Democratic lawmakers rushed to defend Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the Ukrainian leader was publicly berated by Donald Trump in a disastrous Oval Office meeting.
The US president accused Zelenskyy of “gambling with world war three” while his vice-president, JD Vance, called the Ukrainian leader “disrespectful”, before cutting short talks aimed at kicking off the process of ending Kyiv’s three-year war with Russia.
Zelenskyy abruptly left the White House soon after without signing a rare critical minerals deal with the US that Trump has said is the first step toward a ceasefire agreement that he is seeking to broker between Russia and Ukraine.
There is something I’ve been meaning to ask someone who lived it: was watching Yeltsin on TV as bad as watching trump? Was it the same brand of buffooning chaos and mindless dismantlement of institutions?
I never thought of that, next time I talk to a Russian I’ll ask. I suspect was probably more like watching Newsmax given the role Russian media plays in maintaining power. There’s probably an editorial explaining why Yeltsin getting drunk and falling in a river in DC was actually a diplomatic masterstroke.
In the 90s media were completely uncut though, especially their coverage of the first Chechen war. Some openly satyrized Yeltsin and he was kinda ok with it. Toying the line started with overtaking НТВ under Putin, the major divide between pro and anti-state stances and publications then happened around demonstrations in early 2010s, and in the end of the decade the latter started to be pushed out until ouright bans and suppression in 2022-.
There were, like, some guidelines, but when coffins of young boys started to arrive in droves and people protested against the war, print media was there to cover it, and this better-to-be-forgotten page of our history is now set in stone and I occasionally see publications from that period, no way to purge them all. Compare it to today, when mothers’ union not against war, but for better treatment of their sons got quietly put down, and the existing media are just a surrogate tightly governed by statesmen.
On the initial question about Yeltsin vs Trump, it’s hard for me to compare them for their context is inescapably different. Boris was, like, the first real elected pres, and a populist at that, and while Trump is tasked with just not fucking things too much, Yeltsin took a wheel in a harsh transitional period. And as two populists they share a lot of what makes their public image. But, call it naive and biased, Yeltsin sounded humble and honest when he talked about what he does, like he believed in it. It felt like he cared, but was a wrong person to be there from the very start, and drunk himself to death some eight years after passing the wheel to Putin being still influenced by that. With Don getting prezzed in after neolibs Obama then Biden and actually doing worse than if he did nothing at all, with empty waving like with the wall on the Mexican border, I perceive him significantly worse, more dishonest than Boris. Even knowing now that two were deeply pocketed by oligarchs (first time, eh?), I’m still find some sympathy towards our drunkie and find some personality and struggle within him, that I can’t say I see in Trump.