Revealed how an important Ukrainian colonel responded to Zelensky's offspring in the US

The journalist told me in detail how it happened.

“It was evening in Kijiv, when the news came from the White House. My dinner friend, a colonel of the Ukrainian armed forces, received a call by phone to the toast. I heard a dumb voice calling for the footage from the oval cabinet.

We sat down to see the broadcast, and the president of my country and his country were angry with each other as a couple of sighs.

It passed a long time before my friend declared his verdict.

« Cool », he said about President Volodymyr Zelensky. I rarely heard the officer praised his chief commander. But he looked really impressed. « He struck, » he said about Zelensky. « You have to respect that. » Then he stopped again, looked at the screen, adding, « But now we are all crazy. »

Photo by Scanpix

After the drama broke out on Friday, the reaction in Kijiv usually ranged between the two emotions: pride in his leader that he withdrew against the most powerful man in the world, and the fear of the Ukraine, its army and its ability to survive after the Russian invasion. It seemed that between Zelensky's assistants and allies, he was not surprised by what he said to President Donald Trump or Zelensky's tone. For many, it was a classic Zelensky – proud, stubborn, bold to recklessness, and rarely able to quietly accept insult.

« What else did he have to do? » – One Zelensky advisers asked me on Friday night. « If someone wipes your feet on you, would you just have to accept it? While we were talking, the adviser looked at his social network channel, which seems to be every Ukrainian Verde and explained what had happened to their leader. Many of them were annoyed with Zelensky. His clash with Mr Trump is a threat to destroy the Alliance, which retained Ukraine alive with $ 183 billion.

Zelensky's political opponents and many independent analysts called Friday's dispute in an oval office a diplomatic disaster that has no precedent and is unjustifiable.

Photo by Scanpix

But Zelenski's closest people knew that the outbreak had many precedents. President Joe Biden had similar clashes with Zelensky at the beginning of the war. In the summer of 2022, the US agreed to give Ukraine a huge military aid package, including the advanced rocket system that Biden had been arrested for several months, fearing to include the US deeper into the war. Speaking of a package worth about a billion dollars, Zelensky thanked Biden for just a minute before asking for more help. Biden lost his patience and reproached the Ukrainian leader for seeking ungrateful.

On Friday night, Zelensky was under pressure to apologize to Trump during an interview with Fox News, and he refused to do so. “No. I respect the president and I respect the American people, ”he said calmly. “I think we have to be very open and very honest, and I'm not sure we have done something bad.

For many Ukrainians, Zelensky was right. In the oval office and Fox News, he spoke with such belief and respect for himself what his citizens expected from his leader. He has long absorbed their collective pain and anger over the Russian invasion and created art to direct those emotions to win world support. Perhaps this time he chose the wrong environment to talk to such an important ally so freely. But the main response of my friends in Kijive is the pride that he has a leader with such a spine. « Every time he goes abroad, he carries with him what we feel here, » one of them told me on Friday night. “It's part of his work. To express those feelings to the world, ”wrote S. Schusster, a journalist in Time.