Nations are in very many aspects just like individual people: some are stronger, some are weaker, some are capable of controlling others, and some are prone to falling prey to such control. Nations seem to be like individual people also in this respect that they appear never to learn from the past or that they appear never to draw inferences from the mistakes made by others.

Yes, stronger nations tend to control weaker nations. Still, just as it is among individual people, a weaker partner is not doomed to being controlled by a stronger partner. You become controlled mainly because you let yourself be controlled. Similarly, you become cheated because you let yourself be cheated. Within the European Union it is such small nations like Hungary and Slovakia that do not toe the EU party line. They are small, and yet they are following reason more than ideology. They are small, and yet they know how to defend their own interests. On the one hand we have much bigger countries and their leaders have brought them to utter ruin.

Look at Ukraine. It has let itself be used as a tool at the hands of the collective West. It has put all its trust in the seemingly all-powerful Western world and it has lost miserably. The best proof that Ukraine has been and continues to be the West’s instrument (against Russia) is the fact that whether the hostilities are prolonged or are about to be stopped depends entirely on either the United States or the European Union. The decision-making lies outside Kiev. The talks that are held at present over the war in Ukraine are the talks between Moscow and Washington, with Kiev acting as a supporting actor at best. The fact that Ukraine decided to wage war with Russia was in turn the result of the diktat on the part of the European Union, and the Biden administration. Now the United States wishes to end the war, the European Union wishes to continue the conflict till 2029. Ukraine appears to have absolutely no say. It has been serving two masters and now when these masters have divergent interests, Kiev is falling between two stools. The question is, could Ukraine’s leaders not have envisioned it long ago? Of course they could. A cursory knowledge of recent history of their own country would have been enough, let alone common sense.

Before the outbreak of the Second World War Ukraine was split between the Soviet Union (the greater part) and Poland (a much smaller part). Ukrainian chauvinism was particularly rampant in the Polish part because the Polish government was not so ruthless as its Soviet counterpart and because it is in the westernmost part of Ukraine where national sentiment is the strongest. This part was outside Russia the longest. Ukrainians let themselves be used and abused many times in their history, but we want to call the reader’s attention to the events occurring in the run-up to the Second World War, during the same war and in the wake of it. Strange that present-day Ukrainian leaders did not have a similar reflection, strange that they did not want to learn from the recent past of the nation.

Just as the tensions between the Third Reich and the Polish Republic grew in the 1930s, Ukrainian nationalists operating on Polish territory saw a ray of hope: they dreamed about Germany weakening Poland and helping them gain independence of Warsaw. Germany, sure enough, was more than willing to employ Ukrainian national sentiment and Ukrainian readiness to fight against the Poles. Germans launched a project of creating clandestine Ukrainian military units. It was planned that they would sabotage the Polish war effort once the hostilities between the Third Reich and the Polish Republic erupted. Then war broke out. Germany launched an all-out assault on Poland, which gave rise to the beginning of what later would be termed Second World War. The Polish state was swiftly subdued, the Polish government collapsed and fled abroad, while the armed forces were defeated and dispersed, with some of the soldiers and officers working their way to other countries, with some others of the soldiers and officers being taken prisoner of war, with still some others – going underground and continuing the fight. The campaign was so swift that the Ukrainian clandestine unit did not manage to participate in it, though there were some 400 instances of Ukrainian saboteurs thwarting the Polish war effort. With Poland defeated, one might think, the hour of Ukrainian independence or at least autonomy had eventually arrived. Alas!

It had been a few days prior to the outbreak of the hostilities that the Third Reich and the Soviet Union struck a deal (Ribbentrop-Molotov) partitioning Polish territory between the two aggressors. Neither of the signatories to this deal included in his plans Ukraine’s independence. The whole of Polish Ukraine was incorporated into the Soviet Union and joined to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. That was not precisely what Ukrainian nationalists had hoped for.

Even if Germany had conquered the whole of Poland and had occupied all of its territory, would they have carved out a chunk of it and allowed Ukrainians to have an independent state? What kind of state would that have been? Landlocked, small, with few natural resources, wedged between mighty Germany and the mighty Soviet Union. This Ukrainian state would have had to act as dictated to by Berlin. Think for comparison about the then Slovakia, a country – a nation – that with the aid of the Third Reich gained independence from Czechia only to become fully dependent on Germany.

We don’t even need to think about what if Germany had conquered the whole of Poland because three years later as the Third Reich attacked the Soviet Union all prewar Polish territory was occupied by Germany. Did Berlin think about creating a Ukrainian state, even one with limited autonomy? Hell, no! A part of Western Ukraine was joined by the German authorities to the General Government (German: Generalgouvernement), which was the administrative region under German rule recognized by Berlin as (occupied) “Poland”. So, territories around the city of Lvov became again part of Poland, even if occupied by Germany. And these were the territories with the strongest Ukrainian national sentiment! Neither did a Ukrainian state emerge later on although Ukrainians served the Third Reich hand and foot, even forming in 1943 the notorious 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) made up of Ukrainians, which fought on the eastern front. Did Ukrainian leaders draw inferences? Did they learn a lesson? Far be it from them! They continued to serve their perceived protectors and their perceived benefactors.

Ukrainian nationalist leaders and ideologues along with the commanders of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army were somehow tolerated by Berlin during the war and by Bonn after it. Tolerated, yes, that’s the word for it. The leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – Stepan Bandera – ultimately found refuge after the war in West Germany. It is noteworthy that during the war he was arrested by the Germans for a time, including in… the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp! Why? His political aspirations concerning creating a Ukrainian state were too high… Bandera wanted to serve Germany, to ally Ukrainians with Germany and those were his wages… And yet, he was to be used further after the war in the political combat between Washington and Moscow. Did he learn his lesson? As if! He could be used again after the war but at the same time his war record and the record of the deeds of his followers was such that his presence and political activity in Germany was not particularly palatable to his new German masters. The world got word about the numerous massacres that his subordinates and his followers perpetrated during the war against tens of thousands of Polish, Jewish and Russian civilians. So he became more of a political and moral burden, and as such was not protected enough by West German services. The effect was that a Soviet agent could track him down and eliminate him in broad daylight in Munich. No hint.

It is relatively recent history. It was some eighty years ago that Ukrainians let themselves be used against Poland and then against the Soviet Union by Germany. The result? Germany lost the war, Poland emerged from the war without any part of Ukraine, while the whole of Ukraine was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Was that what Ukrainian nationalists had been dreaming of? Not really. Is it not similar today? Ukraine let itself be used by the collective West against Russia. After three years of devastating war, Russia is emerging victorious, the United States seeks to wash its hands of this war, while the European Union puts a bold face on its political, economic and military impotence. Ukraine? Ukraine has suffered enormous losses. Millions of people have been killed or physically and psychologically mutilated, millions of people have left the country for good. The economy is ruined, the state territory has shrunk, white the country’s debt has skyrocketed. Today even Yulia Tymoshenko, known for her passionate hatred of Russia, was shocked as she heard Germany’s defence minister Boris Pistorius say that war in Ukraine ought to last till 2029 to allow the European Union to prepare for a conflict with Russia. Even Yulia Tymoshenko awakened to the realization that Ukraine had been used as a tool to weaken Russia, that Europeans or Americans do not care two hoots about how much Ukrainian blood has been spilled, is being spilled and is going to be spilled.

Ukraine sustained enormous losses because Kiev’s leaders wanted to join NATO and because they thought that Russia would be intimidated by the West and do nothing to prevent Ukraine from becoming a member of this alliance. Ukraine’s leaders sacrificed millions of people and territory and billions of dollars to join a military alliance. They could have stopped the war in its tracks during the Istanbul talks, but they preferred to trust in the collective West, they preferred to part with commonsense. Now it is clear to everybody and anybody that Ukraine is not going to join NATO. What was this war for then? There seems to be virtually nothing whatsoever that Ukraine might gain from the three years of suffering, the three years of bloodshed, the three years of sacrifice. The country’s leaders preferred to obey Ursula von der Leyen and Boris Johnson, to act at the behest of Joe Biden and Jens Stoltenberg rather than serve and spare their own nation, rather than look for guidance into recent history. What a bitter outcome! What a bitter lesson. Yet, a lesson that will not be learned. You may rest assured that in a few decades’ time precisely the same mistake will be made by Ukrainians and – for that matter – by any other nation whose leaders wish to please their Western overlords more than to work for the benefit of their own people. Look at the Baltic states. Tiny though they are like mice, their leaders are as bellicose as tigers. So it goes.

Two explanations for such policymaking on the part of the leaders of such small nations can be offered. Either they are patriotic but deprived of the faculties of reasoning (in which case why they are leaders in the first place?) or they are placed as governors by the stronger states, governors who do not care about their nations, governors whose families and bank accounts are outside their own countries, governors who can always rely on a safe landing promised to them by those from whom they take their orders.

Lex Fridman, a rather well-known American YouTuber, recorded a talk with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Two hours and a half. We are not going to retell what was said during the talk: the reader is strongly advised to familiarize himself with it. It is far more worthwhile to have a first-hand experience with a leader of a nation rather than listening to hours of reports and analyses by experts from the proverbial CNN or BBC. Whether or not the reader is going to listen to the talk, we only want to offer our take on the interview.

President Zelensky makes a bad impression overall. He talks a lot and he talks little sense. Watching the interview, you get the impression that the roles ought to be swapped and swapped in reality, not in imagination: Lex Fridman ought to be Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy ought to take the interview. Lex Fridman looks elegant and talks sense; Volodymyr Zelenskyy looks like a member of a technical staff and spurts out a lot of meaningless verbosity. Lex Fridman cares about peace, about putting an end to the hostilities, while Volodymyr Zelenskyy only thinks about revenge and builds castles in the air to the tune of joining Ukraine to NATO or putting Russia’s president on trial.

Both gentlemen come from Ukraine, with this difference that Lex Fridman has lived for the last thirty years in the United States; both gentlemen are of Jewish descent; Russian is the mother tongue of either. Though they both are native speakers of Russian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy refuses to speak in Russian, although Lex Fridman encourages him to, although Lex Fridman more often than not uses Russian throughout the talk. Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a point of using Ukrainian or English, but since Ukrainian is not his mother tongue, he keeps switching from Ukrainian to English, to Russian and then back to English, to Ukrainian, to Russian. Volodymyr Zelenskyy keeps switching to Russian because that’s the language in which he can accurately convey what he means. If you decide to watch the interview, select at least for a while the original version, without English dubbing, without AI translation and voice-over: you’ll hear Volodymyr Zelenskyy speak the way he naturally does.

Though Lex Fridman adores his guest and lavishes the Ukrainian President with compliments, you get the impression that he grows irritated with him. Why? Because Volodymyr Zelenskyy has little to say, because Volodymyr Zelenskyy is fixated on a couple of ideas that are unfeasible, because Volodymyr Zelenskyy switches from language to language. While Lex Fridman needs an interpreter when Ukraine’s president speaks Ukrainian, to top it all Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s English is not fluent, which makes the communication hard. Just one tiny thing: the Ukrainian President keeps saying ‘wery’ rather than ‘very’, which is not a matter of accent as his apologists might be ready to say or a particular difficulty of English phonetics for a Russian-speaking man. No. Russian has the sound ‘v’ like in ‘very’ in all word positions, including words which like – вера /vera/ = faith, веры /very/ = of the faith – resemble the English word ‘very.’ Strange that he did not pick up the pronunciation of this one of the most frequently used words either at school or later in life. A detail? Yes, sure enough, but a detail that might reveal the Ukrainian President’s perception and cognition of reality: due to his frequent meetings with foreign politicians and diplomats, Volodymyr Zelenskyy hears ‘very’ almost every day several times and reproduces it as ‘wery.’ A small divergence from reality in terms of language that translates into a huge divergence from reality in other fields of the President’s. Russians occupy a quarter of his country, with the West being incapable of doing anything about it, but Volodymyr Zelenskyy is daydreaming about regaining all territorial losses, demands compensation and court martial for the aggressor; a million Ukrainian soldiers are estimated to have been killed or wounded, but Volodymyr Zelenskyy maintains that Russian casualties amount to 788.000; the West is slowly giving up on Ukraine, but President Zelenskyy says that Putin fears Trump, and so on, and so forth. Daydreaming, wishful thinking, conjuring up alternative realities, in a word: ‘wery’ replacing ‘very.’

While speaking Russian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses Lex Fridman with the familiar singular ‘you’ rather than the official plural ‘you’ (something like using French ‘tu’ rather than ‘vous’, or German ‘du’ rather than ‘Sie’), while Lex Fridman keeps addressing the President with the formal and respectful plural ‘you.’ One would expect reciprocity on the part of the President.

Now compare the command of the English language and especially the content of speech, of statements, the concisenesses and precision of thought between what the Ukrainian president presents and what Sergei Lavrov, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, presents. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is lacking some dignity that becomes a diplomat, a dignity that Sergei Lavrov has. The Ukrainian President is fond of selecting words that are offensive – Putin is a killer, Putin is deaf (to arguments), Putin does not like his own country, Putin’s head is sick, Putin is a mammoth, Putin is about to conquer the world – words that make it difficult or impossible for the President of Ukraine to have any talks with the Russian leader. What if – just imagine – what if President Trump coerces President Zelenskyy to sit down at the negotiation table with President Putin? Ukraine’s President will lose face, will lose his integrity: he’ll be forced to talk to the killer, the mammoth, the madman.

Throughout the interview Lex Fridman behaves like a statesman: serious timbre of voice, language that is toned down, elegant clothes. Contrarily, Volodymyr Zelenskyy behaves like a garrulous plebeian dressed in wacky garb.

This longish interview is disappointing and pretty boring. It does not compare in any respect with the interviews given by Vladimir Putin or Sergei Lavrov. Yet, watch it at least for half an hour. Evaluate the personality, character, manners of the leader of Ukraine. That’s a good insight into his psyche, his mentality. It somehow reveals how he guides his country through turbulent waters. And remember one more time: of the few ways of accessing this video, select the original three-language version at least for a while. Do not let the AI make you believe that Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s English is better than it is. In the introduction to the whole material, Lex Fridman explains how to choose a language version.

The 155th Anna of Kiev Brigade has recenlty made a name for itself: 1.700 soldiers are said to have gone AWOL before the unit reached the front line. The 155th Anna of Kiev Brigade was one of the planned 14 brigades that were supposed to be equipped and trained by NATO, with the human resources being supplied by Ukraine. That was the Zelensky plan. Indeed, the said brigade was formed in Ukraine, relocated to France, and then, again, deployed to Ukraine, the Pokrovsk region. As it arrived there, it transpired that it was diminished by the several hundred men, as mentioned above.

Desertion happens in any army, at any time. Some men have been made soldiers against their will, against their physical and mental capabilities; yes, some men have been professional soldiers and some have volunteered to join the ranks out of the patriotic sentiment or simply for money, but then the harsh experience of the real war in the trenches, the carnage and the death of the many comrades at arms have played havoc with their psyche, turning them into deserters.

As said, there is no one army where there is no desertion. What is important is in which of the feuding sides the number of soldiers going AWOL is larger; what is important is also which is the most prevalent driving force motivating soldiers to leave the ranks without permission.

It does not require much mental effort to realize that desertion afflicts first and foremost the losing side. Simple human psyche. We prefer to collaborate with or even serve the winners, but, conversely, we sever our connections with losers, even if the losers are somehow strongly related to us. Desertion haunted the Napoleonic troops trailing back from Moscow, desertion haunted Hitler’s troops when the Soviet cannonade could be heard in Berlin. Desertion is at present afflicting the Ukrainian army.

The war has long been lost. The comparison of human and material resources at the disposal of the warring countries tells the whole story. Lightweight against heavyweight. A lynx against a tiger. A sports car against a racing car. Who was silly enough to think that the former had any chance?

I hear you say: Ukraine had a chance because it was helped by the West. Was it? Let us assume it was. Go and help as much as you can a lightweight fighter against a heavyweight fighter; go and put a lynx on a dope against a tiger; go and equip a sports car in such a way as to make it beat a racing car. Good luck with your efforts!

Desertions are barometers. Deserting soldiers are those proverbial rodents (no insult intended) leaving the sinking ship. They know that the ship is sinking. Despite the statements and actions of all the crew and the passengers, when those small rodents who occupy the lowest social rank – just like rank-and-files in an army – leave, they know that the ship is sinking for certain. Those up and above the social ladder (on upper ship decks) may cherish silly hopes and harbour silly expectations, but those at the social and army bottom know best.

They know best because they have been bussified for months and sent to the meat-grinder. They know it best because they – we mean the common people – have been suffering these three years in the trenches, with their families suffering privation back at home. They know best because we all know that the United States wants to end this war.

Do you know that Ukrainians have coined a new word? We have used this word in the foregoing paragraph. The word is bussification. No need to reveal the association it evokes in everybody’s mind. Bussification, because Ukrainian men are hunted down and rounded up in the streets and shops and institutions, and then bussed and drafted into the army. Very often women turn up in defence of such a poor guy and try to chase away or at least shame and shout down the oprichniki of the Kiev government, those bounty hunters who perform this task.

Oprichniki or oprichniks were a corps of the state police in Rus’ under Tsar Ivan the Terrible. They were feared by the nation, by the common people. Bounty hunters were individuals in the Old West who would pursue an outlaw and either catch him or kill him for money. Those Ukrainian units of oprichniki or bounty hunters do pretty much the same: they either get paid for hunting people down or they let themselves be bribed in return for leaving someone out of the draft.

All of which haunts the common people, those who do not have money or connections, those who did not manage to leave the country. The billionaires and the millionaires enjoy themselves in the West; the politicians are not drafted by definition; the officers usually are somewhere in the rear. The common man bears the brunt.

With all this in mind, soldiers, Ukrainian soldiers, are confronted with a life decision of either going AWOL or being killed or maimed, as the case may be. If 1.700 soldiers desert from one brigade alone – a brigade can consist of anywhere from 1.500 to 5.000 soldiers – if – assuming the brigade counted close to 5.000 men – one third goes AWOL with all the supervision and discipline, it speaks volumes.

In 2024 the Ukrainian parliament issued a special law that all deserters who came back to the units before the end of the year would be pardoned for desertion. Few came back. Does a law like that not reveal the problem? The problem of massive AWOL cases? You do not draft laws unless there is a need – a pressing need – for them.

To wind up this sad reflection: Which indicator about the prospects of the ongoing war carries more weight: a bellicose declaration of a NATO Secretary-General (or any other personage of this status) or the fact that cannon fodder has said that enough is enough? You can take a horse to water but you cannot make him drink. Rutte or Biden (or Trump for that matter, or Macron, or Scholz, or Starmer, or Zelensky) can bussify Ukrainians, but they cannot turn them into soldiers, even in France. Enough is enough.