JC

’m not sure whether our first story this morning is more like “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Walking Dead.” Either way, I think it may mark the beginning of the end of the world as Zelenskyy knew it. Time Magazine launched a rhetorical hypersonic missile into the heart of Ukraine’s war effort yesterday, with a full-sized, bright-red cover story gaily headlined, “‘Nobody Believes in Our Victory Like I Do.’ Inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight.”

They didn’t come right out and call Zelensky Hitler, but they called him Hitler. I’ll show you how, in a minute.

The cover’s sub-headline didn’t help keep Ukraine in the fight. I guess keeping Ukraine in the fight is Zelensky’s problem:

As John F. Kennedy quipped after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. Where are all the Counteroffensive’s™ parents now?

And that was just the cover. Now, I’m old enough to remember back when media wasn’t allowed to say anything critical about the Ukraine war effort. Slava Ukraini! and all that rot. But, between the article’s soaring rhetoric and its fascinating, behind-the-scenes personal interest anecdotes, yesterday’s long-format story (which ran for pages and pages) took a bloody dental appliance and methodically vivisected whatever is left of Ukraine’s faltering chances.

The context for the story was last months’ trip when Zelensky’s went to Washington trick or treating but went home with a mostly-empty bag, with one or two lonely homemade ziplocks down at the bottom containing nuts and raisins and no candy. His reception in D.C. was downright frosty: “Congressional leaders declined to let Zelensky deliver a public address on Capitol Hill.” No, thanks.

Time said the Ukrainian president had hoped his visit would boost lawmakers’ confidence in the war, like in times past, but this year his costume just didn’t fit right or something. Apparently, at this point most folks are no longer interested in sending any more borrowed money to further enrich corrupt oligarchs:

Public support for aid to Ukraine has been in decline for months in the U.S., and Zelensky’s visit did nothing to revive it. Some 41% of Americans want Congress to provide more weapons to Kyiv, down from 65% in June, when Ukraine began a major counteroffensive, according to a Reuters survey taken shortly after Zelensky’s departure. That offensive has proceeded at an excruciating pace and with enormous losses, making it ever more difficult for Zelensky to convince partners that victory is around the corner. With the outbreak of war in Israel, even keeping the world’s attention on Ukraine has become a major challenge.
Well, Times’ cover story isn’t going to help those poll numbers any. Zelensky is probably already regretting it, but he invited Time’s reporters to travel back to Ukraine with him, perhaps hoping for some positive coverage. Boy was he wrong. The first thing Time’s reporter did was interview the former comedian’s staff, and it wasn’t funny, at all:

On my first day in Kyiv, I asked one member of his circle how the President was feeling. The response came without a second’s hesitation: “Angry.” His usual sense of humor, his tendency to liven up a meeting in the war room with a bit of banter or a bawdy joke, none of that has survived into the second year of all-out war. “Now he walks in, gets the updates, gives the orders, and walks out,” says one longtime member of his team. Another tells me that, most of all, Zelensky feels betrayed by his Western allies. They have left him without the means to win the war, only the means to survive it.
Zelensky sounds kind of bitter. In fact, he sounds a lot like Hitler in the bunker at the end of World War Two, doesn’t he? The analogy was drawn more closely than you might think. It’s almost like Time, scribbling furiously between the lines, was secretly conjuring the image of a frail German leader pounding the table and screaming at subordinates. Consider this next paragraph that basically reported Zelensky has become delusional:

Despite the recent setbacks on the battlefield, (Zelensky) does not intend to give up fighting or to sue for any kind of peace. On the contrary, his belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. “He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”

As Mark Twain once said, history may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Time continued drawing an invisible line directly between Ukraine in 2023 and Berlin in 1945. For instance, Time said Zelensky’s military commanders are starting to ignore his increasingly clueless orders:

(A senior Ukrainian military officer reports that) some front-line commanders have begun refusing orders to advance, even when they came directly from the office of the President. “They just want to sit in the trenches and hold the line,” he says. “But we can’t win a war that way.”
Some commanders have little choice in second-guessing orders from the top. At one point in early October, he said, Kyiv demanded an operation to “retake” the city of Horlivka, a strategic outpost in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have held and fiercely defended for nearly a decade. The answer came back in the form of a question: With what? “They don’t have the men or the weapons,” says the officer. “Where are the weapons? Where is the artillery? Where are the new recruits?”
That was bad enough. But then Time really started sticking the surgical blade in even deeper. This next sentence may have changed history. It’s difficult to underestimate the impact of this next assessment, an assessment made by a single Time reporter quoting an anonymous Ukrainian official, but it will echo a million times down Congress’s marble halls.

Time reported that sending more expensive weapons and ammo would be useless at this point:

In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells me that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.”
All the young soldiers are dead now. Ukraine’s remaining fighters have an average age of forty-three. And, said Times, they aren’t exactly the healthiest bunch of men you ever saw. “This is Ukraine, not Scandinavia.” Time even found a way to make it Zelensky’s fault.

Responding to Western criticism of the widespread, corrupt practice of Ukrainian families paying conscription agents for medical waivers, Zelensky — maybe channeling President Reagan during the Air Traffic Controller strike — fired them all. Buh bye.

It wasn’t the best idea he ever had:

On August 11th, Zelensky fired the heads of the draft offices in every region of the country. The decision was intended to signal his commitment to fighting graft. But the move backfired, according to the senior military officer, as recruitment nearly ground to a halt without leadership. The fired officials also proved difficult to replace, in part because the reputation of the draft offices had been tainted. “Who wants that job?” the officer asks. “It’s like putting a sign on your back that says: corrupt.”
At this point in the article, Time had pretty conclusively won the argument that sending more aid to Ukraine would be effectively useless, because there aren’t enough men to use more weapons, and there’s no way for Ukraine to recruit any more men, since its conscription service has collapsed. But, to make sure its intended victim was completely dead, Times piled on.

The article explained, even if the manpower problem could be solved, more aid would just be stolen at this point anyway:

Amid all the pressure to root out corruption, I assumed, perhaps naively, that officials in Ukraine would think twice before taking a bribe or pocketing state funds. But when I made this point to a top presidential adviser in early October, he asked me to turn off my audio recorder so he could speak more freely. “Simon, you’re mistaken,” he says. “People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.”
Doesn’t sound like a very good advertisement for sending even more money to Ukraine, does it?

Channelling even more Zelensky-as-defiant-Hitler, the Times article began and ended the same way: Zelensky stubbornly refuses to consider any kind of peace deal, or anything short of complete victory against the Russians. The reporter didn’t come right out and say it, but the hint that Zelensky is completely delusional and should be immediately replaced could not have been more strongly suggested.

Finally — this morning, all the major Establishment Media outlets ran headlines referencing Time’s story. They are making sure the bad news gets broad coverage. If I had to bet, I would bet that Zelensky is living on borrowed time. It is very difficult to conceive how any kind of substantial Ukraine aid package could possibly survive this report

So