If Vladimir Zelensky is Ukraine’s most inflated politician, its most important one is not from Ukraine at all. Kiev’s war and its political regime both vitally depend on Washington’s faltering, though obstinate, octogenarian, President Joe Biden. Without his support, Western support as a whole would either collapse entirely or decrease decisively; the war would be over, and so would Zelensky.
That is why an interview that his US counterpart recently gave to Time Magazine was a severe blow to Kiev’s ruler, as even the ultra-hawkish British Telegraph noted. NATO, Biden explained, is not part of his plans for Ukraine’s future. To be precise, while NATO membership during an ongoing war has always been an absurd idea, Biden has ruled it out for the future postwar peace as well. Instead, he suggested that Ukraine would be supplied with weapons so “they can defend themselves.”
To add insult to injury, the American president also mentioned Ukraine’s record of “significant corruption,” a thing he should know a thing or two about from family experience: It was money from nepotistic non-work for the Ukrainian company Burisma that, according to Biden’s son Hunter’s own autobiography, “turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction,” while enabling him to “spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively. Humiliatingly.”
Let’s set aside the fact that Joe Biden’s statements contradict Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent promise that the upcoming NATO meeting in Washington will be used to build a “strong and well-lit bridge” to membership for Ukraine. Bridge to nowhere, it turns out, at least according to Blinken’s boss.
Is Biden reliable? Of course not. For one thing, he is clearly incapable of remembering most of his own statements. Indeed, the Time interview as a whole displays his rambling confusion all too clearly. (Almost as if he had been set up by those among the Democrats who’d still like to replace him with another candidate, but let’s not dwell on that.) In addition, even among politicians, he stands out as unusually immoral (ask the Palestinians), dishonest, and corrupt. And by openly permitting Ukraine to use American arms to strike within Russia (if with restrictions, for now), he has just shown again that his own declared ‘red lines’ are always up for revision.
Hellbound and Down 