Anyone who has worked in public leadership will recognize that Zelensky has been putting on a diplomacy/PR/propaganda masterclass. His decisions and actions will be studied for a long time to come as an example of how to gain and exert soft power, and how to translate soft power to material power.
Yup, and the reason it’s working is Zelenskyy is putting himself at huge risk as part of it. Risk like that cannot be faked, and people know it. People know that some of the stuff is flashy PR stunts and exaggerations, but it doesn’t matter because Zelenskyy is clearly willing to risk his life for this. Like, an enormous, enormous risk. He has maybe a 50% chance of surviving this. Absolute legend. And we can see the whole country is cut from the same cloth.
That will to fight matters more than the sophistication of their weapons. Weapons without the will to fight just go right into the enemy’s hands as you surrender. In a sense, soft power then is the vastly more important power.
If Kyiv falls that is 0%. The risk is a lot higher to him, he can't just walk out of this or be evac'd. The Russians have a price on his head and want him dead because they believe that that will break the Ukrainian spirit, which I highly doubt will be the effect, if anything it will spur them on.
Zelensky has broad cultural appeal in Ukraine (or you could frame it as "he's not polarizing and isn't hated by a large fraction of the country" which I think is the better way to look at it). How else would someone become president with such a limited political background? Killing him would be a textbook way to make a martyr.
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Russians to read the ideological room. The details of this operation seems predicated on Russian misunderstanding of who they were dealing with. An entire generation has grown up living with the background threat of Russian aggression and this point has really been driven home sine 2014. Expecting the people and leaders of Ukraine to not be mentally prepared for that comes across like the nation state version of the feds showing up on the doorstep of a bunch of apocalypse preaching crazies expecting an easy win and then being baffled that their victims prefer to die together.
Or something might happen and Ukraine might just roll over. Nobody knows yet. Time will tell.
I think that is the collected western view of it. Everyone is baffled of the ignorance and ... well, mostly not finding words to describe the enormous disconnect from reality that russian leaders are showing.
The first wave of soldiers from Russia was kids with normal walkie talkies unencrypted communication thinking they are doing a normal manouver and suddenly realising they are at war.
