Sometimes, for a Ukrainian lawmaker who takes time between air raid alerts to monitor U.S. political debates about Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor, there’s nothing to do but laugh.
“This guy — he is really weird,” Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Chairman Oleksandr Merezhko told the Washington Examiner in between chuckles. “He’s really weird, and what he says is stupid. It's just stupid.”Merezhko was referring to Vivek Ramaswamy, the smooth-talking biotech entrepreneur whose rhetorical talent and knack for channeling the preferences of conservative voters has propelled his long-shot candidacy into an early third-place showing in some polls.
“You know, to tell you the truth, I even didn't know that he's a candidate for [the] presidency,” he said when reminded of the tweet. “I didn't know who he was. I thought he is a pundit or a local politician, but he's not important.” — olexander scherba🇺🇦 July 15, 2023 It’s the kind of provocative commentary on a presidential election cycle that might once have been verboten, if not impossible. Yet it has been enabled, if not necessitated, by the unprecedented combination of a war in Europe during the social media age.
Most Ukrainian citizens, Tokariuk noted, are not on X , but they have enough awareness of the U.S. presidential cycle to feel “a certain degree of worry that the policy might change for the worst.” And there was no missing former President Donald Trump’s recent boast that he could “have that war settled in one day,” which drew a censorious rebuttal from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“This kind of logic, which is driven more by fear of an escalation than by the resolve of actually acting forcefully, maybe taking the initiative and making Russia face this strength and force, it is really something that Ukrainians, I think, really struggle with accepting,” she said. “Very often Western policy, and American policy, is driven by this fear of escalation, rather than by the understanding that, actually, escalation comes if we do not act, not if we act.
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