[Skybird]

Focus writes about the Ukrainian leader:


Selensky has long since become a hero, but will he survive this war?

This war can also be read as a battle between two men, and the question is how they will get out of it. Both of them - because the question of survival does not only arise for Volodymyr Selenskyj.

The question whether Volodymyr Selenskyj will survive Vladimir Putin's hunt for him can be answered simply: Yes, he can survive. If he wants to. He can call Joe Biden, he can call Emmanuel Macron, he can call Boris Johnson - and maybe he could even call Olaf Scholz.

If he wants to get out of this hell, he can get out of there. But he doesn't want to. The reason is obvious: Selenskyj is no longer the citizen, the popular ex-satirist who went into politics to be elected president in free elections.

The citizen Selenskyj has become the hero Selenskyj, who every day wears a green T-shirt and stands before his people and the world as fearlessly as he is vulnerable, to give courage, to campaign for help, to ask for weapons and to fight for accession to the European Union. In short, history has placed Selenskyj in a place that leaves him only one choice - to make history now.

It is, by the way, may I be forgiven for this know-it-allism, once again the refutation of all materialistic theory, according to which the "conditions", "make" history. According to which the "having" determines the "being".

Not much remains of this whole leftist, essentially Marxist narrative. What remains is the nearly 150-year-old phrase of the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke: "Men make history." That it can also be women is, of course, clear to everyone today. In the current situation, however, it applies either way to Selenskyj's adversary.

The fact that a Marxist system of all things produced a macho man like Putin may be understood as a special punch line. But it was the same with Stalin - to whom Putin refers - and against Lenin, because he gave too much freedom to the "Russian" republics, first and foremost to Ukraine.

Putin can be imagined as a strong man. At least, that's the image he projects to the world. With a naked upper body on a horse, or apparently death-defyingly descending into an icy lake. These images unleashed a tremendous power, not only at home, but also in the West.

Putin still draws on this power today. But the secret service man, like all good secret service men, is an illusionist. The picture he has painted of himself over the years shows not himself, but how he wants to be seen by the world:

As a revenant of Ivan the Terrible or one of the other Russian imperialists who have been walking over corpses for centuries. (The one exception, Mikhail Gorbachev, portrays Putin as a traitor to the people).

In any case, this painted picture prevents a different perception of Putin: what if those biographers are right who paint Putin not as a daredevil, but as a cautious person? From which the existential question arises:

How dangerous is a scaredy-cat on nuclear weapons?

Or as historian Valery Slovoley, for years employed at a Moscow cadre school and dismissed a year and a half ago, put it in the "taz": "He is incredibly afraid of ending up like Gaddafi in Libya or in the dock."

In extreme situations, people need heroic symbols of identification. In England, this was Winston Churchill, perhaps not Hitler's strongest rival, but his fiercest. What Churchill was for Hitler, Selenskyj is now for Putin: a ridiculous figure, an actor. That is how Putin perceives him.

Which also just shows what a bad historian Putin is. The last ex-actor who then made it to statesman is partly responsible for the end of the Soviet empire: US President Ronald Reagan.

Selensky grew into a role that he did not choose: That of the intrepid fighter for good against evil. This may be too black and white for the finicky, but what other conclusion can be drawn from the current situation?

Evil is the unscrupulous, the nefarious, the devious. Putin, the liar. In one sentence: Nothing is good about Putin.

There was nothing good about Stalin either, who subjugated Russia for a quarter of a century, had people murdered in camps, and is responsible for millions of deaths from starvation. And to this day is revered by far too many Russians, Putin leading the way.

In the Eastern West, Russian leaders have long been perceived as Putin is today - from bitter experience. Russian leaders put down the uprising in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968).

That is why these countries fled from Russia's threatening grip to the free West the first moment they could. They were united by the lesson that they had better not trust Russian potentates.

This is now Selensky's drive. Western leaders are now learning this lesson, long internalized by the Ukrainian, within days, after years of illusion about what Eastern European historian Karl Schlögel brutally debunkingly calls "Russian kitsch."

Life now holds the following options for Selenskyj: He becomes the hero who stops the Russians. This is the only positive option. Which is opposed by two negative options:

The Russians kill him, which Selenskyj says he expects. Or they force him to sign the surrender. In the first case, at least, Selensky would become a martyr for his people.

The fourth variant: Selenskyj goes into hiding at the last moment and wages a guerrilla war against the Russian occupiers. The history of the struggle of democrats against autocrats also has an example of this.

France's General Charles de Gaulle led the resistance against Hitler and after his downfall became first the president of the French transitional government and then the founder of the Fifth Republic - France as we know it today.

In any case, Selenskyj has already achieved one thing, beyond his personal success, which has since been recognized internationally: In the West, Ukraine is no longer perceived as an appendage of Russia. Instead, it is seen as a country in its own right, with its own history and a brave population.

Selensky has won the war of images. But more than that, as an individual he has managed to positively change the world's perception of his entire country.

A national hero.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)