In a propaganda piece for Ukraine and its president, Volodomyr Zelensky, Time magazine inadvertently revealed that the diminutive dictator might well be a dangerous megalomaniac who thinks Ukraine will one day march on Moscow and burn down the Kremlin.
Published two days ago, The Endgame showed Zelensky in front of three paintings, one of which depicts Russian President Vladimir Putin’s headquarters engulfed in flames.
The photo understandably infuriated the Russians. They have decided, probably rightly given the former comedian’s not-so-funny act before he became president, that Zelensky is mentally unbalanced.
The Photo
Reporter Simon Shuster opened his nearly 4,500-word tongue bath by allowing that despite his six years in office, Zelensky “cringes at all the polished brass and chandeliers that crowd his office.”
Whether Zelensky’s cringe is an act we aren’t given to know, but Shuster immediately used the dictator’s well-appointed office to snipe at President Donald Trump:
The place does seem rather gaudy, like a room plucked straight from Mar-a-Lago, and Zelensky can’t seem to stop apologizing for it as he shows me around one evening in March. He would rather scrap the furniture, he says, rip down the pilasters, and use white paint to hide the gold leaf on the ceiling.
“But, you know, we haven’t had much time for renovations, especially these last few years,” he says, referring to the war.
Right.
From there, Shuster laid it on thick. Zelensky is a humble man, unlike the man from Mar-A-Lago, content with a tiny office. That’s the repository of the world’s most important paintings. Forget the Louvre in Paris. Visit Zelensky’s place.
“Only in the back of his chambers, behind Ukraine’s version of the Resolute Desk, is there a space that feels like home to Zelensky — a small room with a single bed and a set of paintings that he chose himself,” the smitten Shuster wrote:
They are not museum pieces. At the local bazaar, similar ones might fetch a few hundred dollars at most. But they matter to the president because of what they represent.
The one that hangs above his bed shows a Russian warship sinking into the Black Sea. Another shows Ukrainian troops fighting recently on Russian territory. The third, Zelensky’s favorite, shows the Kremlin engulfed in flames. “Each one’s about victory,” he says as we cram into the space for a look at the pictures. “That’s where I live.”
Understandably, fury ensued in Muscovy, the Russian news agency Tass reported.
“Well, I suppose this illustrates in the best way the level of spiritual development and inner state of the one posing for these images,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “In any case, this does not flatter those who capture and publish it, as well as those who pose for such pictures.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called Zelensky’s office “a mental hospital.”
“The man is sick in the head,” said Russian legislator Vladimir Dzhabarov:
Would a normal person think of hanging such paintings? He realized his dreams, probably the dreams of all Ukrainian neo-Nazis, since he commissioned this painting. I think this will remain his dream, a black dream.… I think this shows the limitations of his mental abilities.
At least in Russia, it’s unanimous: Zelensky is one brick short of a full load.
Munich Comments
The paintings, again, suggest that Zelensky envisions his troops in Moscow, having won a third world war backed and paid for, of course, by NATO.
Last month, appearing at the Munich Security Conference, Zelensky gave voice to delusions that the Putin would take over the world if he isn’t stopped from taking part of Ukraine, notably the ethnically Russian Donbas.
Zelensky claims that Russia might well attack Poland or the Baltics, the Kyiv Independent reported of his remarks, “raising concerns about a broader conflict with NATO.”
“Based on all the information I’ve gathered from intelligence and other sources, I think he [Putin] is preparing for war against NATO countries next year,” Zelensky predicted, although he wasn’t “100 percent certain,” the website reported:
“Just like in 2022, they could move forward towards Ukraine, or they could go to Poland or the Baltics. And I believe this is his idea,” he said.
“God bless, we will stop this crazy guy,” Zelensky added.
Who’s Crazy?
“Crazy” might be the hallmark of a man who thinks he can win a war that has cost his country half its population because so many left, or one who thinks lobbing long-range American-made missiles into Russia would not invite a brutal retaliatory strike.
After Ukraine sent those missiles into Russia, it responded with a major attack on Ukraine’s power grid. It hit three electrical substations. “Russia used cluster munitions — weapons that break apart in midair, scattering smaller bomblets over a wide area — to attack the grid,” The New York Times reported.
But beyond Zelensky’s fantasy of setting the Kremlin ablaze — presumably with “crazy” Putin inside — his past as a not-so-funny comedian suggests that he is, indeed, a little crazy himself.
Widely available video shows him in a demented performance pretending to play the piano with his nether anatomy. Another shows him adorned with fake breasts.
A third Cabaret-like performance raises the question about his sexual preferences.
Zelensky is wearing tight leather pants and a skimpy leather top. Stiletto heels adorn his feet. He dances provocatively with three other men in what is evokes images of a forthcoming homosexual orgy.
All three show a man obsessed with sexual deviance.
