It’s getting harder and harder to pretend the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, is about “defending democracy,” as our political elites in Washington insist.
This is especially true when Secretary of State Antony Blinken shows up in Ukraine to deliver billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund the war, proclaims that Ukraine’s scheduled presidential elections this spring are canceled until “conditions allow” (Ukraine has not held elections since 2019), and then jaunts off to a popular Kyiv nightclub to play a boomerish cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
That actually happened this week.
And it happened just days after Russia unleashed an armored ground offensive in Ukraine’s northeast near the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continued pushing the same quixotic message he’s been repeating for years now: Ukraine is in dire need of even more Western aid, without which the war effort will collapse, but also Ukraine is capable of “winning” this war — that is, expelling all Russian forces from Ukrainian territory.
At this point, no one really believes that. Nor does anyone really believe — if they ever did — that Ukraine, one of the most corrupt countries in the world before the war began, is a bastion of democracy. Indeed, asked about presidential elections in Ukraine, which were scheduled for this spring but have been delayed indefinitely, Blinken said bluntly that there will be no elections until “all Ukrainians” can vote.
That means no elections even if a ceasefire or peace plan
