#ukrainian president volodymyr zelensky

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Two far-right members of the House of Representatives were spotted blowing straight past a security checkpoint outside the House floor on Wednesday evening as they headed in to attend a surprise address to Congress from Ukraine’s president.

Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert were seen on the second floor of the Capitol building walking down a hallway outside of the House floor when they veered right towards the chamber. Before they were able to reach the door, two US Capitol Police officers in suits stopped the pair, addressing Mr. Gaetz by name, and informed them that they needed to go through a security screening before entering, gesturing to a nearby metal detector.

The Florida congressman was heard briefly questioning the officer’s direction, before turning away.

“Mr. Gaetz? Mr. Gaetz?!” the officer said as the pair breezed past them and entered the chamber without further incident.

The incident lasted only a few seconds. Neither Mr. Gaetz nor Ms. Boebert became verbally aggressive or insulting, but made clear that they were ignoring the two Capitol Police agents after getting an unsatisfactory reply.

While the two are members of Congress and therefore have permission to enter areas of Capitol Hill where visitors and members of the press are naturally restricted from accessing, all members of the House and Senate no matter their seniority must adhere to security guidelines put in place by the House and Senate Sergeants at Arms.

Violations of those rules are governed and punished by the House Ethics Committee, which is set to change into Republican hands in the coming days.

In the past, the panel has not hesitated to enforce security rules and punish members who violate them. In May of last year, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx of North Carolina was fined $5,000 for going through a checkpoint too quickly and refusing a proper screening in a similar manner.

Metal detectors and their related security procedures were put in place a week after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

At the time, the House Ethics Committee was empowered to enforce the new procedure. Two other Republican members, Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Louie Gohmert of Texas, have also been fined for violating the rules.

The fines are deducted directly from their congressional salaries upon the committee’s ruling that the procedure has been violated, making dodging payment impossible.

As far-right conservatives aligned with the Trump wing of the GOP, the two are thought to be some of the most opposed to further aid to Ukraine, a key point of Mr. Zelensky’s speech to Congress tonight.

[never-was-has-been]

Caitlin Why is Greta Thunberg supporting and glad handing the recipients of funds from the global Fossil Fuel cartel for the purpose of the empiricist war machine?? I saw your latest. It's mind numbing.

[thejewishlink]

Zelensky Visits Recaptured Kherson, Says Investigators Documented Russian War Crimes

Zelensky Visits Recaptured Kherson, Says Investigators Documented Russian War Crimes

KHERSON (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday visited the newly recaptured southern city of Kherson, the biggest prize yet won by Ukrainian forces, where he has accused Russian forces of committing war crimes before they fled last week. “We are moving forward,” he said in an address to Ukrainian troops, thanking NATO and other allies for their continuing support in the war…

[tomorrowusa]

You can tell how insecure Putin is. He apparently told his stooges on Kremlin-run media to stop calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy "president".

Of course you can still get into big trouble in Russia for calling Putin's illegal invasion a "war". Putin's 3-day special military operation is now into Day 574.

The Kremlin has instructed Russian state-run media outlets to stop referring to Volodymyr Zelensky as “president” of Ukraine, the independent news website Holod reported Monday, citing the recipients of the presidential administration’s directive.  Television broadcasters and online publications are instead advised to use the phrase “the Zelensky regime” or call the Ukrainian president by name only, according to the instructions circulated last Friday. The instructions are currently limited to news headlines in order for Zelensky’s name to appear without his official status on Russian online news aggregators. Holod analyzed Russian news stories published since Friday and found partial compliance with the Kremlin’s directive.

FYI: The Moscow Times moved to Amsterdam in 2022. That's why they're still able to publish items like this.

Meanwhile, PRESIDENT Zelenskyy was at the United Nations in New York asking why Russia, a country which has violated the UN Charter, is still a UN member.

Zelensky urges unity in dramatic UN address

Hailed with vigorous applause when he took the stage, Zelensky used his 15 minutes to accuse Russian leaders of terrorism and genocide, citing in particular the removal of Ukrainian children from the country. Ukraine has long accused Russia of forcibly deporting Ukrainian children from occupied areas – allegations which form the basis of an international war crimes arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some Russian officials have admitted the practice, publicly boasting about their efforts to bring children to Russia, place them in Russian families and, in some cases, give them Russian passports.

PRESIDENT Zelenskyy seemed to refer to the folks ignorant about Eastern Europe who preach "compromise" with Russia.

In a warning to other nations over “shady” cooperation with Russia, the Ukrainian president also invoked the death of Russian Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin last month. “I am aware of their attempts to make some shady dealings behind the scenes. Evil cannot be trusted. Ask Prigozhin if one bets on Putin’s promises,” he said.

Occasionally German Chancellor Olaf Scholz nas not always been enthusiastic about the conflict. But in his speech at the UN he seemed fully on board with the PRESIDENT of Ukraine.

Peace without justice is dictatorship, says Germany's Scholz

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz warned of "phony solutions" in the search for peace in Ukraine during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly. "For peace without freedom is called oppression. Peace without justice is called dictatorship. Moscow must finally understand that," Scholz said, calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war. Ukrainians were "fighting for their lives and their freedom for the independence and territorial integrity of their country, for the preservation of the very principles to which we all committed ourselves in the UN Charter," Scholz said. "And it is Russia's president who can end it (the war) at any time with a single order," he added.

Absolutely, Herr Bundeskanzler. Putin's Russia started this illegal genocidal war on its own and the only negotiations needed to end it is to arrange a ceasefire to allow Russia to withdraw promptly.

Of course Putin was not at the UN. He seldom ventures outside of Russia, except to his satellite Belarus, for fear of being arrested as a war criminal.

[politicoscope]

Why Fumio Kishida Visited Ukraine

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s trip to Kiev will allow him to raise his rating within the country. This conclusion was reached by the expert community. Of the Asian leaders, he became only the second after Indonesian President Joko Widodo, who decided to honor Ukraine with his personal presence, but among the leaders of the G7, in which Japan now presides, he is the last. At the same…

[xh1dos]

Zelensky presents Ukrainian flag to Pelosi and Harris.

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Zelensky Appeals To Mexico's Congress. #mexico #usa #news #army #ukraine...

[molfarua]

👍 French President Emmanuel Macron awarded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the Order of the Legion of Honor.   "This is a tribute to Ukraine and its people. Honor to you, dear Vladimir, for your courage and dedication," Macron said.   "This is a tribute to Ukraine and its people. Honor to you, dear Vladimir, for your courage and dedication," Macron said.

[worldmilitary]

Zelensky Yakin Rusia Siap untuk Memulai Serangan Baru Yang Lebih Besar

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s surprise arrival in Washington on Wednesday for a meeting with President Joe Biden and a speech before Congress has unhinged the always-seething anti-Ukraine Trumpian right, triggering a deluge of snark and grievance. For instance, after the Washington Examiner’s Byron York tut-tutted that Zelensky was about to tell Congress that U.S. aid to Ukraine so far was not enough, the former First Son weighed in with this:

“National conservative” pundit and Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, who played the “obviously Putin is a thug and Ukraine is the victim here, but . . .” game in the early days of the war, went full Putin this time around.

To top it off, Hammer, who shares Zelensky’s Jewish heritage, also accused the Ukrainian President of being a bad Jew—unseemly under any circumstances, but all the more so considering that only a few days earlier, Hammer had been spotted at a New York Young Republicans’ Club Gala in the company of various alt-right types with, shall we say, a complicated relationship to anti-Semitism. (Among them: Rep. Marjorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Taylor Greene, the founders of the white-nationalist website VDARE, and erstwhile Jew-baiting troll Jack Posobiec.)

Hammer’s deputy op-ed editor, progressive-turned-populist Batya Ungar-Sargon (for whom, I must mention, I used to write during her stint as an editor at the Forward), at least made an effort to stay classy while making a de facto pitch for throwing Ukraine under the bus:

That’s more than can be said for the vast majority of the “no money for Ukraine” crowd, from the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh (“Get this grifting leech out of our country please”) to Tucker Carlson, who referred to Zelensky as a “Ukrainian strip club manager”—apparently because he was dressed in a olive-drab sweatshirt—and asserted that “it may be impossible to imagine a more humiliating scenario for the greatest country on Earth.” He also insisted that Zelensky is seeking not just to “push the Russian army back to pre-invasion borders,” which even Carlson conceded “sounds reasonable,” but to topple Vladimir Putin and bring about “regime change” in Russia. After Zelensky’s speech to Congress, Carlson brought on former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the “maverick” Democrat from Hawaii, to sing along with his assertions that Zelensky was actually an autocrat muzzling critical media outlets, jailing opposition politicians, and now trying to shut down an entire church because he finds it insufficiently loyal.

(In reality, the situation involving the Moscow-affiliated branch of the Orthodox Church—one of the two Orthodox denominations in Ukraine—is massively complicated; in wartime, there are legitimate security concerns about its clergy’s reported activities in support of the invaders. However, a quote Carlson attributes to Zelensky, threatening “economic and restrictive sanctions [on] any Christian caught worshiping in unapproved ways,” does not seem to have any source other than Carlson himself.)

Then there was this from Red State commentator Brandon Morse, asserting that Zelensky has done much more damage to the United States than the January 6th rioters:

A few other right-wing pundits, including career plagiarist-turned-conspiracy-theory-peddler Benny Johnson and Turning Point USA grifting leech Charlie Kirk, homed in on the really important stuff: Zelensky’s outfit.

Of course Zelensky’s clothes were meant to visually convey the fact that he’s in the middle of a brutal war. When you’re just back from a visit to the front lines in an area that looks like a ghost warscape from World War I come back to life, you’ve earned the right to make that particular fashion statement—even on a visit to Washington, D.C.

But wait, is it a military outfit or a mafia one? The American Spectator’s Melissa Mackenzie has got the goods:

I could go on and on. But perhaps this parade of indecency should come back full circle to a literal obscenity from Don Jr.: a photoshopped image that put a naked Hunter Biden next to Zelensky on the podium addressing Congress. (Warning: this tweet may be hazardous to your eyes.) It’s vile, of course. It’s also the sort of thing you post when you have no substantive way to attack someone.

* * *

The extent and purpose of U.S. military aid to Ukraine is certainly a legitimate subject for debate. Right now, there is a powerful consensus in the United States and Europe that Ukraine, for all the flaws and imperfections of its still-young democracy, is fighting for freedom against an authoritarian Goliath and that its fight is also a fight for the free world and its values.

The question of why the Trumpian populist right is so consumed with hatred for Ukraine—a hatred that clearly goes beyond concerns about U.S. spending, a very small portion of our military budget, or about the nonexistent involvement of American troops—doesn’t have a simple answer. Partly, it’s simply partisanship: If the libs are for it, we’re against it, and the more offensively the better. (And if the pre-Trump Republican establishment is also for it, then we’re even more against it.) Partly, it’s the belief that Ukrainian democracy is a Biden/Obama/Hillary Clinton/”Deep State” project, all the more suspect because it’s related to Trump’s first impeachment. Partly, it’s the “national conservative” distaste for liberalism—not only in its American progressive iteration, but in the more fundamental sense that includes conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: the outlook based on individual freedom and personal autonomy, equality before the law, limited government, and an international order rooted in those values. Many NatCons are far more sympathetic to Russia’s crusade against secular liberalism than to Ukraine’s desire for integration into liberal, secular Europe.

Whatever the reason, the anti-Ukraine animus on the right is quite real and widespread. (When journalist Bari Weiss, who has a largely “anti-woke” following, retweeted a Hanukkah greeting from Zelensky, the responses from her followers in the thread were mostly hostile.) But right now, it also smells of desperation. Ukraine’s cause is still massively popular in the United States, with two-thirds of Americans supportive of sending money and arms. Disingenuous laments about the poor Ukrainians exploited by American and European globalists ring hollow and false when the vast majority of Ukrainians are so clearly determined to resist the invasion. And Zelensky, as the smarter among the aid opponents, like Ungar-Sargon, can see, is a genuine hero: patriotic, incredibly courageous and charismatic, and a speaker so compelling that even congressional right-wingers who initially refused to join in the standing ovations (including Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Andrew Clyde) finally rose up during the last portions of his speech.

There’s a nineteenth-century Russian fable called “The Elephant and the Pug” in which a pug yaps furiously at an elephant to get attention and show off how tough it is, while the elephant simply ignores it. Zelensky would obviously be the elephant in this scenario; but that would make the Zelensky haters the pugs—and that’s frankly a hideous insult to pugs.

[serial-unaliver]

Biden Posts 'Suggestive' Image Of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky As Apology For Mixup | CNN

SOURCE: North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2024

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Zobacz: Następny gość Davida Lettermana: Wołodymyr Zełenski już na Netflix!

[razorblogz]

The Education of Volodymyr Zelensky

Up until his decision to run for president in Ukraine’s 2019 election, Volodymyr Zelensky was largely absent from the country’s political history. He played no role in the two upheavals that shook Maidan Square in Kyiv in the first two decades of this century: the Orange Revolution of 2004 and 2005 that compelled election officials to scrap a fraudulent runoff, and the deadly clashes in 2014 that forced pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych from power and invited Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first military intervention. Zelensky didn’t even do his compulsory military service. His draft-dodging has long prompted jeers from political opponents.

So you would expect a new biography of the Ukrainian leader to explain how Zelensky made the transition from successful comedian and television mogul to vaunted wartime leader — complete with comparisons to Britain’s Winston Churchill.

Ukrainian journalist Serhii Rudenko’s slim Zelensky: A Biography doesn’t quite do that. The 200-page book came out in Ukrainian last year, well before this February’s Russian invasion. The author added a few scenes to the recently published English-language edition that depict Zelensky as a wartime leader: in Bucha and in the opening hours of the war. But they add little or nothing to the public record.

What Rudenko does provide is a portrait of Zelensky during his first nearly two years in office, when his presidency looked a lot like one more season of his popular television show Servant of the People — slapdash and chaotic. (As an actor, Zelensky played a schoolteacher who, in very unlikely circumstances, becomes president. In real life, he gave his political party the same name as his show.)

His first challenge on entering politics seemed to be convincing people that he was serious. Zelensky launched his campaign with the slogan “I’m Not Kidding.” His platform featured anti-corruption pledges alongside the catchphrase “Ukrainian centrism,” a term that turned out to be largely hollow. In a television debate, Zelensky pointed an accusing finger at incumbent President Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s chocolate magnate, and declared himself to be the incumbent’s “verdict.”

Even some of Zelensky’s own advisors in that early period didn’t think he had a fly’s chance of reaching the presidency, according to Rudenko.

“They thought it could not happen, that Volodymyr was just playing,” Ukrainian political strategist Serhiy Haidai recalls in the book. “But when he won, they were even more confused. They didn’t know what to do, because they understood what a responsibility it was and that their old life was over.”

Zelensky’s victory brought new faces to Ukrainian politics. Wedding photographers and restaurateurs won seats in the chamber. But it quickly became clear that Zelensky had no real ideology and lacked any central plan for governing. Like his television alter ego, he elevated some of his best friends to top jobs. Some would be caught seeking bribes. One newbie parliamentarian was seen swiping through a dating app during votes.

“He had to understand very quickly what he had taken on. And then there would have been a completely different Zelensky,” Haidai said. “I think he still doesn’t understand how things work, either at the local or the central levels. He became a typical hostage of the system.”

“There is no more [Vasyl] Holoborodko,” Haidai added, a reference to the character Zelensky had played on television. “There is just Zelensky, to whom the system dictates what procedures there are, what rules there are, what he should do.”

The deer-in-the-headlights behavior Rudenko describes also followed Zelensky onto the international stage. He looked stupefied at a September 2019 press conference when then-U.S. President Donald Trump tried to whitewash his effort to push the Ukrainian leader to investigate the Biden family’s dealings in the country. (Trump’s suspension of U.S. military aid to Ukraine during the ordeal led to his first impeachment.)

Zelensky even thought — initially, anyway — that he could handle Putin in one-on-one diplomacy. Up until Russia’s invasion, many Ukrainians were giving him less than a passing grade in presidential polls.

Rudenko’s account is a snapshot in time, necessarily incomplete as Ukraine’s future plays out on the battlefield. Undoubtedly, Zelensky’s political education, from the initial honeymoon to elbowing out some of his top allies, would inform his leadership in wartime. Earlier this summer, Zelensky pushed out his intelligence chief, a close childhood friend, and Ukraine’s top prosecutor, a campaign ally. Ihor Kolomoisky, the oligarch who first put Zelensky on his airwaves, has seen his PrivatBank nationalized and swept away.

What’s unfortunately missing from the story is anything on Zelensky’s state of mind in the months and weeks leading up to the war — when he urged calm and protested U.S. intelligence forecasts warning of an imminent invasion; when he traveled to the Munich Security Conference, just days before Russian troops poured over the border, and journalists wondered openly whether he’d return to Ukraine at all. On the second night of the Russian attack, Zelensky emerged from Kyiv’s Mariinskyi Palace, under the possible threat of Russian assassination attempts, to tell the world he was still there. The events around that moment and many others will surely be picked over in future biographies.

“[S]tarting from February 24, 2022, … we have discovered a completely different Zelensky,” Rudenko writes in the first pages of the book. “A man who was not afraid to accept Putin’s challenge and become the leader of popular resistance to Russian aggression. A president who managed to unite in this fight his supporters and opponents, corrupt officials and fighters against corruption, adults and children, people of different nationalities and faiths. A head of state who is greeted with applause in European parliaments and the US Congress.”

But we are still left to wonder how he got there.

[politicoscope]

Zelensky, Putin Negotiations Indicative of Split in NATO

Zelensky, Putin Negotiations Indicative of Split in NATO

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s readiness for negotiations with Russia is indicative of a split in the NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization, according to Baris Doster, a columnist for Turkey’s opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper. “Finally, something that was expected happened. As key US media outlets have been reporting for several days already, US pressure on Ukraine in order to make it…