It is every leader’s duty to ensure his homeland remains secure, and that is what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must do. Yet his manipulative talk to US lawmakers during his address to members of Congress on Capitol Hill days before Christmas, in which he vehemently appealed for ‘absolute victory’ is similar to the Total War speech given by Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels at the Berlin Sportspalast on 18 February 1943—Goebbels’ remarks were delivered to a large, carefully selected audience as the tide of World War II was turning against Nazi Germany.
Zelensky, of course, is not to be compared to Goebbels. As President of Ukraine, he must appear strong before his people. Nevertheless, his well choreographed oral deliveries in green attire—let’s keep in mind that he used to be an actor—present a warrior and not a statesman who is seeking to end the war. In fact, as explained in a September Hungarian Conservative article titled ‘The War Could Have Ended Months Ago — But the West Didn’t Want It To’, it seems as if Zelensky and his Western-backed allies do not want the war to end. In all truth, it appears as if they desire the fighting to continue.
Continuation of the War Serves a Purpose
In May then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson paid a surprise visit to Kyiv. Reportedly, Johnson who affirmed the war crimes of Putin, said that there should be no negotiations since the West is not ready—Ukraine was apparently willing to sign some agreements on guarantees with Russia at the time. Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine ‘had turned into a dead end’.
While Johnson is now out of the picture, US President Joe Biden is not. In fact, he seems to personally gain if the war were to go on. It would continue to keep lawmakers and the mainstream media distracted from the corruption scandal that involves his son, Hunter Biden, with Burisma—an oil and natural gas company owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky.
Reportedly, from 2013 through 2018 Hunter and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member of Burisma, accused of bribery, and his work with a Chinese businessman, now accused of fraud; analysis of a copy of Biden’s hard drive and iCloud account and documents released by the US Finance Senate Committee bear witness to this:
‘The records acquired by the Committees also show that Hunter Biden and his family were involved in a vast financial network that connected them to foreign nationals and foreign governments across the globe…. and their firms made millions of dollars from that association while Joe Biden was vice president and the public face of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.’
Perhaps this is the reason why President Biden in April overruled his Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin’s objective with Russia, which was to to curtail its power over the long term so it does not have the ‘capability to reproduce’ its military assault on Ukraine. Biden’s ‘new policy’ is now ‘to punish Russian aggression, to lessen the risk of future conflicts.’
Zelensky, too, has been able to use the war to deflect attention from his links to corrupt individuals.
The Zelensky Corruption: Another Reason to Prolong the War?
Unknown to many, in October and then again in December 2021, as the US and others were warning of the increasing potential of a Russian invasion, the Biden administration was ironically calling out Zelensky’s government for inaction on corruption that had little or nothing to do with Russia.
In 2019, US government-run Radio Free Europe reported on Zelensky’s connection to Ihor Kholomoisky, a Ukrainian oligarch whom the State Department banned from entering the US in March 2021 due to his involvement in ‘significant corruption’. In January 2022, the US Department of Justice filed a civil forfeiture complaint—the fourth against him—which alleges that Kholomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov, who at the time owned PrivatBank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, embezzled and defrauded the bank of $5.5 billion which went missing.
The two were apparently provided with fraudulent loans and lines of credit from 2008 through 2016 and laundered portions of their criminal proceeds using an array of shell companies’ bank accounts, primarily at PrivatBank’s Cyprus branch, before they transferred the funds to the US where they continued to launder them illegally through an associate operating out of offices in Miami. Aside from providing financial support to his 2019 election, Kholomoisky supplied Zelensky with a car and lent his personal lawyer to him to be the future President’s campaign adviser, in addition to promoting his candidacy on various media outlets that he owned.
This reminds me of a film Hollywood produced in 1997, Wag the Dog. The synopsis of the film entailed a sex scandal involving the US president two weeks prior to his reelection bid. In need of outside help to quell the situation, presidential adviser Winifred Ames enlisted the expertise of spin doctor Conrad Brean, played by Robert De Niro, who decides a distraction is the best course of action. Brean approaches Hollywood producer Stanley Motss, played by Dustin Hoffman, to help him fabricate a war in Albania. Immediately afterwards, the duo has the media entirely focused on the war.
Naturally, the war in Ukraine was not fabricated by either Biden or Zelensky, but the question remains as to why have they not at least tried to pursue certain avenues towards peace.
