Do you back Zelensky, or do you back Putin and Trump? Poll

[noblegiraffe]

I dunno what I'm starting this thread for, tbh. I just really, really felt like I wanted to click a button saying I support Zelensky and reject Trump and Putin tonight.

Pretty sure that's Putin's claim.

"I had to invade Ukraine and take this land that I have openly stated I think belongs to Russia because of NATO"

Do you really support Ukraine? i note no condemnation of Putin or criticism that Trump et al won't do so either.

Putin is a murdering despot, not as you described him, as some character out of a Western....he will use whatever methods available to him, inc nerve agent and radioactive material.

Putin cannot/will not surrender, so Ukraine must instead...

Everything else you write are just word salads.

One of his many claims. He escalated to wider conflict citing a number of grounds.

Criticism of NATO expansion isn't a novel idea though : policy advisors within the alliance have had reservations about it for a long time, there has been a lot of debate about the possible negative consequences.

The NATO partners don't seem to be living up to Ukraine's expectations, as alluded to by Zelenskyy - he said he has had assurances before which didn't come good. Meanwhile as far as Russia is concerned, NATO is massively overreaching itself and reneging on its promises.

I think the white house argument was a set-up, and they were always going to cut him adrift, but it's instructive that the point where they lost their shit with him was when he questioned what their international power brokerage had done for him.

J.D. Vance: For four years, in the United States of America, we had a president who stood up in press conferences and talked tough about Vladimir Putin, and then Putin invaded Ukraine and destroyed a significant chunk of the country. The path to peace and the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy. We tried the pathway of Joe Biden, of thumping our chest and pretending that the president of the United States’ words mattered more than the president of the United States’ actions. What makes America a good country is America engaging in diplomacy. That’s what President Trump is doing.
Volodymyr Zelensky: He [Putin] occupied various parts of Ukraine in 2014. During that time, it was President Obama, then President Trump, then President Biden, and now it’s President Trump and he will stop him [Putin]. But during 2014, nobody stopped him. He just occupied and took. He killed people. From 2014 till 2022, the situation was the same—people have been dying on the contact line and nobody stopped him. We had a lot of conversations with him, including a bilateral conversation. As a new president in 2019, I signed with him a cease-fire deal alongside Macron and Merkel. All of them told me that he will never go. We also signed a gas contract with him. But after all of that, he broke the cease-fire. He killed our people, and he didn’t exchange prisoners. We signed the exchange of prisoners, but he didn’t do it. What kind of diplomacy, J.D., are you speaking about? What do you mean?
Vance: I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country. [Zelensky begins to respond] Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come to the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems—you should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.

The point where shit was lost was when Zelensky pointed out that diplomacy with Putin hasn't worked in the past because Putin doesn't stick to ceasefires and agreements..

Do you disagree with Zelensky's point that Putin doesn't stick to ceasefires?

Would you trust Putin?

Or would you want some sort of assurance of a back-up in the inevitable situation where Putin carries on doing what he wants to do?

He was pointing out that USA and NATO diplomacy hadn't worked. Which from his pov is true, it hasn't. That's what pissed Vance off - because Zelenskyy was finally holding him to account. At that point, the gloves came off and the self styled diplomatic broker/world's policeman showed its true self. It had always been there, but Zelenskyy hadn't realised.

Every country that the USA meddles with knows it. They've been doing it since WWII. Across the Americas, in the Middle East - using neighbouring countries to put their rivals on war footings, using rebels to overthrow regimes they don't approve of, installing leaders who are useful to them. They even did it in Cambodia - despite losing their own war with its neighbour, they managed to fuck it up in the process.

They pin different labels on their activities - war on communism, war on drugs, war on terror - but the end goal is the same: money and leverage for the USA.

Zelenskyy, at the time in trouble domestically, outed in the Pandora Papers, his financial backer looking to be so bent he was running out of countries that would let him park his luxury yacht, thought that he was different. He wasn't.

I notice that in none of that did you actually answer my questions about Putin. @HauntedBungalow

Do you trust Putin to stick to a ceasefire?

I didn't answer because I don't know why you're asking me that question, honestly. It's impossible to judge without a deal on the table and it's not really relevant what I personally think because I'm not a negotiator. Fwiw my overall impression is that the war has gone far worse than predicted, for Russia, and so up until a couple of weeks ago they would probably have been content to take whatever they could have sold to the country as a face-saving exit. But now that events on NATO side are moving so quickly, it's not really possible to predict whether they'd feel there was sufficient NATO disarray to let them renege at some point without too many consequences. Donbas is going to be a problematic border anyway long term I think, whatever gets hammered out in talks.