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Zelenskyy Self-Destructed, So Why Are Media Acting Like Trump Is to Blame?

Posted on | March 2, 2025 | Comments Off on Zelenskyy Self-Destructed, So Why Are Media Acting Like Trump Is to Blame?

The deal was all settled. On Thursday, the basic terms of a mineral-rights treaty had been agreed upon, and Friday’s Oval Office meeting was supposed to be a formality — a handshake, a meet-and-greet with the media. For some reason, however, Volodymyr Zelenskyy decided he should start an argument in front of the cameras. It has been pointed out that the meeting ran for about 50 minutes, and was uneventful until about the last 10 minutes. The fireworks started after Vice President J.D. Vance pointed out the difference between Biden and Trump:

Vance: “For four years, the United States of America, we had a president who stood up at press conferences and talked tough about Vladimir Putin, and then Putin invaded Ukraine and destroyed a significant chunk of the country. The path to peace and the path to prosperity is, maybe, engaging in diplomacy. We tried the pathway of Joe Biden, of thumping our chest and pretending that the president of the United States’ words mattered more than the president of the United States’ actions. What makes America a good country is America engaging in diplomacy. That’s what President Trump is doing.”
Zelenskyy: “Can I ask you?”
Vance: “Sure. Yeah.”
Zelenskyy: “OK. So he (Putin) occupied it, our parts, big parts of Ukraine, parts of east and Crimea. So he occupied it in 2014. So during a lot of years — I’m not speaking about just Biden, but those times was (Barack) Obama, then President Obama, then President Trump, then President Biden, now President Trump. And God bless, now, President Trump will stop him. But during 2014, nobody stopped him. He just occupied and took. He killed people. You know what the –”
Trump: “2015?”
Zelenskyy: “2014.”
Trump: “Oh, 2014? I was not here.”

What the hell is going on here? Why has Zelenskyy decided that now is a good time to deliver this history lecture? The word “impertinent” comes to mind. He is talking out of turn, presuming that his hosts are ignorant.

In fact, Zelenskyy’s interruption — his little lecture about Putin seizing Crimea in 2014 — merely serves to illustrate Vance’s point about the failure of “the pathway of Joe Biden.” When Putin grabbed Crimea, there was a lot of tough talk from Obama and Biden, but they weren’t actually willing to risk anything over it. So when Biden returns to the White House in 2021, and then makes a catastrophic error in Afghanistan, it’s a signal of weakness that encourages Putin to invade the rest of Ukraine.

What has happened since then is that the United States has poured more than $180 billion — that’s BILLION, with a “B” — into Ukraine, and the strategic situation after three years is basically a stalemale. How many more hundreds of billions of dollars does Zelenskyy expect us to spend to keep this going? If we’re already spending a billion dollars a week just to maintain a bloody stalemate, is there any estimate of what an actual Ukrainian victory might cost? Like, if we spent twice as much money for six months, would that be sufficient to enable Ukraine to drive the Russians back across the border? Or is it the case that, however much money we give Zelenskyy, it will never be enough for Ukraine to win?

Zelenskyy seems to believe that he is entitled to more than he’s already gotten, without regard to the actual military results and with no feasible prospect of a better result in the near future. But y’all didn’t come here for a geopolitical realism lecture — readers have their own opinions about the Ukraine situation, and aren’t going to be influenced much by my ranting like this — so instead let’s get back to what happened after Zelenskyy interrupted Vance at the White House:

Zelenskyy: “Yes, but during 2014 ’til 2022, the situation is the same, that people have been dying on the contact line. Nobody stopped him. You know that we had conversations with him, a lot of conversations, my bilateral conversation. And we signed with him, me, like, you, president, in 2019, I signed with him the deal. I signed with him, (French President Emmanuel) Macron and (former German Chancellor Angela) Merkel. We signed ceasefire. Ceasefire. All of them told me that he will never go … But after that, he broke the ceasefire, he killed our people, and he didn’t exchange prisoners. We signed the exchange of prisoners. But he didn’t do it. What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about? What do you mean?”
Vance: “I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country. Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.”

Game. Set. Match. J.D. Vance has here summarized the essence of what’s gone wrong with Ukraine’s war effort the past couple of years — their “manpower problems.” In April 2023 (“Pentagon Leak Confirms Ukraine Suffering Shortage of Trained Manpower”) I tried to call attention to this problem, and I further pointed out in February 2024:

Even if we could give Ukraine all the weapons they need, the manpower shortage would still make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to mount an effective counter-offensive against Russia.
Merely throwing money at Ukraine’s problems won’t fix the problems. One consequence of the Russian invasion has been the discovery that the United States and its allies lack the capacity to manufacture enough artillery ammunition and other supplies in sufficient quantities quickly enough to meet an emergency demand. It doesn’t matter how many billions of dollars Congress votes to spend, we’re still not going to be able to put enough equipment into Ukraine to make complete victory over Russia a reality this year, or next year, or the year after that.

For the past year or two, some people have been living in a delusion about this situation. Ukraine’s manpower problem was apparent as early as spring 2023. One would think that the Russian invasion might have stirred such a surge of patriotism among young Ukrainians that they easily could have gotten 200,000 healthy young volunteers in the first few weeks of the war. Allow a full year for these raw recruits to get trained and equipped and organized into military units, and by spring 2023, Ukraine should have been ready to launch a major counter-offensive.

The year 2023 came and went without any such offensive, and it was not until August of this year that Ukraine made a minor incursion into Russian territory that did nothing to alter the larger strategic situation — stalemate on every front, with no end in sight. So now let’s get back to that White House transcript from Friday:

Vance: Do you disagree that you’ve had problems, bringing people into your military?”
Zelenskyy: “We have problems –”
Vance: “And do you think that is respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?”

You can read the rest. My point is that it’s J.D. Vance making these arguments, not Trump, and the reason Vance went off like that is because Zelenskyy tried to use this Oval Office photo-op to embarrass the Trump administration. The way the media are spinning it, however, is that somehow Trump blew up this meeting, instead of Zelenskyy.

Much more at Instapundit, where Professor Reynolds suggests “Zelensky knew exactly what he was doing, and picked this fight on purpose,” pandering to anti-Trump sentiment in the European Union. If true, this would be the height of folly; the big problem with NATO is that Our European Allies don’t really have much in the way of military power; as allies, they’re practically worthless. How many divisions of armor or paratroopers can be deployed by France, Germany, Belgium, etc.? Even if the Europeans did want to go to war (which they certainly do not), they don’t scare anybody. Let Zelenskyy go back to Brussels and bask in the admiration of the Europeans. That will do nothing to help Ukraine.



 

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Category: Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Media Bias, Ukraine

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