Zelenskyy: Russia Has Weaponized Food (In Addition To Energy)

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the Annual U.N. General Assembly for the first time.  I watched live and it was a Tour de Force.  If you didn’t see it please, please take fifteen minutes of your time and watch for yourself:

It took a minute for me to get over my surprise that I wasn’t listening to a translator.  Zelenskyy gave his address in English.   Heavily accented to be sure but quite easily understood.  It was only afterwards that the thought struck me that this man is even more savvy than I’d realized.  He knows damn well that forces here in the U.S. are sucking up to Trump, that Putin is supporting Trump and that Trump is telling GOPers to stop supporting Ukraine.  So far overall support in the GOP has held but there are way too many for comfort who are working furiously to weaken not just U.S. contributions but our ability to lead the rest of the world in the fight to restore peace and freedom in Ukraine.

And that FOX NEWS evening hosts were licking their chops at all the ways they’d be able to distort what he actually said by screwing with translations of his words from Ukrainian to English.  You know it.  You KNOW it.  And Zelenskyy cut them off at the knees.  Oh, they’ll do their thing and distort what he said but with his speech out there for all to view and having been delivered in English in the first place it will be easy enough for those who care about truth to put up the Fox (and other RWNJ versions) and the real-life segments of his speech!   The wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments at Fox this afternoon must be epic.  Hell, maybe some of them will hit the cafeteria for ketchup bottles to throw!

So there’s that, but let’s get to the substance of what President Zelenskyy dove in to because it’s an impressive laundry list.  BBC News has a nice piece that if you scroll down starts with the pre-speech stuff but it does a nice job of emphasizing those main points.  Zelenskyy starts out throwing a hard punch, noting that Ukraine gave up the third largest stockpile of nuclear weapons once upon a time. (If you didn’t know this was a carefully negotiated treaty and Russia signed on – with a promise not to try and take over Ukraine I might add) He flat out said it was Russia, who is acting as a terrorist State that should have had to give up its nukes!

From there he pivoted to the point I raise in the title, which is that Russia has weaponized the world’s food supply in addition to it’s long use of weaponizing energy.  A blunt reminder to the world that while Russia has been waging actual land war against Ukraine it’s been engaging in other forms of warfare against the rest of the world.   He also noted the dangers they pose with AI (we all know how much they’ve engaged in cyber attacks) and while not quite as blunt as in a meeting at the UN yesterday when he asked why a terrorist State like Russia had a seat at the table (they STILL have a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council) I’m sure many of the world leaders in the audience knew of the comment as were asking the question themselves earlier this afternoon.

The BBC article I linked contains a running summary from Emma Owen which includes:

• He warned world leaders that Russia’s invasion of his country is a grave threat to the whole world and that Russia should have no right to hold nuclear weapons.
• He accused President Putin of weaponising everything from food, to energy, to nuclear power. He said Moscow’s occupation of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – Europe’s biggest – had turned it into a “dirty bomb”.
• He said Russian forces were guilty of mass kidnappings of children from Ukraine, and they were being taught to hate their home country.
• He called for openness in international discussions about the way forward, and pointed to the fate of Wagner leader and former Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in June, to highlight the perils of doing deals with Russia

For good measure Zelenskyy also addressed climate change, perhaps more importantly in noting how the world having to deal with the likes of a country like Russia is hampering the world’s efforts to adopt unified, strategic strategies to mitigate the damage that’s apparent to all but willfully ignorant conservatives both here and abroad.

Like I said, it was a Tour de Force.  Putin has probably gone spastic.  He of course isn’t in NY to address the Annual U.N. General Assembly.  As Zelenskyy has pointed out he’s under indictment by the ICC – you might recall Pootie had to cancel a planned trip to South Africa to be feted at some conference of theirs because while they wanted to protect him from arrest they weren’t sure they’d be able to do so!  Maybe as I write this he’s making like Trump and decorating the walls around him with thrown ketchup bottles.  Or whatever the equivalent condiment to ketchup is over in Russia.

Again, I urge you to watch President Zelenskyy’s address.  It’s well worth fifteen minutes of your time.  Then call your legislators, especially if like me you have any P.O.S. Republican ones (my Representative is a Democrat but I’ve got two GOPer Senators) and blast them to speak out loudly and forcefully against ANYONE in their Party who suggests curtailing support for Ukraine.  Including Trump.

Ukrainians have been suffering and dying far away, doing what Patton said we should have done after Germany surrendered.  He didn’t trust Russia then and he turned out to have been tragically correct in his assessment they were no ally and sure as hell no friend to freedom in the world.

So, while I realize we’ve got serious stuff going on right here at home with the impending GOPer shutdown of the government we HAVE to proverbially walk and chew gum at the same time.  We HAVE to make sure our leaders make it clear to the world that our support for Ukraine is rock solid, and that we will demand others be the same in this fight.  Don’t forget for one second that China is sitting and watching to see how this all plays out.  IF we lead the world in helping Ukraine prevail and finally crushing Russia (and disarming it of nukes) China will be on notice that it’s own ambitions are going to have to be more limited than they currently are.