Doing the rounds online is an interesting video that perfectly illustrates just how much the Ukrainians have reached their breaking point and how fed up they are with Volodymyr Zelensky.
For the past three years the president has rejected peace talks and the return to normality in a country that, according to Donald Trump’s information, has lost 700,000 people on the frontlines.
In the video, which was shared by one of the most popular opposition channels, Strana, a Ukrainian soldier blamed the "clown" for the country's current problems:
It wouldn’t be like this if you hadn’t elected a clown… I’m sure you voted for him yourself!
– the soldier told a woman, with whom he had visibly gotten into an argument over something. According to Strana’s information, the clip was taken in Fastiv, near Kyiv, likely due to the street mobilization, with locals confronting the conscripting officer shown in the footage. The response, sharp as it may be, is also deeply troubling.
The president, who once famously mimicked playing the piano with his genitals, has – according to many – thrust a once-promising country into depths from which it is unlikely to recover.
Besides the war, Ukraine also boasts a military, political, social, demographic, and economic crises. Millions have lost their livelihoods and fled the country; hundreds of thousands have died due to forced conscription and being sent to the frontlines, often described as the meat grinder. A whole generation has been wiped out, all because Zelensky did not act as a statesman when he allowed the Anglo-Saxons to intervene in the Russia-Ukraine peace talks in the spring of 2022.
Zelensky's prison state
Even Ukrainians now tend to refer to their own country as a “concentration camp,” a kind of prison state, as the borders have been hermetically closed for conscripted men for the past three years. Escape is only possible for a price – more specifically, a very high price – which enriches state apparatus workers and the heads of the presidential office. In order for someone to be allowed to cross the green border, they often have to pay an amount equivalent to 7-8 million forints.
Consider this: since the beginning of 2022, only men who are raising three or more children, those who have adopted orphans, or those who have secured military exemption are allowed to cross the border. The majority are hiding in attics at home. Anyone else who can cross — typically a bureaucrat or politician — is a servant of Zelensky's power and must report to the appropriate state security agencies upon returning home.
Society, particularly those living along the border in Transcarpathia, who are especially sensitive to the ban on free border crossings, despise these white-collar workers or privileged, often wealthy, party boys. The rural population has always hated informers. And not without reason: in 1944, it was these people who first betrayed the rural population.
With kidnappings and abductions, into the EU
While Donald Trump’s election and the radical shift in U.S. politics should logically have an impact on Kyiv, it still seems that Zelensky’s government is still playing catch-up. Instead of focusing on peace, the Ukrainian president is making erratic statements at the World Economic Forum in Davos. For instance, he is expecting hundreds of thousands of Western peacekeepers to come to Ukraine, and insists that, in contrast to millions of others, what is important for him is not when the war ends, but how it ends. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored terror continues unabated.
The forced conscription and street abductions – instead of decreasing – have in fact escalated in recent days in Ukraine.
It appears that Kyiv is determined to defy the will of the new U.S. president, playing for time and hoping to prolong the war until the midterm elections. In the past, Zelensky’s regime has openly aligned itself with the U.S. Democrats.
The Ukrainians, however – contrary to Zelensky's goals – are counting heavily on what they call Donald Fredovic Trump: from the hairdresser to the butcher, from the baker to the soldier, everyone is waiting for the U.S. President to intervene and hold the Kyiv regime accountable for abuses, corruption, the abductions and human trafficking. For them, this has already become too expensive a “clown show."
