[Salon] Cummings on Ukraine

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

https://twitter.com/davidpgoldman/status/1789048853926167017

“What lesson have we taught him? The lesson we’ve taught Putin is that we’re a bunch of total f**king jokers,” Cummings asserted, saying the war had “broadcast it to the entire world what a bunch of clowns we are.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/dominic-cummings-volodymyr-zelenskyy-ukraine-war-corruption/

Dominic Cummings: Zelenskyy’s no Churchill and Ukraine’s corrupt

Former Brexit campaign chief says the West is ‘getting f**ked’ by supporting Ukraine.

Dominic Cummings was scathing of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and comparisons with World War II. | Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images

May 9, 2024

By Noah Keate

LONDON — Boris Johnson’s former top adviser Dominic Cummings launched a sweary attack on Western support for Ukraine Thursday.

In an interview with the i newspaper, Cummings — who led Britain’s Vote Leave Brexit campaign and spectacularly fell out with Johnson in 2020 — declared that the West “should have never got into the whole stupid situation” and claimed sanctions against Russia have had a greater impact on European politics than in Moscow.

The former adviser was scathing of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and comparisons with World War II.

“This is not a replay of 1940 with Zelenskyy as the Churchillian underdog,” he said.

“This whole Ukrainian corrupt mafia state has basically conned us all and we’re all going to get f**ked as a consequence. We are getting f**ked now right?”

In a follow-up tweet, Cummings later branded Zelenskyy a “potemkin” leader — but denied he’d called him a “pumpkin” as originally quoted in the interview.

He argued that war would only strengthen the relationship between Russia and China, saying Western nations “pushed [Russia] into an alliance with the world’s biggest manufacturing power.”

Cummings has long been critical of support for Ukraine, a stance that puts him sharply at odds with his old boss Johnson, a vocal supporter of Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s war effort.

He told the paper the West had failed to send Russian President Vladimir Putin a worthwhile signal which would deter him from invading another country.

“What lesson have we taught him? The lesson we’ve taught Putin is that we’re a bunch of total f**king jokers,” Cummings asserted, saying the war had “broadcast it to the entire world what a bunch of clowns we are.”

It comes as the former Vote Leave Brexit campaign chief tests the water for a new political party to replace the Tories.

POLITICO reported on Thursday that Cummings has organized a series of focus groups to get the public’s views about a new anti-establishment outfit.

Cummings told the i his “Start Up Party” would be “ruthlessly focused on the voters not on Westminster and the old media.”

The headline of this article was updated Friday after the i corrected its transcript of Cummings’s attack on Zelenskyy.