"Nazis in Ukraine? That's ridiculous, they have a Jewish president!"

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Someone - a Jewish person as it happens - said that to me, pretty much verbatim. And it's true, it is ridiculous! Unfortunately, that doesn't make it untrue. Volodomyr Zelensky has stated that his great-grandparents were killed when German troops burned their village during WW2, that all of their male children joined the Red Army, and that of those children, only his grandfather survived the war. He is not only Jewish, his first language is Russian. Either of these things could make him expendable for diehard Ukrainian nationalists - in fact, expendable may be exactly what he is.

One has to feel sorry for Zelensky (Ze for short). Before 2019 he was a comic actor, known for inoffensive romcoms and for his production company Kvartal 95, and for playing the lead role in TV show Servant of the People from 2015, in which he portrays a school teacher who stumbles into becoming president of Ukraine.

I won't pretend to know much about his political leanings pre-2019, but he did perform this skit in 2014 making fun of Crimea not having drinking water, since Ukraine dammed the North Crimean Canal in response to their referendum to join Russia, which was itself a response to the Euromaidan revolution/coup and the subsequent repealing of a 2012 law giving Russian the status of official regional language in parts of the country, amongst other things. Strange behaviour for someone whose mother tongue is Russian. It's also a pretty tasteless joke if you ask me, but the audience seem to like it.

In 2017 the political party 'Party of Decisive Changes' changed its name to Servant of the People and later made Zelensky its presidential candidate, and on 21st April 2019 he stumbled into becoming president of Ukraine for real, promising to crack down on corruption and bring peace in the east of the country.

Zelensky 'taking on' corruption

Unfortunately it's a bit hard to take Ze's promises about corruption seriously when his trajectory of fame from fictional president to election as actual president, appears to have been substantially underwritten by Ukrainian-Israeli-Cypriot oligarch Ihor/Igor Kolomoisky (he has triple citizenship because in Ukraine dual citizenship isn't allowed, lol). Kolomoisky owns media company 1+1, which produced Servant of the People and provided 'security and logistical backup' for Ze's election campaign. Kolomoisky also funded the Azov battalion in 2014 - the idea of a Jewish oligarch funding an openly neo-Nazi militia might seem too absurd to be true, but there it is. These militias are much more focused on hating 'Russians' (including Russian-speaking Ukrainians) than Jews, and neither Kolomoisky nor anyone in his orbit is going to become a target for them.

Kolomoisky's connections don't stop at Zelensky. This masterful blog post by Vanessa Beeley (she has a Myrotvorets page) goes into great detail about how Kolomoisky not only put Ze in the position he's in, and financed Azov, he also gave Hunter Biden his job at Burisma! This was the job from which his emails showed he was passing 10% of his salary to 'the big guy', widely assumed to be his father, Joe Biden, at the time US Vice President.

Recently Kolomoisky has been investigated by Ukrainian officials in connection with corruption charges, bringing to mind the "handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500" quote from Apocalypse Now. If he is being investigated for corruption, does that mean that Zelensky is turning on his former sponsor, or could Zelensky be next?

Zelensky the peace-maker

So Ze is in bed with some very murkily-connected people, which seriously undermines his claim to deal with corruption. But what about his promise to bring peace in the east? As president, one would think he should have had the power to do that.

Again, Ze's promises were undermined by the system he took over. Those militias fighting 'Russian-backed separatists' in the east turned out to be more like private armies than units of the AFU (because they are actually part of the National Guard, who take their orders from the Interior Ministry). In October 2019, Zelensky visited a militia in Zolote, to try and order them to leave their positions. It didn't go well for him. In that widely-circulated video, he is shown to be simply unable to command them; they just tell him that if they leave, thousands more will come in their place. He is visibly angered and humiliated by this, as you might expect.

Zelensky's role

Zelensky has received fawning praise in western media as a heroic leader of Ukraine's fight against Russian aggression. TIME magazine named him 2022 Man of the Year. He received a hero's welcome (and shouts of 'Slava Ukraini!') at his speech to US Congress. What does this mean for a man who may not actually be in control of the situation at all?

On 22 January 2023, the head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Kyrylo Budanov said in an interview with Radio Svoboda that Denis Kireev, a member of the Ukrainian team negotiating with Russia at the beginning of the SMO who was murdered on the streets of Kiev on suspicion of being a Russian spy, actually wasn't a spy. But Budanov admits quite matter-of-factly that he was killed by the SBU (alternatively called the SSU), with no implications of consequences for anyone involved, and no one seems to care. Kireev was pushing for peace with Russia. If Zelensky starts seriously advocating negotiations and suddenly dies amid claims of being a Russian spy, will anyone care then?