Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And that was the most difficult times and days. And speaking about Zelensky, every, I understand, reasonable leader in the West was trying to convince him to leave Ukraine and to set a government in exile in Poland or in London. And it was reasonable to accept one of his predecessors, Mr. Yanukovych, flat gave.
A few months before that, in Afghanistan, the president of Afghanistan fled Afghanistan. That was a reasonable thing to expect. And he turned out to be very unreasonable in that sense. That comes with the guts, his guts and guts people around him and Ukrainians in general.
Because I think he believes in things. And one of those things was that if he is president and he is in the presidential office, he is there to play his role to the end. And another thing, my personal, again, I never met Volodymyr Zelensky. My personal understanding of him is that he has talent that helped him in his career before the presidency and then helps now.
He fills the audience and then channels the attitude of the audience and amplifies it. And I think that another reason why he didn't leave Kyiv was that he failed the audience. The audience in that particular context were the Ukrainians.
The East and the West was not already such an issue after Crimea and part of Donbass being gone. So Ukraine was much more united than it was before. He brought to power his before that really non-existent party of regents,
on his personal popularity, but the important thing is that he created a majority in the parliament, which really reflected the unity that existed among Ukrainians that was not there before. He won with 73% of the population, of those who took part in the elections. His predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, also carried 90% of the precincts. The same happened with Zelensky.
The country unified after 2014 to a degree it was impossible to imagine before, and Zelensky felt that. Zelensky knew that. And that's where the talent of politician really matters. That's something that you can see beyond just data, and you can feel that. Apparently, Yeltsin had that ability.
The main reason is that the conditions that Russia was trying to impose on Ukraine were basically unacceptable for Ukraine. Because one of the conditions, apart from this strange thing called denazification, was, of course, de facto loss of the territory and, for the future, really staying outside either of NATO or any Western support, which was very clear.
You can buy a couple of weeks, you can buy a couple of months, but in conditions like that, Russia will come back tomorrow and will take over everything. And once Ukrainians realize that they can win on the battlefield, once the Russians were defeated and withdrew from Kiev.
the opportunity emerged to get out of the negotiations, which was very clear were leading, if not today, then tomorrow to the complete destruction of Ukraine. And then, of course, once the territory started to be liberated, things like Butcha and massacres of the civilian population came to the fore, which made also very difficult, if not impossible,
to conduct negotiations from this moral and emotional point of view.
I asked people who accompanied Boris Johnson to Kiev that question. The answer was no, and I believe this answer, and I'll tell you why. because it is very difficult for me to imagine President Zelensky to take orders from anybody in the world, either it was Joe Johnson or Joe Biden or anybody else, and basically doing things that
Zelensky believes are not in his interest or in the interest of his country. I just can't imagine that anybody in the world telling Zelensky what to do and Zelensky actually following it against his own wishes and desires, at least if that is possible, what is in the public sphere doesn't allow us to suggest that it is.
That is a different supposition to know that it can continue with the West's support, but if we are talking about withdrawing from the negotiations, that's not about the continuation of the war, that you don't need Western support.
We can interpret that that way. But Boris Johnson represented, at that point, Britain, not the United States. And really what the war showed, and it was clear already at that time, that what was needed was massive support from the West as a whole. And the promise of that support came only after the West realized that Ukraine can win.
and came only in late April with the Rammstein, so at least a few weeks later. So I don't know how much Boris Johnson could promise. He probably could promise to try to help and try to convince and try to work on that. If Zelenskyy acted on that promise, he certainly was taking a risk.
But the key issue, again, I'm going back where I started, it's principle and acceptance for Ukraine, the conditions that were offered. And Ukraine was, the moment they saw the possibility that they could fight back with Johnson's support, without Johnson's support, they took the chance.
It's a question on the one level very easy to answer, on the other, very difficult. The level on which it is very easy, it's a broad historical perspective. If you really believe, and I believe in that, that this is the war of the Soviet succession, that this is the war of the disintegration of empire, we know how this story ends. And they end with disintegration of empire.
They end with the rise of the new states and the appearance of the new colored spots on the map. That's the story that started with the American Revolution. So that's long-term perspective. The difficult part is, of course, what will happen tomorrow. The difficult part is what there will be in two days or even in two years. And in very broad terms, the war can end in one of three scenarios.
The victory of one side, the victory of another side, and a sort of a stalemate and compromise, especially when it comes to the territories. This war is already approaching the end of the second year. I follow the news and look analysis. I don't remember one single piece suggesting that the next year will bring peace, or will bring peace for sure.
Showing 241–260 of 375 · page 13 of 19
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