Volodymyr Zelensky is credited with a famous phrase that he said privately to the US Government when the Russian invasion broke out in February 2022: “I don’t need a taxi, I need weapons.” Books, the media and statements by Ukrainian politicians have reported on the pressure that the president of Ukraine received in the early stages of the war to leave the country from his Western allies. Few believed in the country’s ability to defend itself. His former Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba put this idea black on white on Thursday in a television program documentary TSN:In the first hours of the Russian offensive, the White House considered that Ukraine would hold out for seven days at most.
TSN He assures on his website that Kuleba also explains in the program that on February 19, 2022, during the Munich Security Conference, US Vice President Kamala Harris privately recommended that Zelensky organize a Government in exile and prepare a war of guerrillas against the Russian occupation. However, these statements do not appear in the more than two hours of documentary.
The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, ordered the invasion five days after February 19. the book The Showmanin which journalist Simon Shuster lives with Zelensky’s team during 2022 and part of 2023, reports that at the Munich meeting the Ukrainian leader received requests from several participants not to return to his country: “Several Western leaders urged Zelensky not to return home that day, and to begin forming a Government in exile. The president responded to these proposals with a smile: ‘I had breakfast in kyiv and I will have dinner there today.’ The American journalist Bob Woodward, in his recent book Warassures that at the Munich conference, Harris also suggested that Zelensky prepare a plan for his succession in case he was assassinated.
The US vice president has highlighted as a Democratic candidate in the US elections her firm defense of military support for Ukraine, in contrast to her Republican rival, Donald Trump. But in the run-up to the war, almost no one would have bet on kyiv being able to resist Russian aggression. The beginning of the invasion surprised Kuleba in Washington and the former minister affirms that at that time, President Joe Biden received information from his military advisors that Ukraine would not hold out for more than a week: “Very prepared people met with Biden and he He asked what was going to happen, and they told him that it would last at most. [la guerra] seven days.” “But it was not the specific position of the United States, it was generalized,” adds Kuleba.
A small part of Ukraine
The Ukrainian foreign minister from 2020 until last September explains that a senior representative of the White House urged him in Washington not to return to kyiv because “in the most optimistic scenario, the Government will only be able to maintain power in a small part.” of Ukraine.” “Think three times, you will be needed to regain Ukraine’s independence,” this senior official told Kuleba. The Ukrainian politician does not want to identify his interlocutor, but assures that it was not Biden.
On the return trip, during his stopover in Warsaw, Kuleba again received the same message from this person, emphasizing that he was going towards certain death. Another senior Allied representative asked Zelensky to record a posthumous farewell message, in case of death, to strengthen Ukrainian resistance during the Russian occupation.
Kuleba remembers that the US Government warned for weeks before the invasion that Russia would attack, but when kyiv asked for evidence of this, Washington did not want to provide it, arguing that they were secret documents. “On the other hand, when we called Berlin or Paris they assured us that everything would be fine, that the Russians would not invade us,” says the former minister. Zelensky has been criticized in Ukraine because until the day the invasion began he told citizens that there would not be a Russian offensive.
Kuleba, a veteran diplomat today without political office, highlights in the documentary that since the beginning of relations between Biden and Zelensky, in 2021, the US president used paternalistic forms that the Ukrainian leader wanted to make clear were erroneous. Kuleba also believes that, at the beginning of the invasion, the Americans were reluctant to provide weapons because they were convinced that they would soon fall into Russian hands.
