How Zelenskyy has led Ukraine down the path to perdition – Firstpost

The fate of Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Oval Office on Friday, February 28, 2025, reminds us of the title of a Gabriel García Márquez novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. For, anybody with a sense of history, and also a bit of geo-strategy, would have realised that sooner than later the Ukrainian President was going to tread the path to perdition. His was the case of a disaster foretold. Sadly, the Ukrainian President could not realise that he was merely a pawn — though a much glorified one — in the larger Russia versus the West battle. And like all pawns, he was there just for making sacrifices at an opportune time. The Oval Office saga exemplified this stark reality.

What one saw at the Oval Office wasn’t regular stuff. Differences do happen on the diplomatic front, but rarely are dirty linen washed in public. It all began when the Ukrainian President tried giving history lessons to Trump and Vance, especially the latter, explaining how the US Vice President had little understanding of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This was followed by Vance accusing Zelenskyy of being “disrespectful” and also trying “to litigate in front of the American media”. He asked the Ukrainian President to be thankful to Donald Trump for “trying to bring an end to the war”.

Zelenskyy did no good to his cause, and of course his country, when he mocked Vance for talking about “Ukraine’s problems” without ever visiting it once. He might have scored a point or two on the political front, especially in his Ukrainian constituency, but it was a diplomatic hara kiri of sorts. Zelenskyy should have known that he was in America for a deal — a deal which his country needed the most. And a seeker of a deal doesn’t resort to giving history lessons, more so to his patrons.

It was then that Trump lost his cool. While accusing Zelenskyy of “gambling with World War III”, he said: “Don’t tell us what we’re gonna feel. You’re in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel … You’ve allowed yourself to be in a very bad position … You don’t have the cards right now with us.”

Interestingly, Zelenskyy was heard murmuring, in response: “I don’t play cards!”

Given his handicap with English, Zelenskyy seemed to have taken Trump’s card charges literally. The Ukrainian President would, thus, have done well to have used the services of an interpreter. This is especially advisable when, especially in the Western world, English is not your first language. This becomes even more pertinent when the situation is tough and tense, as was the case when Zelenskyy reached the White House. Another advantage of having an interpreter is that the latter would be more nuanced and diplomatic in the usage of terms.

Zelenskyy could still have avoided the spat by keeping quiet. He could have learnt from the conduct of other world leaders who visited the White House in recent times. But then Zelenskyy took his laurels too seriously, never realising that he was being feted merely because he had become the face of the war that the West had been itching to go with Russia for years.

The Ukraine war can be analysed from two vantage points, depending on one’s ideological inclinations. If one’s worldview is shaped by Eurocentrism, then Russia is the aggressor for violating the territorial integrity of Ukraine. But if one’s idea of history isn’t moulded by the dominant European worldview, then one could see the US-led NATO being the real aggressor in the battle of supremacy in Eastern Europe — of promising not to move “an inch” to the east of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But as Richard Lourie writes in Putin: His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash, “NATO, of course, moved not inches but hundreds of miles east. This was effectuated by granting membership to three former Soviet republics — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — and seven former Eastern Bloc countries — Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia — between 1999 and 2004.”

This policy has been criticised by none other than George Kennan, US ambassador to the USSR and author of the containment doctrine that guided the American policy throughout the Cold War. He has called NATO’s expansion “the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold-War era” and foresaw its leading to a resurgence of “nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion”.

Putin, to his credit, has been raising the issue of NATO’s eastward movement for almost two decades. In February 2007, he said at the Munich Security Conference: “We have the right to ask: Against whom is this (NATO) expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?” Seven years later, he again raised this issue: “They (Western leaders) have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed before us an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the east, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders.”

Zelenskky, by ignoring these realities, deliberately or otherwise, has severely hurt the interest of the very country he is leading today. Ukraine has turned out to be the biggest loser in the entire story. But then that’s what happens when someone volunteers to become a pawn in the bigger war; he loses the most during the war and gains nothing after the war gets over.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.