Zelensky action figures
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Asked in January 2023 whether the West had reached peak Zelensky, and told that the drive to the Iraq war now looked like a lesser propaganda achievement by comparison, John Kiriakou answered with a shopping observation rather than an argument. 

The action figures

You can buy Zelensky action figures in stores now, he said. That is how far we have reached the point of ridiculousness: that you can buy a Zelensky action figure to have as a souvenir. 

The thing he says few Americans see

What surprised him from the very beginning of the conflict, he went on, was that so few Americans recognised what was behind it. The United States cannot maintain its international hegemony when there is a strong Russia and a strong China; it would have to destroy one in order to focus on the other. That, he thinks, is what was being seen: an attempt by the United States and its NATO allies to destroy Russia, or to bog Russia down over the long term in a war that slowly bled it, so that the United States could then focus on confronting China. That, he adds, is why Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan.  

The rest of his position in that conversation

Kiriakou's other contributions to the same discussion turn on the gap between victory and peace. The American government, he said, has not prepared the American people or Congress for peace; it has only talked about victory, and the two are vastly different things. In the mainstream media, he added, we see only news about how well Ukraine is doing and headlines saying Russia is losing, a disservice to both the American people and the Ukrainian people, since nobody is prepared for either a long war or for peace.  

On the tanks then dominating coverage he was dismissive: they were not going to change the course of the war, the Ukrainians could not win over the long term, and the only way they could would be direct NATO intervention, which simply would not happen.   He also inverted a phrase current at the time, saying that the truth is that it is the Americans and NATO who are willing to fight to the last Ukrainian. 

See also

- Ukraine as a proxy war
- Russia-Ukraine war origins
- Volodymyr Zelensky
- China as economic threat
- Vladimir Putin
- Kiriakou's Russian media work
