Friedrich 2025, 3 days after Zelensky's historic show in the Oval Office
The Bucha Curse
The conversations about Zelensky's fiasco in the Oval Office on February 28, 2025, miss the most important point.
We have seen the behavior of a person who is not completely sane.
You cannot expect any kind of rational reaction when you mention Russian President Putin in the presence of Zelensky.
An insane person has a fairly good understanding of the real world, only some small areas of that understanding are irreparably distorted.
Zelensky's area of distortion is everything related to Russian President Putin.
I will call this psychological feature the Bucha Curse.
Imagine that you are the president of Ukraine in May or June of 2022.
Some areas of your country have been liberated, and every day you receive new reports of Ukrainians being tortured and killed in the former occupation zone.
And you have seen the corpses with your own eyes.
You keep thinking about the things you could have done wrong.
The whole world tried to warn you about the imminent invasion, but you did not believe these warnings.
You believed that Putin was peaceful but paranoid.
You showed Putin that Ukraine was not preparing for war.
Your goal was to make your country to look weak, and you succeeded in making it weak.
This has allowed the Russian army to take over large parts of your country.
What's more, Ukrainian civilians in those areas feared the Russians were going to invade and were ready to flee.
It was you who had used all available state media and all your charisma to persuade them to stay.
They were killed because of Putin, but they have stayed to be killed because of you.
That is the responsibility you have to share with Putin.
You keep thinking about this day and night.
A strong man could take personal responsibility and carry this sin all his life.
The psychological torture of self-blame was too much for the weak President Zelensky to bear.
Internal psychological mechanisms protect people from self-destruction and replace dangerous thoughts with illusions.
Zelensky has washed away his feeling of guilt in the Bucha massacre by creating an internal belief that Putin is such an evil monster that Zelensky could do absolutely nothing to save the people.
If it was impossible to do anything before the Russian invasion, then Zelensky is not responsible for any of his actions.
No one was capable of doing anything better.
It is the evil Putin who takes all the blame.
Zelensky's own guilt is reduced to zero.
Even better, he is not an idiot, but a hero who did everything he could for the sake of the country and the people.
The agreement was to be signed by another Ukrainian government official.
There was no logical reason for Zelensky to come to Washington and speak to President Trump in person.
It was the Bucha curse that forced Zelensky to fly to Washington to prevent Trump from making this "grave mistake".
He came to the Oval Office to warn Tramp and to fill Trump's head with his own distorted understanding of the Russian monster Putin.
Note that if you can negotiate with Putin and he keeps his promises, Zelensky's internal image of Putin will be proven wrong.
Consequently, this could destroy Zelensky's psychological self-protection, and his guilt will run rampant.
That would destroy him.
We saw that the Bucha curse had taken over President Zelensky's reasoning near the end of his historic performance on February 28, 2025.
You cannot blame him.
But I doubt that you can cure him.
He is the lost cause.
***
I have two additional notes.
I am partly describing my own personal feelings.
I had conversations with Ukrainians before the Russian invasion in February 2022, and I kept convincing them that a full-scale war would not happen.
It was obvious that Putin was not interested in a long and bloody war.
It was obvious that an easy blitzkrieg was absolutely impossible.
(I was sure that Ukraine would stay strong, and described the reasons on the second day).
It could be that my reasoning influenced someone to make a disastrous decision before the invasion.
That person may not be able to tell me this because he or she is already dead.
We will never know.
Yes.
I was wrong about Putin's rationality.
This is my error.
You must never underestimate the stupidity of the people.
My second comment is about Ukrainians.
Most of them have done not enough or even nothing to prepare their country to defend against the Russian invasion.
They are also affected by the Bucha Curse.
I will not explain the consequences here.
The crazy Ukrainian art of war and other effects of the Bucha curse have been the subject of other posts.
See also An open letter to undisclosed recipients /13 kB / 2023-08-19
[ Project: War_202202_NsF_Psy RU DW ]: Черновик краткого учебника новейшей истории / / 2022-03-19 (Список основных постов на тему разбора психологии войны 2022-02)