by Andrew Korybko, published on Global Research, February 21, 2022
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Munich Security Conference on Saturday in a dramatic speech that implies how increasingly desperate his country has become. Comparing the Russian Federation to Nazi Germany and fearmongering about World War III has become standard fare among Moscow’s many critics so it isn’t surprising that Zelensky resorted to the same. He meant to scare his audience so that they consider scaling up their military and economic assistance of his country, which suggests that he isn’t satisfied with the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of aid he’s already received this year alone.
According to Zelensky, Ukraine deserves even more because it serves as a so-called “shield” for protecting Europe. Nonetheless, he’s against it being considered a “buffer” between Russia and the West since he insists that his country should be part of the latter, including through NATO membership. About that, he called the alliance out and told it to finally be honest about Ukraine’s membership prospects. Even if it never joins, though, he said that it’ll always defend itself against any threat. This shows that Zelensky is very unhappy with everything that’s recently transpiring, especially the evacuation of all US-led Western military forces and most of their diplomats in recent weeks.
Moreover, he’s also very upset at them always talking about this or that date of a so-called “Russian invasion”. Reports have claimed that such hysteria already cost Ukraine several billion dollars but the reality is probably a lot more, including in terms of decreasing investor confidence in the country’s future. That’s probably why Zelensky proposed a “Stability and Reconstruction Fund” for Ukraine as well as a “lend-lease” military-technical program. He likely doesn’t expect all that much more free aid and therefore wants to make it known that Kiev is ready to cut deals in exchange for more. This further confirms how desperate the country has recently become.
Zelensky lamented several times throughout the course of his speech that Ukraine seems to be considered a peripheral country among many Europeans, who apparently haven’t paid all that much attention to it until the recent undeclared US–provoked missile crisis in Europe. That likely explains why he suggested that Ukraine play a front and center role in creating what he described as a new European security architecture. To that end, he proposed convening a meeting between the UNSC, Ukraine, Germany, and Turkey. He also said that his country might abandon the Budapest Memorandum’s obligations for Kiev not to develop nuclear weapons since he claims that its terms have been violated.
That last-mentioned aspect of his speech leaves no question to the fact that Ukraine is unprecedentedly desperate to receive more US-led Western support in all respects otherwise Zelensky wouldn’t have flirted with going nuclear, which is delusional in any case but was nevertheless meant to generate hysterical headlines the day after for redirecting global attention to Kiev’s case (not that it wasn’t getting enough already). It’s unlikely that the Ukrainian leader wrote his speech himself so observers can interpret his words as representing the concerns of his country’s military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”).
This insight suggests that the entire state structure is extremely worried about being abandoned by the US-led West after their American patron beat the drums of war, accelerated Ukraine’s economic collapse, then literally fled in the face of their fearmongered “Russian invasion”. Zelensky’s country has been hung out to dry at no cost to the US-led West itself but with unprecedented costs to Ukraine in every respect, especially economic and financial. While it remains unclear whether the US will give the green light for Ukraine to initiate a third round of all-out civil war hostilities and thus probably prompt a Russian military response in self-defense, there’s no doubt that its ties with Kiev are very complicated.
*Featured Image: The entire Ukrainian state structure is extremely worried about being abandoned by the US-led West after their American patron beat the drums of war, accelerated Ukraine’s economic collapse, then literally fled in the face of their fearmongered ‘Russian invasion’.
This article was originally published on OneWorld.