Zelensky’s Right to Be Furious

My old friend Rod Dreher thinks that Volodymor Zelensky is showing ingratitude and real chutzpah by complaining to his Western backers ahead of his arrival at the NATO conference in Vilnius. I’m of the opposite view: Zelensky has every right to be furious and more.

Leading up to the conference, diplomatic signals were blinking that what the participants wanted was something like “Bucharest Plus.” In other words, they wanted something that would go beyond the 2008 NATO summit’s declaration that someday Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO members. Diplomats wanted this because they know that Zelensky needs something like this message to sell at home in Ukraine, especially when he is already in the unenviable position of cancelling elections. Without major progress in the counteroffensive, Zelensky’s political life depends on his popularity and influence among Western allies.

But even before he arrived, the wording being circulated amounted to something closer to “Bucharest Minus.”

NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine was not only kicked off into the future, but the West made further, unspecified conditions on it.

The Washington Post reports:

For his part, Biden has been more hesitant than leaders of many other NATO member countries about Ukraine’s bid, saying that in addition to resolving the ongoing war with Russia, Kyiv would need to implement internal reforms to become eligible. NATO encourages its members to embrace democracy and a market economy.

Zelensky sensed, probably correctly, that the White House and the West were preserving Ukraine’s NATO membership as a potential bargaining chip with Putin. Evidence of this was abundant as the diplomatic chattering class speaking out of Vilnius started talking about concepts such as “armed neutrality” or “the Israel model” for Ukraine.

Zelensky blew up. Read the whole tweet for the effect:

And he has a point.

Think about it from Zelensky’s perspective: He was elected on promises to end the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, rebuilding Ukraine’s road network, and insulating Ukraine’s politics from the influence of oligarchs. No shared basis for ending that conflict could be found between Putin and Zelensky during his first years of office. The Western press and diplomatic corps undercut Zelensky’s efforts then — lampooning him as an amateur comedian getting punked by Putin. That was also the view of Ukraine’s paramilitary ultra-nationalists.

War came, and the political options for Ukraine’s future narrowed even further.

Now the West is talking about “neutrality” for Ukraine and demanding it improve its scores on democracy and liberalism? Neutrality is the policy that Putin has proposed for Ukraine. The only difference between the West and the Kremlin on this point is whether Ukraine will be armed or disarmed. For Russia, a Ukraine armed by NATO to be interoperable with NATO is non-neutral, and seen as a threat to its security. For Ukraine, the point of arming was to assert and protect its foreign-policy independence from Moscow. As I discussed in a previous post, Ukraine’s nationalist project of detaching itself from Russia is necessarily an illiberal and anti-democratic one. If Ukraine’s government were to improve the quality of its democracy, it would almost necessarily weaken its resolve to join the West.

The West’s reasoning for itself is perfectly understandable; it does not want to push the conflict with Putin to a breaking point.

From Ukraine’s perspective, it has already jumped through Western hoops. It has already suffered the devastation of war. It has done NATO the favor of crippling and demoralizing Putin’s armed forces. And now the West wants to exacerbate all the problems that led Ukraine to its devastation, and to lean in to its internal political contradictions without providing a final resolution that could make any sense of the current bloodshed: a Western-aligned Ukraine. Ukraine has paid the highest possible price to assert its independence from Russia, and the West effectively told it this week that it will probably never get it.