Unspecified Ukraine Worrying
False and toxic narrative redux
No one who uses monotonic logics in ultra-competitive Ukraine-style politics is ever allowed to take something back. Once you've said something, that's it. It’s stuck to your ass forever.
That’s one reason why the May 26, 2020 statement written and signed by seven former American ambassadors to Ukraine is ridiculous.
The letter, which appeared on the website of the Atlantic Council, did not specify what prompted concern among the former ambassadors. But John Herbst, the U.S. envoy to Kyiv from 2003 to 2006 and now director of the think tank’s Eurasia Center, said it was motivated by leaked recordings of years-old phone conversations between then-Vice President Joe Biden and Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president at the time. - Washington Post, May 26
A second reason is because there are at least eight hours of these unflattering secretly recorded conversations. Think of it as the Ukrainian audio version of Wikileaks. I won’t talk about the third and fourth reasons.
It's something between a miracle and a curse that the authors of the statement can even tolerate disruptors Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, let alone offer advice, like tears in rain, to policymakers in both countries.
FoxNews, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Euronews, Newsweek, Mother Jones, Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, The Independent, et cetera wrote about the leak, which was promoted by thousands of Kremlin bots and pro-Trump ezines. Even renowned Ukraine expert Nina Jankowicz had something to say. But all these stories, and now this statement, miss the point (centered, bold, highlighted below).
Renaissance humanists did not call out statements, cancel ex diplomats and then write to their fan base instructing them to ignore their bullshit commentary. That would have been tantamount to sequent calculus - seamlessly transitioning assertions into conditionals when challenged, and then back into assertions when their back is turned.
While kooky conspiracy scandals cooked up by Trump’s re-election campaigners and bemoaned by former U.S. ambassadors are grabbing all the headlines, Ukraine continues to be ravaged by war, poverty, joblessness and disease.
Lest we forget:
Business does not trust Ukrainian courts.
The Prosecutor General’s Office is a joke.
No one takes Ukraine’s SBU State Security Office seriously.
The State Bureau of Investigations is a mess.
Ukraine’s State Tax and Customs Services are being reorganized.
The Health Ministry is totally corrupt.