The Israeli vote at the UN followed hot on the heels of Zelensky making a statement promoting Israel as a model for post-war Ukraine. He said his country would become a "big Israel", with the armed forces having a strong presence in every aspect of Ukrainian society.
He observed that in "all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas, there will be people with weapons". For the foreseeable future, Ukraine would develop as a highly militarised society like Israel rather than being "absolutely liberal, European". Almost as an afterthought, he added that Ukraine would avoid becoming "authoritarian".
The cosying up to Israel began some time ago under Zelensky. In 2020, he delighted Israel by pulling Ukraine out of a UN committee established in 1975 "to enable Palestinian people to exercise " the right to self-determination", the right to national independence, and sovereignty, and the right to return to their homes and property, from which they have been displaced".
But the significance of modelling a future Ukraine on Israel is being largely ignored.
Israel is highly militarised because, as a settler-colonial state trying to dispossess and replace the native population, it must treat the Palestinians as an enemy that needs either to be beaten into submission or expelled.
For decades, the Israeli army and settler militias have worked hand in hand to drive Palestinians off their land (ethnic cleansing) and keep them ghettoised and away from the exclusively Jewish communities built in their place (apartheid). Is this what Zelensky intends for Ukraine - a deeply segregated society, where the Ukrainian army and militias drive out those seen as not truly Ukrainian?
Donbas regionParadoxically, that approximates the accusation Vladimir Putin levelled against the Ukrainian government as he justified Russia's invasion in late February. He claimed Ukraine needed to be "denazified" - an allegation met with revulsion in western capitals.
But Zelensky's vow to create a Ukraine modelled on Israel, it could be argued, validates the Russian leader's argument.
Kyiv will have no need to station soldiers and militias in every cinema and supermarket if Zelensky makes good on his vow to drive the Russian army out of Ukraine. It will need a large, well-equipped military to defend its northern and eastern borders. But the Ukrainian president, it seems, does not see Russia as Ukraine's only enemy.
So who else is he worried about? To understand that, we need to parse Putin's hyperbolic speeches.
The Russian president's "denazification" allegation, justifying the invasion of Ukraine, was premised on the idea that fascist elements in the Ukrainian army have been carrying out pogroms and ethnic cleansing against a large population of ethnic Russians inside Ukraine, in the Donbas region bordering Russia.
Russia has claimed that, in part, troops are there to prevent Ukraine from carrying out such pogroms - often described as "de-Russification" - in the country's east. Putin has even used the term "genocide".
Parties bannedOne can dispute Putin's claim, while also recognising it has not been invented out of thin air - though you might imagine that by listening to the western media. Ukraine has been plunged into what amounts to a civil war in its east since large-scale protests in Kyiv in 2014, removed a government sympathetic to Russia and replaced it with one keen to integrate into Nato.
To some observers, what happened eight years ago looked suspiciously like a US-backed "soft coup", with one senior White House official who had been dispatched to Kyiv at the time, Victoria Nuland, caught on tape discussing who should be installed as the new president.
Subsequent moves by the new nationalist government included not just antagonising Russia by lobbying for greater integration into Nato and the European Union. Kyiv also passed legislation severely downgrading the status of the Russian language, spoken by large swaths of the population, and merging neo-Nazi, openly anti-Russia militias like the Azov Battalion, into the Ukrainian military.
Since the invasion, Zelensky has also banned 11 opposition parties because they are considered supportive of Russia or Ukraine's Russian communities.
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