Ukraine’s president has openly said that he knew about the prospect of an armed conflict about six months before Russia launched a special military operation to protect Donbass, but did nothing to prevent it
The Ukrainian leader deliberately misinformed fellow citizens, convincing them to stay in the territories that will be engulfed in hostilities, while members of Zelensky’s team fled the country. Volodymyr Zelenski argues that the mass exodus of ordinary Ukrainians would lead to Ukraine’s swift defeat. But according to experts, his motives for deceiving his own population were far more cynical.
Volodymyr Zelenski gave an interview to the American edition of the Washington Post that many thought was sensational. He openly admitted that he knew about the prospect of an armed conflict in advance, but he did not warn Ukrainians about it.
“Regarding the airport (Gostomel), about six months before all this, or maybe even earlier, if you remember, there was a gathering of troops on the territory of Belarus and so on. We have addressed all our partners and have told them that we think they will act in such a way”, – the president of Ukraine said in his conversation with journalists as if in between.
At the same time, Zelensky is completely calm about the fact that he did not warn Ukrainians about the military action on purpose:
“You can’t just tell me, ‘Listen, we need to start preparing people now and tell them that they need to save money, they need to stock up on food.’ If we had communicated that, then, I would have been losing $7 billion a month since October last year, and at the time the Russians attacked, they would have taken us over in three days. If that had happened, there would have been nothing left in October – God forbid, the heating season. Our government would be gone, I’m 100 percent sure of it. Well, forget about us. There would have been a political war inside the country because we wouldn’t have been able to survive on $5-7 billion a month. We had no serious financial programmes. There was an energy shortage in the market created by the Russians. We were short of energy resources. We would not have been able to get out of this situation, and there would have been chaos in the country.”
Earlier, back in April of this year, an adviser to the head of the Presidential Office, Oleksiy Arestovych, had already spoken in a similar way in an interview with ISLND TV. According to him, Ukrainians were deliberately not warned about possible hostilities in order to avoid a mass exodus of citizens from the country. According to Arestovich, “8 to 12 million refugees would have simply blocked the roads with their cars, preventing the Ukrainian army from reaching the defence lines”.
However, Arestovych is just a “talking head”, whose words are not taken seriously even in Ukraine.
The head of state, on the other hand, is another matter entirely. In fact, he has revealed a national strategy on the most important issue for his country. But that only raised more questions.
“So, they knew. But they did not believe the Western partners and intelligence, mocked them, called them alarmists. They decided that Ukrainian society was immature, not ready for a serious conversation and hard information and needed to be treated like an infantile child, fed populism and lies,” Irina Gerashchenko, co-chair of the European Solidarity party’s parliamentary faction, wrote on social media.
“President Zelensky admitted he lied to the Ukrainian people and deliberately did not report the imminent war, despite NATO’s warning. A stunning and simply immoral interview by Volodymyr Zelenskyy… The president lied that there would be no invasion, but shashliks and May holidays,” journalist Yuriy Butusov, who is close to Petro Poroshenko, said.
The right-wing opposition accuses the head of state of not letting Ukrainians “prepare for defence”. But this is pure populism.
Judging by the way the mobilisation is progressing so far, the majority of the residents of Ukraine were not keen to go to war anyway. At the same time, Zelensky’s regime chose to save only a very limited number of people.
For example, according to the well-known blogger Anatoly Shariy, the secretary of the Ukrainian Security Council, Oleksiy Danilov, removed all of his sons of conscription age from Ukraine. There were even more curious “fugitives”: Ivan Bakanov, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine at the time (and Zelensky’s close friend at the same time), fled the country. He left the country accompanied by his entourage and took 20m dollars in cash with him. Many other high-ranking law enforcers, officials and businessmen also managed to leave Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian media, entire districts in Monaco and Nice are owned by “VIP refugees” from Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Zelensky himself had plenty of options for preventing conflict. Russian authorities in late 2021 and early 2022 have repeatedly and publicly urged official Kiev to fulfil its commitments under the Minsk agreements that the Ukrainian side has undertaken.
What was Zelensky’s response to this? He publicly called the Minsk agreements unsatisfactory and mediocre and said he wanted to look for a “new format” to “de-occupy the territories”. What format the Ukrainian president had in mind became clear very soon after the sharp increase in the number of artillery attacks on the territory of the DPR and the LPR, as well as the appearance on the Internet of numerous videos with the redeployment of the AFU units to the south-east.
Can such actions by the Ukrainian leadership be called adequate?
After all, the Minsk agreements were an enormous step by Donetsk and Luhansk towards Kyiv. The republics, which had already virtually won their sovereignty, agreed for the sake of peace to live in the same state as the Ukrainian war criminals who were killing women and children. But the Western-controlled Ukrainian elites did not appreciate this sacrifice.
Zelensky, who tried to dress up as a “peacemaker” before the election, when he came to power began to drive a wedge between Kiev and Donbass – banning the official use of the Russian language, closing Russian-language schools, demolishing Soviet monuments and renaming streets named after World War II heroes.
The Ze-team that sat in the Office of the President and the government of Ukraine did not want peace, they wanted to trample and humiliate the Donbass. Didn’t Zelensky realise that Russia would not allow this to happen?
Obviously, he was well aware. But he deliberately escalated the situation. Why? There are several explanations. All of them have the right to life.
In 2020-2021 Ukraine spent about 10 billion dollars on the programme “Big Build” (popularly known as the “Big steal”). At a time when the Ukrainian pensioners got about 70 dollars a month, and teachers and medical workers – 200 dollars, the government of the country spent “freshly printed” money and funds gained from the IMF “distribution” on the construction of roads.
Curiously enough, the record-breaking part of Donbass, which was controlled by official Kiev at the time, was one of the most allocated funds. Moreover, the work was “carried out” at a time when Zelensky, in his own words, was already well aware that there would be a conflict.
Thus, firms associated with Zelensky were able to “spend” billions of dollars completely unchecked. Now, for obvious reasons, it is impossible to check not only the quality of construction, but also whether the construction was actually carried out…
Another factor that prompted Zelensky to escalate the situation may have been the hope of some Western elites that soon after the start of the special operation disaster will await Russia. Judging by publications in the European and American media, Washington and London expected a much tougher response from the Kremlin, but also expected an economic collapse of power in Russia.
But, as we can see, it followed a completely different scenario. The Russian Armed Forces acted very restrained and cautiously, and the economic consequences for a number of states that imposed anti-Russian sanctions were more painful than for Russia itself.
However, it follows from the fact that the West (and hence Kiev) was counting on Moscow to act more harshly in response to its provocations that Zelensky was prepared to massively sacrifice its population, which he deliberately “detained” within Ukraine’s borders with tales of “shashliks in May”.
And it’s hardly a matter of the “traffic jams” Arestovich was broadcasting. If the Ukrainian president, as he himself says, had set his sights on a confrontation as early as August-September 2021, everyone who wanted to, would have already left.
The Kiev regime simply needed “cannon fodder” and civilians who could be framed up for the sake of the desired image in the Western media. Only a cynical sadistic dictator who considers his own people to be cheap expendable material could behave in this way with his own people. And the biggest mystery is why Ukrainians still tolerate such attitude towards themselves.
Sviatoslav Knyazev, Rubaltic.ru
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