Today, the Atlantic Council posted a forecast of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s intentions during his visit to Washington, D.C. This is composed of brief statements from seven different “experts” presenting their views on what the war against Russian President Vladimir Putin, which is how they view it, requires. In summary, they are optimistic that the supposedly wildly popular Zelenskyy will impress Biden with his strength and dissuade him from being at all cautious in the matter of destroying Putin, any nuclear confrontation be damned.
Ian Brzezinski, Zbigniew’s son, agrees with Zelenskyy that Patriot air-defense systems are fine and good, but “Kiev also seeks offensive capabilities to push Russian forces off of Ukraine’s territory—tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, aircraft, and longer-range artillery and missiles.” Zelenskyy’s task, this deranged former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense insists, is to “convince Washington to shed its exaggerated fear that a swift Ukrainian victory would cause Russia to escalate the war with nuclear weapons.”
And then there is Matthew Kroenig, who hails Zelenskyy as “the Winston Churchill of our time,” endorsing Ukraine’s demand that it be freed up to carry the war into Russian territory. In Kroenig’s words: “At the White House, Zelenskyy will attempt to convince Biden that he should lift arbitrary restrictions on weapons sales and give Kiev the weapons it needs to shoot the archer, not just the arrows.”
John Herbst applauds the decision to provide Zelenskyy with Patriot weapons systems, but argues that Zelenskyy wants the Biden administration “to publicly express its support for a Ukrainian victory in this war and to provide the more advanced weapons systems—accurate artillery and missiles with a range up to 300 kilometers (186 miles), tanks, and fighter jets—that would enable Ukraine to take back all of its territory more quickly.” He concludes his argument, however, fearing that “unfortunately, hesitation in the White House makes that outcome, which would serve American interests, a long shot.”
Daniel Fried writes that Zelenskyy has demonstrated by coming to the U.S. that it is the leader of the free world that can ram through an agreement on the recommended $45 billion budget increase for Ukraine. “Like Churchill,” Fried writes, Zelenskyy knows that some in the U.S., the “neo-isolationists, America-firsters, or `realists’” on both right and left, “reject the Biden administration’s commitment to Ukraine and to the Free World generally,” and might be willing “to force Ukraine to surrender people and land to Russia.” Zelenskyy, he asserts, is coming like “Winston Churchill did in 1940, as Adolf Hitler battered Britain,” to prevent that.