A black cat has run between the office of the President of Ukraine and the administration of President Biden
There is growing dissatisfaction in America with the fact that official Kiev does not echo the overseas agenda on “Russian aggression”. All these meetings of the National Security and Defence Council, where Zelensky and his team tried to ease the tension, apparently did not please the Americans too much, who keep claiming that Russia is about to attack Ukraine. And not just any attack, but a “monstrous invasion”.
This according to Mark Milley, an American general and head of the US General Staff: “I think you have to travel back in time to the days of the Cold War to see something on this scale. They do annual exercises, we’ve been watching them closely, but this is different. If it all comes down to Ukraine, the situation will be serious, very serious. It will be monstrous, it will be terrible.”
“It’s different”, “monstrous in scale”, “worse than the Cold War” – the Americans are trying to stir up the spooks to achieve their political and economic goals. There’s the Nord Stream pipeline and sanctions against Russia, up to and including complete isolation. But some political experts still believe that this is Washington’s way of pressuring Kiev to implement the Minsk agreements.
So there are several fundamentally different views on the situation – is it a worsening of relations between the US and Russia or is it this kind of strange coercion of Ukraine to make peace? And Zelensky may fear both an American-induced conflict and the implementation of Minsk because he believes that in such a case he would be “swept out of the presidency” by radical elements. But there is a suspicion that Zelensky may be “pushed out” by the US, all the more so because the ground has already been warmed up for that in Ukraine thanks to the efforts of Petro Poroshenko and Rinat Akhmetov.
The US media publicly claim that Biden and Zelensky have serious discrepancies in their views on the current situation. It should be recalled that Zelensky and Biden had a phone conversation on 27 January, which was not even announced. It may have been planned secretly, but then due to leaks of information it was launched officially. According to journalistic rumours, Biden threatened the Ukrainian president with a looted capital – this information was fed to CNN, but then deleted. It’s also remarkable how much some US media are trying to heat things up. By the way, if we talk about the official releases of the talks, again we can get hooked on “Minsk”, the US version mentions it, the Ukrainian version does not.
Zelensky finds himself backed into a corner. He is under pressure from American politicians and the American media. Politico even released a piece with a telling title “Why is the inevitable pissing Zelensky off?” The publication even wondered why America continues to help Zelensky with arms if he doesn’t think the threats from Russia are real? The Washington Post also picked up on the Politico wave. They accuse Zelensky of having selfish motives that make his position run counter to the American one. It is also indicative that no world media outlet questions the US intelligence reports and statements of US officials – on the contrary, they question the adequacy and competence of Zelensky.
The story of the “Russian invasion” has been dragging on since last October. It hits the Ukrainian economy and the Ukrainian energy market incredibly hard. It is as if a methodology has been spread around the world media, but Ukraine itself is no longer interested in escalating the situation, and Kiev wants to “jump off” the subject. But this may end up with Zelensky losing support from Washington which will speed up the possibility of another coup d’etat in Ukraine.
Daniel Bezsonov, Analytical Service of Donbass