Volodymyr Zelenskyy watched Nicolás Maduro get hauled out of Venezuela like a bag of dirty laundry, and the gears immediately started turning. If the United States military is capable of swooping into Caracas, snatching a sovereign leader right from under the nose of its armed forces, and going back by happy hour for hot wings in Houston without so much as a single casualty, why can’t they extend that courtesy to a certain dictator who’s been causing so much death and misery in his country for the past three years?
Speaking to reporters in Kyiv after Operation Absolute Resolve made headlines worldwide, per AP News, Zelenskyy was asked for his reaction to the U.S. military capturing Venezuela’s president and flying him to New York to face drug trafficking charges. “Regarding Venezuela? How should we respond to this?” Zelenskyy mused, barely containing a knowing smile. “Well, what can I say is, if you can do that with dictators, then the United States knows what to do next.”
Touché, Mr. President. It’s just a shame this comes right as Ukraine and Russia were finally inching toward a peace deal after three years of bloodshed.
Of course, while Zelenskyy was talking to members of the press with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, Russia was absolutely losing its mind over Maduro’s overthrow. The Kremlin demanded his immediate release, per The Moscow Times, with the Foreign Ministry calling the capture “an unacceptable encroachment on sovereignty” — which, you’ve got to admit, is rich coming from the nation currently treating Ukraine’s sovereignty like a speed bump on the road to annexation.
The U.S. has spent months pressuring Zelenskyy to hand over Crimea, Luhansk, and all of Donetsk, accept a demilitarized buffer zone, and abandon any hope of NATO membership, which is what began this whole mess in the first place.
And all of this for a deal Putin still hasn’t signed, and that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says essentially amounts to Russia conceding “literally nothing.” So, while America can apparently extract a dictator from Caracas with ease, ending the war in Ukraine, as President Trump promised to do in one day, is proving to be a tougher nut to crack. It’s easy to be a tough guy when your target is a broke petrostate with a crumbling military. Putin, on the other hand, has nukes and the other advantages that being a global superpower affords.
Is he next on Washington’s grab list? Almost certainly not. But Zelenskyy might finally be doing some math of his own, and realizing that it’s not adding up.
