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by thow-58d4e8b 1572 days ago
Propaganda mostly works by highlighting the convenient facts and omitting the inconvenient. Reading western media, one would get the impression Ukraine is a country inhabited by nothing but immaculate saints and heroes, who would never hurt a fly

In reality, every month of Zelenskyj's rule, the country moved further and further away from democracy and closer to autocracy. This is an annoying feature of western geopolitics - despite all the talk about democracy, we always prefer a western-aligned autocrat to any anti-western democratic outcome

Just an excerpt of Zelenskyj's rule:

* banned opposition's TV channels

* urged Apple and Google to remove apps related to those TV channels from app stores, as well as fairly innocuous Russian apps like Yandex (search engine) and vkontaktu (facebook-alike)

* an already atrocious state of minority rights turned even worse in many aspects

* refused Russian COVID vaccines despite having no alternative (this plummeted his approval ratings)

* after seeing Russia-aligned parties leading in the polls, he bypassed the judicial system and froze assets of his main political opponent by a presidential decree, and put him under house arrest

* casually throwing people to jail with accusations of treason, including previous president of Ukraine (democratically elected ethnic Ukrainian), opposition politicians, as well as diplomatic negotiators

and there's much more. As a citizen of a Western country, it's really difficult to get a good picture of the situation. Putin is lying lunatic directly responsible for this war. Zelenskyi is a lying lunatic indirectly responsible for this war. Why are we acting like one of them is a saint?

3 comments

There is also the extremely oppressive language law that punished both the polish and hungarian minority (even though the main target were the russian speakers).
Zelensky himself is a native Russian language speaker. I do not condone the laws but they should be challenged through a democratic response, not a military response from a nuclear power.
I don't like these kinds of comments because the intent behind them always seems to be some sort of justification for the deaths of Ukrainians and annexation. The spirit of my comment, that I hope is captured by the reader, is that NATO/USA could have avoided war and loss of lives by being more careful in the past.

But we have the present and must deal with the immediate consequences with our best foot forward. The Ukrainian people are blameless and deserve our help - more so because we are partly to blame for not exhausting every option of diplomacy available to us. Please don't try to throw them under the bus.

Let's confront this tragedy while acknowledging context so that we don't make the same mistakes again

How can you be so naive as to condemn Zelensky for taking these actions (which were arguably retaliation for Russia annexing Crimea and a preventative measure to stop the same happening to Ukraine) yet willfully accept Putin's complete control of the media, poisoning and jailing of political opposition and many other repressive and aggressive actions? I don't particularly condone or like Zelensky's actions but I don't see why they are constantly judged differently to Russia's actions?
I guess the goal was not to condemn or to justify rather than to provide some context conveniently lacking in the mainstream media.