Past Events: Feria Latina - Featuring Saranaide From top level menus, use escape to exit the menu. Within a submenu, use escape to move to top level menu parent. Use up and down arrow keys to explore within a submenu. Use left and right arrow keys to navigate between menus. That Boris Johnson – the man who dragooned Ukraine into all-out war (read: utter destruction) by rejecting the Istanbul peace offer – now seems destined to head up NATO speaks volumes but, alas, only for those prepared to listen.The following menu has 2 levels. It is likely that history will judge Zelensky harshly, and appropriately: a second-rate stage actor who, through an emergent artefact of western socio-political organization that now rewards showmanship before substance and skill, got his turn to shine on the big media stage (something even he actually admitted publicly early on). That this reality can even be framed as “acceptable” in the context of Russia “being weakened” in the future – as has been stated by senior US, EU and NATO officials – makes it clear that Ukrainians, who might’ve had peace by now, are de facto ideological and geo-political cannon fodder in the battle to cling to “Western hegemony” as most of the world pushes toward multi-polarity. No serious military analyst disputes this. It is certain, and always was, that Ukraine cannot win an all-out war against Russia. Why was Zelensky/Ukraine effectively prevented from following through on the peace framework reached in Turkiye in March? We all know the answer to this one.Since Russia made it clear (for 8 years) that they had zero territorial ambitions for the Donbas, rebuffed the 2 regions’ attempts to hold referenda, and pushed relentlessly to have Minsk implemented on the basis “underwritten” by those European representative nations actually mentioned in the agreement (Russia wasn’t), why wasn’t Zelensky allowed to execute on the “peace ticket” he was elected on? Answer: Petro Poroshenko recently admitted that Ukraine only signed Minsk in order “to buy time to train and weapon-up” and that there “had never been any intention to honor the accords.”.But as usual answers are highly dependent on the quality of the questions. This latest act…and it is an act…is doubtlessly a push to recover waning public, media and political support as narratives crumble. For it seems that in pursuit of his presidential goals, Zelenskyy feels he must now play a celebrity again. But as fuel prices continue to rise, and with them the cost of food, heating, and most other everyday necessities, we may well see much more of the Ukrainian celebrity who went from playing a President to being one. What any of this says about reality on the ground in Ukraine is anyone’s guess. But the fact that Piers Morgan got an interview too, splashed across the whole Murdoch media empire, implies that the PR campaign is targeting a broader demographic base. On its own, the Vogue photoshoot would imply a Marie Antoinette-ish focus only on rich women, as though war is merely emotional porn for the kind of elite progressive who might spend £28 on psychic vampire repellent on Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP website. Perhaps, then, he’s simply reverting to type, and doing what a media creature does best: raising awareness, through the media.Īnd at the risk of over-reading, we can also perhaps make some inferences from the choice of media outlets for this PR push. And Zelenskyy was an actor playing a President before he was a President. Zelenskyy is probably right to worry that no longer being the current thing may have downstream effects on continued international support against Putin, especially given that economic measures against Russian President are contributing directly to an already-looming cost of living crisis across the West. Now Ukraine is background noise, and people are mostly worried about household bills. And it’s true that the world’s fickle attention has moved on: six months ago, my small Bedfordshire town was holding concerts to raise money for refugees and hanging Ukrainian flags in windows. To my eye the most plausible read is not that the war is fake, but simply that Zelenskyy is worried about waning international support. So while we can surely read Zelenskyy’s media appearances as a clear sign that some kind of PR push is under way, it doesn’t follow from this that the war in Ukraine is not real. But on the media battlefront, the entire Anglophone world is a target. We can take as read that every report on the actual, material fighting in Ukraine is skewed one way or another, and as such we can have very little idea of what’s going on. But however queasy it may seem, war and fashion have long coexisted: Vogue published through WW2, and conducted photoshoots amid bomb rubble.
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