Russia Dismisses Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky: ‘Child’, a ‘Monkey with a Grenade’

Russian lawmaker Andrey Lugovoy, who rose to international recognition as a top suspect in the polonium poisoning of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, dismissed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “child” and a “monkey” in a rant before the Duma on Tuesday.

The state-owned newspaper Gazeta relayed Lugovoy’s remarks against Zelensky and on the growing crisis in eastern Ukraine generally caused by Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize his proxies in the region as a form of legitimate state government.

Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, colonizing its Crimean Peninsula and starting an ongoing war in Donbas, an eastern region consisting of Donetsk and Luhansk. While Moscow has been arming paramilitaries fighting the Ukrainian military for eight years, Putin formally sent the Russian military into the region on Monday after declaring Donetsk and Luhansk independent states. Putin rationalized the formalizing of the invasion by claiming that the leaders of those two “countries” had requested Russian military assistance to oust the legitimate government in Kyiv.

Lugovoy, Gazeta reported, “said that, due to a lack of political experience, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reminds him of a child playing with matches.”

“I would even say more – he rather resembles a monkey with a grenade. With a toy grenade, because he has no other,” Lugovoy reportedly said.

“Monkey with a grenade” is an increasingly common idiom – one used by dissidents against Putin for his incessant adventurism abroad.

Lugovoy is one of the most aggressive voices in the Russian government. In addition to evidence against him largely compiled by the British government in the killing of Litvinenko, a former Russian agent who defected to the United Kingdom, Lugovoy has openly advocated for “exterminating” any opponent of the Putin regime.

“If one knows about characters who can cause serious damage to the Russian state, they should be exterminated,” Lugovoy told the Spanish newspaper El País in 2008, calling his stance “the position of every normal Russian” and suggesting former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili as an example of someone who should be killed. Like Zelensky, Saakashvili presided over the Russian invasion of two Georgian regions by Putin in 2008: South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which Putin declared sovereign “states” in the same way he did Donetsk and Luhansk. The two remain occupied to this day; a Putin-friendly government arrested Saakashvili last year and he began a hunger strike in Georgia this week.

Lugovoy’s language underscores the lack of respect with which the Russian government views Zelensky, a lack of respect that has been mirrored in the way the administration of President Joe Biden has handled its relationship with the head of state.

Zelensky is a professional actor with no political experience prior to becoming president. Observers interpreted his election in 2019 – defeating incumbent chocolate industry oligarch Petro Poroshenko – as the culmination of the Maidan movement that began in 2014 with the popular ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Poroshenko succeeded Yanukovych on a promise to fight Russian influence in the country but rapidly lost popularity after facing widespread allegations of corruption – including from his own officials, most prominently Saakashvili, who Poroshenko imported into the country to fight corruption. Poroshenko’s tenure also overlapped with Hunter Biden’s tenure on the board of the gas company Burisma from 2014 to 2019. Biden left the company a month before Zelensky became president.

Zelensky campaigned aggressively against this corruption and cornered Poroshenko into attempting to replicate his absurdist style, at one point leading Poroshenko to debate an empty podium as a campaign stunt. Poroshenko later lost a debate to Zelensky held on the latter’s terms: that the candidate be drug tested and the event held in a stadium with seating for 70,000 people.

The decisive victory against Poroshenko nevertheless left Zelensky with few allies in the global political establishment, which has resulted in much of the world’s leader actively disregarding Zelensky while attempting to shape the future of Ukraine.

Putin’s escalation in Donbas followed President Biden’s remarks in January suggesting that America would not come to Ukraine’s aid in the event of a “minor incursion” by Russia. The Biden administration then proceeded to severely weaken the Ukrainian economy by predicting an “imminent” Russian invasion of the entirety of Ukraine, causing as much as $500 million in foreign investment to flee the country in two weeks, according to remarks by Zelensky in late January. The White House largely ignored Zelensky’s calls for sanctions against Russia at the time and advice to tone down the “panic” about a potential invasion of Kyiv, which the president insisted no evidence pointed to being on the horizon.

Biden responded to Putin sending the military overtly into Ukraine this week with mild sanctions on individuals he claimed had close ties to Putin. Russia’s oil and natural gas industries remain untouched by the sanctions. Zelensky has enthusiastically urged Biden to sanction Russia for nearly a year, strongly condemning Biden’s move last summer to lift sanctions on the proposed Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany. Germany halted work on Nord Stream 2 this week, but not before the removal of American sanctions significantly hampered global credibility on sanctions.

Biden has repeatedly ignored, or belatedly and listlessly accepted, Zelensky’s attempts to meet with him. Most recently, the White House disregarded Zelensky’s invite for Biden to visit Kyiv entirely, leaving it out of a White House readout of their most recent phone call. The office of the presidency of Ukraine published the invite; which Biden never responded to.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.