not only of Mr. Zelenskyy’s dramatic U.S. visit, but of the deeper meaning of his and his nation’s current struggle.
In 1939, Nazi Germany made a deal with Soviet Russia that led to the invasion of Poland — and directly to World War II. Having divided the spoils of that aggression, Germany proceeded to conquer most of the rest of Europe while the Soviet Union invaded neighboring Finland. Prior to 1939, Nazi Germany had overtaken considerable neighboring territory by mere threat while the European democracies stood by. The Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia each were overtaken without a fight. Finland, however, fought back against the much larger Soviet army, and heroically succeeded for several months. At the same time, the island nation of Great Britain held out against Nazi conquest until Germany’s Axis ally Japan attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor, bringing the U.S. into the world war on Great Britain’s side. Germany next made a surprise invasion of its erstwhile Soviet Union ally, suddenly making Russia part of the Allied effort, an alliance which the Russians promptly ended soon after the war’s end.
The continent of Europe has seen armed conflict, invasion, and subjugation for more than a thousand years. World War II was only the latest and one of the most brutal examples — and when the war ended, a historic effort was made, under the leadership of the U.S. and its Marshall Plan, to halt the cycle of hostilities by rebuilding the battered European democracies and enabling the defeated enemy nations of Germany, Italy, and Japan to reconstitute themselves as free capitalist democracies. The Soviet Union, a Marxist dictatorship, chose to oppose this effort, leading to a prolonged Cold War that only ended with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1990-91.
But initial efforts to establish a democratic Russia failed, and by the second decade of the 21st century, Russian leaders began to implement the goal of reassembling the old Soviet Union. The centerpiece of that ambition was the recovery of what had been the Ukrainian communist part of the U.S.S.R., but the Ukrainians, now restored to their historic independent identity, chose to resist.
As Anne Applebaum recently and persuasively wrote, if Mr. Zelenskyy, his populace, and its army had not fought back in February 2022, the Russians would have crushed Ukrainian independence, killed or imprisoned many of them, and massed its army on the eastern European borders with intention of further invasions to subjugate neighboring countries. Not only would Russia have interpreted a quick successful invasion as proof the NATO countries would not oppose them, but the two other global ambitious totalitarian powers, China and Iran, would have also assumed they would not be opposed in their quests in Asia and the Middle East.
To be fair, Mr. Zelenskyy’s critics have some valid points. U.S. aid, financial and military, is not an endless resource for Ukraine. Already, some of our own supplies of ammunition, missiles, and other weaponry are getting low — and the U.S budget, deeply in the red, cannot provide unlimited billions of dollars in foreign aid with so many critical domestic needs. Calls for an audit of what the U.S. does send to Ukraine are also reasonable, given past histories of such aid to other countries when aid, principally food and money, never reached the people that it was intended to help.
In short, the current conflict in Ukraine cannot go on indefinitely, neither for the much-suffering Ukrainian people, nor the rest of Europe, nor for Russia, also depleted in war materiel and suffering from the impact of a global embargo from much of the western world.
Beyond the drama of Mr. Zelenskyy’s short visit to the American capital, and its public relations success, remain the uncertainties of this unfortunate conflict, the misery and hardship it is causing on all sides, and the ability of its perpetrators to sustain its human and economic costs.
Something has to give.