The leader of Kiev tries to recover support, in a country that does not have a high opinion of the ruling class: only 9% of the governed say they trust the rulers
President, the angry mob surrounds the building to drive you out !. Oh yeah? You my advisor, come on, what do you propose to disperse them ?. You could shoot people. Mmmh, no, a little too much…. So, let’s invent an epidemic !. What an exaggeration…. Idea! How about making Russian mandatory? The president is startled: But no, there is no need to sow terror! … Better to say something more reassuring: what do I know, that a meteorite is striking down on Kiev….
It was 2014. And you know the laughs. Comedian Volodymyr Zelensky amused the TV audience by playing a bewildered president of Ukraine, and basically his line was already defined. Today a thousand Russian missiles could hit Kiev, a meteorite, and even if President Volodymyr Zelensky knows it well, mass, why get upset? With the somewhat comical tones of those who have to calm down fleeing foreign investors, rather than building shelters for the population or installing anti-aircraft sirens, the main concern of “Volo” in the last year it was a law that removed the compulsory teaching of Russian from schools. After all, he always made it easy, even when he played the role of Ukrainian Beppe Grillo: If I went to Putin, I would look him in the eye and tell him that the war in the Donbass must end …. Then it really happened: his most successful show, Sluha Narodu, servant of the people, also became the name of his party., earned him 70% of the votes, the populist wave allowed him to go seriously to the Kremlin and made him discover, toh, that the Tsar’s eyes were ice. And that not only the war would never end, but it would have reached today, with the 130 thousand Russian soldiers on the border.
Poor Volo now does what he can. After trusting the Americans – right down to Trump’s wiretaps, with The Donald asking him to investigate the Ukrainian interests of Joe Biden’s son -, he realized that Americans no longer trust him.
With the US president, who last week accepted the risk of a minor raid by Putin, he quarreled: I am the Ukrainian president and I know the problems better than him. At Johnson and Erdogan, he supplied himself with weapons and money. Tomorrow I will receive Macron, to repeat that he does not believe in an imminent Russian invasion.
Because Putin perhaps does not need it: it was enough for him to move his troops to win the first round. No NATO soldier will ever die for Kiev – says a diplomat -. No Russian soldiers will enter by land along the eastern front, 15,000 km of mined border, where Zelensky amassed his men. Finished on a stage that is too large, plagued by migraines, Volo has the habit of pulling himself up with the help of panicked showmen and the polls give him a peak: he had promised to expel the oligarchs, but he only did it with Putin’s friends, saving his own. In 30 years of independence, Ukraine has already had five presidents, two revolutions, one invasion, one secession and one war. Its corrupt political class has the world record of unpopularity, only 9% of the governed trust the rulers, and Volo dreamed of a Reagan, or at least a Schwarzenegger. Instead, he has to make a living: to face a possible war, he is thinking that the only solution is to cancel himself out in a Great Coalition with the enemy Petro Poroshenko, the former billionaire president, and even with the long-braided passionate, the hated Yulya Tymoshenko. His press conferences are now the favorite mockery of his former comedians. Resignation of ministers in bursts. He trusts only his wife Olena, who has been writing him jokes since the days of TV. The best, the day the Zelensky couple’s offshore accounts in the Virgin Islands popped up: That money? I need them to stay independent of politics.
February 6, 2022 (change February 6, 2022 | 22:27)
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