Patrick Lawrence: The Shadows Descend in Ukraine | Scheerpost

[Scott]

Patrick Lawrence just published an article with the same name as the title of this thread today. As some may know, I'm a big fan of Patrick Lawrence' work and have named a fair amount of threads after the titles of his articles because of it. Hopefully some here find this latest article of his to be worthy of discussion. Quoting from its introduction, as well as the final paragraph:

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January 28, 2023

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

Two of my favorite New York Times words are “shadowy” and “murky.” They are brilliantly suited to the Manichean version of our world the Times inflicts daily upon its unsuspecting readers. When The Times terms someone or some society or some chain of events shadowy or murky it scarcely has to do any reporting. Two words more or less without meaning point readers’ minds in precisely the desired direction.

I do not mean to single out The Times in this, except that I do. None of the other major dailies and none of the network broadcasters comes close to the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record in the matter of shadows and murk. This is especially so of the foreign desk, and a murkier corner of American journalism I cannot think of.

There are lots of shadowy people in Russia, The Times will have us know, or think we know. Lots of murky things happen there. Donald Trump’s dealings with the Kremlin were very shadowy, and never mind it turned out there was nothing in them to cast any shadows. Shadows linger long after the lights go on, another of their useful features.

It follows that there are never any shadows and nothing is ever murky among those people or nations the government-supervised Times counts among the “good guys” as opposed to the “bad guys,” and the most powerful paper in America does indulge in such language, if you have not noticed.

We come now to Ukraine. The shadows may be many and the murk very thick, but you will never read of either in The Times. The corruption scandal now erupting in Kyiv and across the country seems to me confirmation that Ukraine has made itself in the post–Soviet era less a nation than a criminal enterprise. This often happens in failed states, where no one believes in anything anymore for the simple reason there is nothing left to believe in. It is then the shadows descend and all grows murky.

[snip]

Amid all the revelations of corruption and the firings and dismissals, Zelensky gave a much-noted speech last weekend to commemorate Ukraine’s Unity Day. “We are all together, no matter where we were born and where we grew up,” he said. “Say today: I will defend my Ukraine. My unity.” The conceit is too thin to hold up at this point and the irony of the moment too great to miss. There is little unity to find among Ukrainians, it seems to me. The nationalism professed by the ruling cliques shapes up as a veil covering up the rampant thievery. The virulent nationalism evident among the far-right political factions and militias, a topic I will take up in future commentaries, seems now to reflect a desperate need to belong in a nation offering nothing in which to belong, to find meaning where there is no meaning.
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Full article:
Patrick Lawrence: The Shadows Descend in Ukraine | Scheerpost

 

[Hawkeye10]

The plan is to destroy Russia, suppress China, and rebuild Ukraine into a WOKE UTOPIA......and everybody will love it.

We shall see how that goes.

 

[Scott]

The plan is to destroy Russia, suppress China, and rebuild Ukraine into a WOKE UTOPIA......and everybody will love it.

We shall see how that goes.

Not the people who are paying attention.

 

[Tranquillus in Exile]

The corruption scandal now erupting in Kyiv and across the country seems to me confirmation that Ukraine has made itself in the post–Soviet era less a nation than a criminal enterprise.

So Patrick Lawrence thinks that Ukraine is a criminal enterprise but Putin's Russia isn't?

There is little unity to find among Ukrainians, it seems to me.

Opposition to being taken over by Russia seems to enjoy a certain amount of support among Ukrainians, including Russian-speaking ones like Zelensky. Have we been misinformed?

 

[Scott]

Patrick Lawrence just published an article with the same name as the title of this thread today. As some may know, I'm a big fan of Patrick Lawrence' work and have named a fair amount of threads after the titles of his articles because of it. Hopefully some here find this latest article of his to be worthy of discussion. Quoting from its introduction, as well as the final paragraph:

**
January 28, 2023

[snip]
The corruption scandal now erupting in Kyiv and across the country seems to me confirmation that Ukraine has made itself in the post–Soviet era less a nation than a criminal enterprise.
[snip]
**

So Patrick Lawrence thinks that Ukraine is a criminal enterprise but Putin's Russia isn't?

His main focus is on Ukraine, not Russia. Do you disagree with his findings on Ukraine?

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There is little unity to find among Ukrainians, it seems to me.
[snip]
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Full article:
Patrick Lawrence: The Shadows Descend in Ukraine | Scheerpost

Opposition to being taken over by Russia seems to enjoy a certain amount of support among Ukrainians, including Russian-speaking ones like Zelensky. Have we been misinformed?

I think there is far too much focus on the fact that Zelensky is Russian speaking and far too little on the fact that his wealth has been elevated stratospherically since he entered into politics. From what I've seen, it would seem that Zelensky turned his back on the fate of most Russian speakers. As to why, I suspect he considered the advantages to his own family, in terms not just of wealth but of physical safety and disregarded the disadvantages for the rest of the Russian speakers in Ukraine, not to mention ethnic Russians there. There's a good article from well known journalist Aaron Mate that I think points towards this change in Zelensky after becoming President. It's here:

Siding With Ukraine’s Far-Right, US Sabotaged Zelensky’s Peace Mandate | Scheerpost

Quoting his introductory paragraphs, as well as his concluding paragraphs:

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April 18, 2022

In 2019, Zelensky was elected on an overwhelming mandate to make peace with Russia. As Stephen F. Cohen warned that year, the US chose to side with Ukraine’s far-right and fuel war.

By Aaron Maté / Substack

In a warm October day in 2019, the eminent Russia studies professor Stephen F. Cohen and I sat down in Manhattan for what would be our last in-person interview (Cohen passed away in September 2020 at the age of 81).

The House was gearing up to impeach Donald Trump for freezing weapons shipments to Ukraine while pressuring its government to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The Beltway media was consumed with frenzy of a presidency in peril. But Professor Cohen, one of the leading Russia scholars in the United States, was concerned with what the impeachment spectacle in Washington meant for the long-running war between the US-backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas.

At that point, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was just months into an upstart presidency that he had won on a pledge to end the Donbas conflict. Instead of supporting the Ukrainian leader’s peace mandate, Democrats in Congress were impeaching Trump for briefly impeding the flow of weapons that fueled the fight. As his Democratic allies now like to forget, President Obama refused to send these same weapons out of fear of prolonging the war and arming Nazis. By abandoning Obama’s policy, the Democrats, Cohen warned, threaten to sabotage peace and strengthen Ukraine’s far-right.

“Zelensky ran as a peace candidate,” Cohen explained. “He won an enormous mandate to make peace. So, that means he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin.” But there was a major obstacle. Ukrainian fascists “have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin… His life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine.”

Peace could only come, Cohen stressed, on one condition. “[Zelensky] can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back,” he said. “Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war. So the stakes are enormously high.”

The subsequent impeachment trial, and bipartisan US policy since, has made clear that Washington has had no interest in having Zelensky’s back, and every interest in fueling the Donbas war that he had been elected to end. The overwhelming message from Congress, fervently amplified across the US media (including progressive outlets) with next to no dissent, was that when it comes to Ukraine’s civil war, the US saw Ukraine’s far-right as allies, and its civilians as cannon fodder.

[snip]

In sabotaging Zelensky’s peace mandate to side with the Ukrainian far-right, the US pushed Ukraine into a calamity that Professor Cohen warned about nearly three years ago.

“There were moments in history, political history, when there’s an opportunity that is so good and wise and so often lost, the chance,” Cohen told me in October 2019. “So, the chance for Zelensky, the new president who had this very large victory, 70 plus percent to negotiate with Russia an end to that war, it’s got to be seized. And it requires the United States, basically, simply saying to Zelensky, ‘Go for it, we’ve got your back.’”

By choosing to ignore the pleas of lonely voices like Cohen to instead have the back of Ukraine’s far-right, Washington sabotaged a historic peace mandate and helped provoke a catastrophic war.
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