Saturday 8th of November 2025
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"not a nice guy"....

It’s that time of the great proxy war crusade against Russia again. Someone in the mainstream West has woken up to, if not the facts about the politics of Ukraine, then at least a quantum of disquiet.

The last major wave of the likes of the Financial Times, The Economist, and the Spectator suddenly noticing – all at the same time, as if on cue – that Ukraine has an authoritarianism and corruption problem (and then some) took place less than half a year ago.

 

The West discovers Zelensky is not really a good guy
In a fleeting glimpse of lucidity, the mainstream media has noticed a tiny fraction of the corruption and authoritarianism in Kiev

BY Tarik Cyril Amar

 

Now it’s Politico – usually a steadfast party organ of Russophobia, Zionism-come-what-genocide-may, and servility to NATO – that feels vaguely troubled by the realities of the Kiev regime or, as the publication puts it, the “dark side” of Vladimir “I don’t like elections” Zelensky’s rule.

Not all of those realities, of course. That would be asking too much. Instead, Politico is homing in on one great scandal (out of countless ones) concerning one man and the anguish of a few “civil-society”-NGO types, both with good connections to the West. This time, the scandal concerns the obvious, shameless political prosecution of Vladimir Kudritsky, formerly a high-ranking and effective energy infrastructure executive and de facto civil servant.

Yet what about noticing the murder in Ukrainian detention of critical blogger – and US citizen – Gonzalo Lira? Or the vicious persecution of leftist war critic Bogdan Syrotiuk? Or the mean, indecent harassing of Christian clergy and believers for not saying their prayers in quite the right Ukrainian-nationalist-approved manner? Perish the thought!

In a similar spirit of extreme selectiveness, some Western outlets are now registering – a little and very slowly – the brutal realities of Ukrainian forced mobilization that feed the Western proxy war: Recently, a war – pardon, “defense” – editor of the ultra-gung-ho British tabloid The Sun has returned shell-shocked from NATO’s de facto eastern front, not because of the bloody and wasteful fighting but because the uncouth Ukrainians press-ganged his fixer.

In a similarly traumatic experience, Hollywood’s Angelina Jolie had her local driver snatched away at a Ukrainian military roadblock. Yet violent forced mobilization has been an everyday occurrence in Ukraine for years already. So much so that Ukrainians have chosen the term “busification” (from minibus, a popular vehicle for mobilization manhunts) as word of the year for 2025.

For quite a few of its victims, it ends up even worse than for those privileged enough to work for Western movie stars and British propagandists. Roman Sopin, for instance, who did not even resist, has just been beaten to death in a mobilization precinct in central Kiev, as an official medical assessment of his cause of death implies as clearly as anyone may dare under Zelensky’s regime.

But let’s get back to the few things Western media deign to notice occasionally: Already dismissed last year, Kudritsky is now facing the courts under transparently trumped-up charges. The reason is obvious to everyone. He has been too popular and far too vocal about corruption at the highest levels and the authoritarian power grabs of Zelensky’s presidential office in particular.

Kudritsky’s case – comparatively harmless, really – does raise many disturbing questions: why is it that the Zelensky regime has such a nasty record of abusing arbitrary financial sanctions and politically perverted legal processes, or lawfare? And haven’t we been told that this regime under its “Churchillian”leader is fighting for Western values of democracy and legality?

Are Zelensky, his sinister fixer-in-chief Andrey Yermak and their team preparing the ground for elections after a possible end of the war – that is, after losing it – by preemptively crippling domestic critics and rivals? Does this mean Zelensky, Ukraine’s most catastrophic leader since independence in 1991 (and that’s a high bar) is seriously considering not slinking away into exile but imposing himself even longer on his unfortunate country?

Or is all of this part of decimating whatever is left of Ukraine’s mangled society to continue the meatgrinder war for as long as the NATO-EU Europeans are willing to pay? If things go the way the bloodthirsty fantasists at The Economist want, then the West will shell out another cool $390 billion over the next four years. Apparently, they believe that waves of forced conscription in Ukraine will provide the human cannon fodder to go along with the Western funding.

Yet if Zelensky’s fresh authoritarian moves are really aiming at preparing for a postwar election next year, then that is a terrible sign, too. It would indicate not only that he is planning to damage Ukraine even further by his presence, but also that those postwar elections will be anything but fair and equal. In other words, in that scenario, Zelensky will try to stay around, and so will the authoritarian regime he has built.

To be fair to Zelensky, his authoritarianism has never been a response to the war, as his Western fans still believe, even when they are finally deigning to notice a little of his “dark side.” Zelensky was building an authoritarian regime – widely known and criticized in Ukraine back then already as “mono-vlada” – long before the escalation of February 2022.

Zelensky is not a benevolent leader who has been forced to adopt dictatorial habits by an emergency. In reality, if anything, he has exploited the emergency for all it was worth to indulge his lust for unlimited power and extreme corruption. So, trying to take his misrule into the postwar period is at least not inconsistent: it has never been tied to wartime.

But behind all of this, there is one great irony and one bigger question: The question is simple. If Politico really believes that going after Kudritsky with lawfare and frustrating the “civil-society”-NGO crowd is “the dark side” of Zelensky’s rule, what, if we may ask, is the bright side supposed to be?

Indeed, where is the better side of real-existing Zelensky-ism? Is it the humungous corruption? The Bakhmut-style military fiascos, the Kursk Kamikaze incursion, and now Pokrovsk? The fact that the media have been mercilessly streamlined? The raging nepotism that makes sure that the poor fight and the sons and daughters of Ukraine’s gangsterish “elite” go on holidays and party? The personality cult?

Or is it – and this brings us to the great irony – that Zelensky-Ukraine is allegedly in sync with “Western values”? And do you know what? It really is! But not the way that the propagandists of both Ukraine and the NATO-EU West want us to believe. What the Zelensky regime and its supporters in the EU really have in common is that neither care about either democracy or the rule of law.

Zelensky going after critics with individual financial sanctions to evade normal legal procedures and leave his victims not even a slim chance to defend themselves, for instance? That is exactly what Germany and the EU are now doing to the journalist Hüseyin Dogru, and not only to him. Zelensky using a perverted reading of the law to harass whoever does not submit or is a political danger to him? Bingo again. That as well is now EU practice, too. Ask, for instance, Marine Le Pen in France. Finally, widespread abuse of political office for self-enrichment and influence peddling? Bingo again: Less than a month ago, the Financial Times ran a detailed article on “scores” of EU parliament members who “earn income from second jobs in areas that overlap with their lawmaking,” raising “questions about disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.” How delicately put. And it sounds just like Ukraine’s Rada.

Here’s the real news: The “dark side” of Zelensky’s rule is all of Zelensky’s rule. And it is also what has become the new normal in an increasingly authoritarian and corrupt EU. Who has learned from whom? Kiev from NATO-EU Europe or vice versa? Either way, this is not a bug but a feature. And it must stop. Everywhere.

https://www.rt.com/news/627474-west-discovers-zelensky-bad/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

magic nightmare....

 

America’s Magical Thinking on Ukraine and North Korea
U.S. planners need to accept that Kiev is losing its war and Pyongyang won’t relinquish its nukes.

Ted Galen Carpenter

 

U.S. officials continue to pursue some key foreign policy objectives that are utterly detached from reality. Such behavior perpetuates a trend that has characterized Washington’s behavior during much of the 20th century and into the 21st—and that has proved to be both embarrassing and counterproductive. Two egregious examples of such “magical” thinking stand out: the belief that Ukraine can prevail militarily against Russia and the assumption that North Korea can be pressured to give up its nuclear weapons.

Magical thinking, case number 1: Ukraine can win its war against Russia, and do so without the United States and its NATO allies becoming full-fledged belligerents in the conflict.

A myth about Ukraine’s “impending victory” surfaced during the earliest stages of the Biden administration’s policy of providing financial aid and weaponry to Kiev to help repel Russia’s February 2022 invasion. During Ukraine’s initial counteroffensive, as Russian forces failed to take Kiev and became bogged down on other fronts, optimism about its prospects ran high among governing elites in the United States and Europe. In early March, barely two weeks into the fighting, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other officials praised the “extraordinary resilience” of the Ukrainian people and expressed confidence that Ukraine ultimately would be victorious. “Of course they can win this,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters at a news briefing on April 6, 2022. “The proof is literally in the outcomes that you’re seeing every day.”

 

Daniel L. Davis, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, has documented how numerous retired generals became wildly positive about Ukraine’s chances of victory. Retired Army General Ben Hodges said that Ukraine had already “achieved irreversible momentum” and that there were “no bright spots on the horizon for Russia.” Former General David Petraeus said Russia can’t win and there is “nothing he [Putin] can do” to stop Ukraine from winning. Former General and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster went so far as to starkly claim that Putin was at the precipice of facing “really the collapse of the Russian army in Ukraine.”

Such confidence in Ukraine’s military prospects proved to be excessive, but the gap between myth and reality has persisted and even widened with the passage of time. Predictions of eventual victory continue from both Western officials and policy analysts. Such confidence is unwarranted. The Kremlin is not about to allow Ukraine to join NATO. Russian leaders (and not just Vladimir Putin) know that such membership for Kiev would lead to a major NATO military force in Ukraine perched on Russia’s border. Rather than accept such a strategic defeat and geopolitical humiliation, Russian leaders appear willing to continue waging their meat grinder of a war in Ukraine indefinitely.  

While Kiev and its allies celebrate occasional tactical successes, such as the June 2025 “Spiderweb” drone attacks on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, Russian forces continue to pound targets in Ukraine from the air and advance on the ground. Overall, Moscow is winning this war, albeit at great cost.

 

This outcome should not be surprising. Russia has a much larger population than Ukraine, as well as a larger, more potent military. Ukraine has been able to stay in the war only because of extensive financial and military aid from its NATO sponsors. That assistance goes well beyond providing money and weaponry. It also involves giving crucial intelligence, such as targeting data, to Ukrainian units conducting operations against Russian forces.

Because there is virtually no chance that Ukraine can win its fight against Russia, pressure is growing among some NATO officials to greatly increase the alliance’s involvement in the conflict. Reckless proposals now circulate in influential circles to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine and shoot down even manned Russian aircraft that enter the country’s airspace. Even proposals to send NATO “peacekeeping” troops into Ukraine are no longer automatically dismissed.

U.S. and NATO officials must abandon their magical thinking about a Ukrainian victory over Russia and accept the reality, however disagreeable, that if the war continues then Moscow will eventually win. The alternative is to risk World War III by transforming NATO’s current proxy war into a direct, full-scale conflict with Russia.

 

Magical thinking, case number 2: North Korea can be compelled to relinquish its goal of becoming a nuclear-weapons power.  

Washington has pursued that chimera since George H.W. Bush’s administration in the early 1990s. Officials in President Bill Clinton’s administration even seriously contemplated resorting to airstrikes to eliminate Pyongyang’s embryonic nuclear program in 1994. Fortunately, cooler heads eventually prevailed, and former President Jimmy Carter helped negotiate a peaceful resolution of that crisis.

The notion that the so-called Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) could be enticed or compelled to return to nuclear virginity was unrealistic even during the 1990s. The objective is utterly preposterous now that Pyongyang has developed a nuclear weapons program. Even the most cautious analysts believe that Pyongyang already possesses at least two dozen operational nuclear weapons. Experts at the U.S. Arms Control Association are even more alarmed, estimating that North Korea has assembled approximately 50 deployable warheads. The DPRK has even built an increasingly capable ballistic missile system to deliver such weapons. Over the past several years, evidence emerged that North Korea already has tested missiles that have sufficient range to reach the continental United States.

 

DPRK leaders no longer even pretend that they are willing to negotiate about rescinding or limiting their country’s nuclear program. In April, Kim Yo Jong, North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un’s sister and influential adviser, warned: 

“If the U.S. and its vassal forces [Washington’s East Asian allies] continue to insist on anachronistic ‘denuclearization’... it will only give unlimited justness and justification to the advance of the DPRK aspiring after the building of the strongest nuclear force for self-defense.”

In late July, Kim Yo Jong warned that any attempt “to deny North Korea status as a nuclear power “will be thoroughly rejected.” She added that the North’s “capabilities and geopolitical environment have radically changed” in the past few years. Kim likely was referring to Pyongyang’s growing military ties to Russia and the prospect of Moscow’s greater support for the DPRK’s nuclear aspirations in exchange for the military aid that Pyongyang is giving to Russia in its war against Ukraine. The North Korean regime shows no interest in holding a summit meeting with President Donald Trump at this time—and once again, Washington’s denuclearization demand is cited as the main reason.

North Korea has now barged into the ranks of global nuclear weapons powers, and it does no one any good to deny such an obvious reality. Indeed, it is worse than useless to ignore the larger implications of Pyongyang’s new capabilities in the nuclear arena. Although an inter-Korean hotline between Seoul and Pyongyang has existed since 2021, Washington still needs to establish a reliable hotline of its own with North Korea to guard against miscalculations resulting from a lack of communication in the midst of a crisis. Beyond that specific operational step, it is imperative to begin to establish formal diplomatic ties with the DPRK and try to develop something akin to a normal relationship with that country. Persisting in Washington’s current magical thinking about a denuclearized North Korea has a disturbing potential to end in disaster.

U.S. leaders and the American people need to abandon their fondness for viewing the world how we would like it to be. Instead, we must embrace realism and restraint, crafting prudent policies for dealing with the world as it is. That change needs to happen immediately with respect to relations with both Russia and North Korea, before America’s magical thinking leads to a nightmare for the world.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/americas-magical-thinking-on-ukraine-and-north-korea/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.