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Have I been vindicated by the latest WAPO article on Zelensky? [1]
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Date: 2022-08-19
“Zelensky faces outpouring of criticism over failure to warn of war” www.washingtonpost.com/...
This latest article on Zelensky from the Washington Post seems to vindicates my post back in March (www.dailykos.com/...) that Zelensky did his people a disservice by ignoring US warnings about an imminent invasion by Russia.
My position was and is, that as a person with ties and responsibilities to other people, I would have wanted some heads up in order to prepare for an impending invasion … not bravado and denials. Zelensky made a very big point of pooh-poohing US warnings about the impending invasion;
1/20/22
“All our citizens, especially the elderly, need to understand this. Take a deep breath. Calm down. Don’t run for buckwheat and matches. To all the media – remain mass media, not sources of mass hysteria. In the pursuit of hype don’t help the enemy, reporting daily that war may start tomorrow! This will definitely not stop it,” the president said.”
https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/3388270-zelensky-addresses-nation-on-russias-aggression-urges-citizens-not-to-panic.html 2/07/22 “ Ukraine’s Zelensky’s message is don’t panic. That’s making the West antsy.” “I don’t say there can’t be an escalation,” Zelensky told journalists at a news conference in Kyiv on Friday. “We’ve been talking about this openly for eight years.” The buildup, he added, didn’t significantly differ from a similar one at the beginning of last year. The threat of war was a form of “psychological pressure,” he said. “I don’t think that the situation is more tense than at the peak at that time,” he said. He added that his knowledge stemmed from the fact that he, being familiar with the reality on the ground, knew “deeper details than any [other] president.” www.washingtonpost.com/... Most Ukrainian’s had no idea war was imminent; “Even as tensions boil with more than 150,000 Russian troops along the border in annexed Crimea and in neighbouring Belarus, just one in five Ukrainians think the full-scale conflict is inevitable.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/21/why-ukrainians-dont-believe-in-war-with-russia-distrust-west And now, after thousands have died, the fact that the civilian population was left unprepared for a war which led to more death is finally being talked about. From the WAPO article; “Zelensky faces outpouring of criticism over failure to warn of war” “Ordinary people tweeted their experiences of chaos and dislocation after an invasion for which they were unprepared, and described how they might have made different choices had they known what was coming. ” ... ...“Honestly, my hair stood on end when I read what [Zelensky] said about evacuation. … How can a person who has Mariupol, Bucha and Kherson on his conscience say that an evacuation would have overwhelmed the country?” wrote journalist Bohdan Butkevich on his Facebook page, referring to places where Russia has been accused of committing atrocities. “He didn’t want to put the country on a military footing because he was afraid of losing power,” Butkevich wrote. The lack of warning for civilians living in the threatened areas, and especially those with children, the elderly and people with impaired mobility, was “not a glitch, not a mistake, not an unfortunate misunderstanding, not a strategic miscalculation — it is a crime,” said Ukrainian author Kateryna Babkina.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/18/zelensky-ukraine-wapo-interview-warn-of-war/
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/19/2117640/-Have-I-been-vindicated-by-the-latest-WAPO-article-on-Zelensky
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