Volodymyr Zelenskyy achieved his most important goal at the 28 February 2025 Oval Office meeting: He demonstrated to anyone who maintained doubts that Trump is, indeed, a servant of Putin.
At that Friday meeting, Zelenskyy effectively rallied all the major forces in Europe to his side and has drawn the world of democratic states into firmer commitments to Ukraine. He insistently framed the conflict in the only terms it can be framed: right versus wrong, good versus evil. The only question that remains is how quickly the world of constitutional democracies can reconfigure a security assistance package to compensate not just the absence but the overt hostility of the Trump regime to Ukraine. It appears that Europe is moving swiftly.
It may never be known for certain whether what happened at the Oval Office meeting was deliberate or not, but a good case can be made that both Zelenskyy and Trump accomplished what they wanted. Zelenskyy rallied the global forces of democracy, drove a deeper wedge into the US political divide, and forced invertebrate Republicans to slither around on slippery soil. Trump by contrast reassured his principal sponsors: Putin and the global kleptocracy responsible for starting the war and destroying the planet. Trump’s bullying of Zelenskyy surely aroused support from the array of global dictators and war criminals with whom the USA now finds itself aligned: Xi, Orban, Kim Jung Un, Netanyahu, Lukashenko, Mohammed Bin Salman, and others of that ilk. There is no longer any grey, Zelenskyy has successfully presented us with a world of stark black and white choices.
Because of Zelenskyy’s success, any rehash of the failed negotiations of the Ukrainian ceasefire agreement that occurs in the next few weeks will be much more favorable to Ukraine than the ones Kyiv recently rejected. The global reaction of liberal and conservative democracies to the Oval Office fiasco has been swift and unequivocally opposed to Trump. As a sign that the world of democracies is moving away from the US, Europe is now engaged in creating terms of a ceasefire in Ukraine that will operate outside the explicit purview of the US.
Canada, with the largest Ukrainian community outside of Ukraine itself, is moving rapidly in the direction of Europe and away from the US. The Trump friendly Conservative Party in Canada (CPC) is in something of an electoral freefall that may undermine its ability to achieve a majority in this year’s federal elections. Trudeau’s liberal party, which will be under new leadership, has made unimaginable gains due exclusively to recent statements and behaviors of the buffoon in the Oval Office. The CPC will now have to distance itself from Trump if it wants to retain their hope of electoral success. Expect Trump to moderate his positions on Ukraine and Canadian tariffs in the days to come so that the CPC does not lose its chance to rule.
Inside the US, Trump’s appalling treatment of Zelenskyy has only added to the public’s anger in response to DOGE’s unconstitutional dismantling of government services. The combination of domestic and foreign disaster after a month of the second Trump administration will force the President to publicly take a few steps away from Putin. Trump will continue to do nothing, however, without the express or tacit approval of Putin.
Trump is not the first Putin stooge with whom Zelenskyy has had to deal, but he may be the dumbest. This is why it is not difficult to imagine that the Oval Office meeting played out pretty much as Zelenskyy had anticipated. Ukrainians have had to deal with frauds like Trump for generations. While Putin’s real stooges have operated in Ukraine for decades, fictional versions of them are well represented in Zelenskyy’s brilliant series, Servant of the People.
The third and very brief final season of the series came to an end when the actor playing the fictional Ukrainian President Vasily Petrovych Goloborodko became the actual president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The first episode of the final season provides powerful insight into the character of both the man who became the President and the people who put him there.
A quote by Aristotle at the beginning of this first episode provides one of the central conceptual pillars of the entire series. “Those who buy power with cash,” Aristotle wrote, “are used to making profit out of this acquisition.” The power of money and the use of purchased power to accrue more money is the essence of the oligarchy that has tormented Ukraine and that now defines the Republican Party in the USA. Zelenskyy knows the character and vulnerabilities of such people well.
One of the more interesting oligarchs in the series who variously played the role of a nemesis and ally of Goloborodko posed a telling question directly relevant to the incident in the Oval Office. The fictional Oligarch Chuiko asked, “Which is worse, a terrible end or endless terror?” He was hoping to get Goloborodko to skirt this dilemma by compromising his principles. This is the same dilemma posed to him by Trump, who demanded that Zelenskyy and Ukraine either accept the terms of the peace deal he was proposing or return home without any further support from the US. Trump thereby signaled that without submitting to his proposed settlement, Ukraine would be faced with either “a terrible end or endless terror.”
Zelenskyy understood Trump’s lie well; he had seen it many times before. Trump was not offering peace; he was offering a ceasefire that Putin could never be trusted to keep and that would forever undermine the moral values and ideals that Ukraine represents in this conflict. Such values and ideals are incomprehensible to the narcissistic and nihilistic mind of the US president and the zombie party that undergirds him.
Goloborodko makes a similarly insightful response to the corrupting proposal of one of Putin’s fictional oligarchs in the TV series. This oligarch had a written guarantee of release from prison in exchange for Goloborodko confessing to a crime he did not commit.
Goloborodko denied the oligarch the power he felt he had to control the mind, soul, and body of a brave citizen. Goloborodko’s response: “So, you think you’ll lock me up? No. I’ll just get locked up away from you, from your so-called freedom, and from your so-called laws under which criminals put decent men in jail, and not the other way around. . . . At least there are laws here in prison. They may be harsh, but at least they work.” This is not just a statement for the fictional Ukraine depicted in the series. It is also a statement relevant to the fictional freedom we have in the US, where our oligarchs increasingly claim control over our minds, our souls, our bodies, and our pocketbooks. Prisons are not just about being locked in a cell. Some of the freest people in the world live in a prison.
Donald Trump does not know how to deal with people of courage, character, honesty, compassion, and decency. He thinks everyone has a price, for everything. He sits atop a political party who does not understand or appreciate the ideals of people like Zelenskyy, who have been inspired by the best of what the US used to offer to the world.
Zelenskyy’s appeal to those who seek truth and justice goes far beyond the plea for security aid to Ukraine; it is an appeal to embrace the values that define true freedom. There is no harsher prison than the minds of those who embrace the lies and promises of a cult leader posing as a politician. There is no greater freedom than knowing who you are and that the values you represent are transcendent and eternal. Thank you, President Zelenskyy, for showing us what a leader looks like.
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— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) March 1, 2025
Do you really think that Zelensky got a victory here? From all accounts, the European countries are unable to produce enough weapons and the voters are turning away from Ukraine. I suspect that ‘trump and Vance planned this.
“I suspect that ‘trump and Vance planned this.”
Gee, ya think? It was a planned ambush.
I’m assuming myovich doesn’t think the U.S. is an Israeli puppet or Turkish puppet.