What’s wrong with this picture?

William (Coty) Keller
March 3, 2025

Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times

The gentleman on the left, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is the president of Ukraine, a democratic country that was invaded by Russia. The person on the right holds the position that used to be referred to as the leader of the free world. Zelenskyy leads a country at war. As reported by the NY Times, 26 months ago, Mr. Zelenskyy was feted in Washington as a warrior for democracy, invited to address a joint meeting of Congress and applauded by Democrats and Republicans alike for standing up to bald aggression by a murderous foe. This was before the character on the right was elected president of the United States.

The guy on the right has never experienced war. As a matter of fact, he dodged the draft that would have given him the chance to join other US men and women in Vietnam. He is also a serial liar. One of his most egregious lies is that this war was caused by Ukraine. The truth is Russia invaded a sovereign nation and is responsible for the death and suffering that has occurred as a result. The person on the right has taken the side of the perpetrator of the war: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Putin is known for murdering political opponents and allying with murderous regimes like that of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Assad's regime was a highly personalist dictatorship which governed Syria as a police state described as totalitarian or authoritarian and which committed systemic human rights violations and war crimes, making it one of the most repressive regimes in modern times. Syria is the kind of friend Putin likes. He has never, to my knowledge, allied himself with a free democratic nation. The guy on the right wants to be Putin’s friend.

What’s wrong with this picture is that the person on the right is jettisoning Ukraine, a democratic country, in favor of the dictatorship that invaded it. So much for leading the free world. If he has his way, there will be continued death and suffering in Ukraine, and the emboldening of Putin to continue to pursue his illegal, immoral and criminal expansion of Russia’s “empire.”

The person on the right does not know history. If he did, he might understand that appeasing dictators never turns out well. If we don’t stop Russia now in Ukraine, it will come to bite us in the future- at great cost to our nation. In this picture the good guy is on the left, the bad guy on the right.

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