Zelenskyy’s powerful appeals decry Putin’s sheer brutality

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been all over television, which is pretty remarkable for a guy hiding from Russian assassins, pleading on behalf of his increasingly desperate country.

He had already taken questions, in some underground bunker, from correspondents for NBC News and CNN. He spoke remotely with ABC News anchor David Muir, in a clip posted by the network yesterday:

"What needs to be done is for President Putin to stop talking, start the dialogue, instead of living in the informational bubble without oxygen."

The Ukrainian president has also held a Zoom meeting with congressional leaders, demanding a no-fly zone, though such a move, with its risk of a direct U.S.-Russian confrontation, is exceedingly unlikely to happen. 

And now, according to Jewish Insider yesterday, Zelenskyy made this raw and emotional pitch to the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations:

"This all happened [when] the German army rolled through Europe, and everyone gave their Jewish people away."

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He said the Russians "don’t let people out from those towns and cities, even those who simply want to leave or run away, they don’t let them out. They don’t allow us to bring food in. They don’t allow us to bring the water in. They disconnect the internet, the TV, electricity. This is Nazi behavior. This is Nazism. This is just ordinary Nazism. This is no different from Warsaw, the Polish ghettos.

"I keep telling this for the world to wake up." 

This is extremely powerful stuff, for several reasons:

Zelenskyy himself is Jewish, and shouldn’t have to listen to Vladimir Putin’s fabricated nonsense about his government being controlled by neo-Nazis.

Zelenskyy was a television performer–he once played the president in a sitcom–before running for office, and knows what to do in front of a camera.

And most important, he occupies the moral high ground, given that each passing day exposes more blatant lies from the Kremlin, which is targeting civilians in a campaign that increasingly resembles genocide.

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That brutal reality–no matter how many media outlets Putin shuts down, or how many draconian laws he imposes on western journalists–is tragically clear to the rest of the world. The Russian cruelty in twice promising a safe evacuation from Mariupol, where water and electricity are running out, only to shell the escape routes being traveled by panicked families, cannot be disguised.

But what also can’t be camouflaged is that the war is taking a massive toll on Ukrainians who simply want to defend their country. 

For the war’s first week, the world was uplifted as Zelenskyy and his compatriots slowed the Russian military advance despite the Kremlin’s overwhelming superiority. But this second week shows that Putin has responded with even more deadly tactics, as if bombarding cities and residential neighborhoods is the only way his erratic army can win the fight.  

The stark images, many of them carried on social media, have united most of the world against Putin, even such countries as Japan and Switzerland. And I see far greater unity in the badly fractured American media culture, with some who dismissed an invasion of Ukraine or disputed its importance easing off those positions. 

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In politics, as more Democrats like Nancy Pelosi yesterday favor extending sanctions to Russian oil and gas, there is less daylight with the Republicans, as well. 

Even previously pro-Putin voices are changing their tune. Mike Pompeo has repeatedly praised the Russian autocrat in the past. But the former secretary of State told Fox yesterday that he sees "war criminal activity not only from those who are actually conducting the strikes but Russian leadership, those that ordered the strikes and those that permitted them including all the way up to and including Vladimir Putin."

Donald Trump, whose initial reaction was to praise Putin’s savvy and genius, called the invasion a "massive crime against humanity" over the weekend and said NATO must stop it. That may have been overshadowed by his joke that the U.S. should put Chinese flags on its planes and "bomb the s*** out of Russia."

But this closing of the political and media ranks comes as Ukraine is running out of time. America is racing against the clock to get Zelenskyy missiles and antitank weapons through Poland and Romania before those supply routes are shut down.

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There is an enormous sense of frustration–you hear it in many of the journalists’ questions–about why the United States can’t do more to save Ukraine. But even the most heartfelt appeals from Volodymyr Zelenskyy can’t change the grim fact that our options are limited.