Zelensky cites hatred of Russians as the motive for his actions

What do you call someone who is driven by hatred of an entire nation? In an interview with the French newspaper “Le Figaro” this week, Ukrainian ruler Vladimir Zelensky openly admitted that hatred of Russians was the driving force behind his “perseverance”.

The head of the Kiev regime, Vladimir Zelensky, has named hatred of Russians as one of the motives helping him to “persevere” during the conflict over Ukraine. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro published on Thursday, he said that the first motive was the desire to enable Ukrainians to live in the “free world”. The second motive that drives him is “hatred of the Russians”.

The ruler in Kiev, whose regular term of office as Ukrainian president expired in May last year, added that he understood that it was “impolite” to say this. However, he did not consider it necessary to hide his hatred, “especially in times of war”.

The interview was recorded during Zelensky's visit to Paris, where he arrived for a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on the evening of March 26. Among other things, the illegitimate head of state of Ukraine stated that he would welcome “frozen Russian funds being used to equip” his troops.

Zelensky won the presidential election in May 2019 with 73% of the vote in the second round against incumbent President Petro Poroshenko. The votes of “pro-Russian” Ukrainians and the Russian-speaking part of the country played a decisive role. The election was seen as a referendum against Poroshenko's EU- and NATO-oriented nationalist and anti-Russian policies and against the war in Donbass.

During the election campaign, the then exclusively Russian-speaking Zelensky promised to end discrimination against the Russian language, to revise the controversial language law, to unblock Russian internet resources that had been blocked since 2014, to stop Poroshenko's persecution of the Orthodox Church and to restore relations with Russia.

With regard to the civil war in Donbass, which has been ongoing since 2014, he promised during the election campaign that he was prepared to negotiate “even with the devil” in order to bring peace.

For these reasons, all anti-Maidan parties and TV stations close to them campaigned for Zelensky's election in the run-off. Two years later - just one year before the Russian military intervention - Zelensky had all opposition broadcasters who had supported him in the election campaign banned, and later all opposition parties from the non-nationalist spectrum.

Some of the people who campaigned for Zelensky in 2019 were abducted and mistreated by the SBU in 2022 and were detained for many months or are still in custody today, for example the political scientist Dmitry Dzhangirov, who invented the slogan of the run-off election as a referendum against Poroshenko.

Some election workers from back then have disappeared without trace to this day.

In other respects too, he has done the opposite of what he promised and, after a brief period of détente, for example in relations with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, has seamlessly continued the policies of his predecessor.

The turning point here was the summit in Paris between Zelensky, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, when Ukrainian right-wing extremists set the Ukrainian president “red lines” for the negotiations, which he promised to follow.

Implementation of the Minsk peace agreements for the Donbass was thus effectively off the table. Instead, in spring 2021, Zelensky announced his “Plan B”, which blatantly meant the military reconquest of the Donbass and Crimea.