Zelensky tells @lindseygrahamsc that he supports holding Ukraine's next presidential elections (due in March 2024) but only if Kyiv's Western partners pay the $5-billion cost, send monitors to the front lines, and create voting infrastructure for refugees in the EU. https://t.me/stranaua/120355
@kevinrothrock
this IS NOT what he's saying.
he's making a sarcastic comment about the impossibility of holding elections while the country is at war, under partial russian occupation and russian terror bombing.
what's the point to twist President #Zelenskyy's remarks?
@elCelio @kevinrothrock This. If not sarcastic, certainly rhetorical. He is not proposing to actually do those things. The post (in the original) says as much in the last sentence.
@kevinrothrock @elCelio Only if people think he actually was asking for it, because of, say, commentators spreading that interpretation.
Perhaps there is Ukrainian nuance you're sensitive to that machine translation doesn't provide, but this seems pretty plain -- he responded to Graham asking if he was going to hold elections by asking him if the world was going to provide the sort of thing that might make it possible. Very rhetorical and very off the cuff, and it's pretty silly to compare $5bn to what it costs to run an election in the US. He clearly hadn't costed it; That's not how this sort of rhetoric works.
@kevinrothrock @elCelio Graham made a callow, simpleminded proposal -- not at all uncharacteristically -- to which Zelenskyy tried to say "you have no idea what you're asking... let me put it in perpective that you'll understand." I've no doubt Fox and OANN would gladly pretend it was a serious request, but they lie all the time anyway; whether it's a willful misinterpretation or a fabrication out of the whole cloth is, no pun intended, immaterial.
@pieist @elCelio He did literally ask for it. The rest is context and interpretation.