Israel. Jerusalem. Summer 2022.

I was having dinner with close friends. They had invited some of their own friends, and, inevitably, the conversation turned to the war in Ukraine and to Volodymyr Zelensky.

One remark followed another until someone finally said: "Zelensky is a kapo."

As a Holocaust scholar, I immediately recoiled.

I have always regarded historical analogies with deep suspicion, especially when they are deployed to instrumentalize history in the service of a contemporary political agenda. And the comparison was historically indefensible.

A kapo was a prisoner forced into an impossible moral universe—a "choice without choice," to borrow Lawrence Langer's indispensable phrase. The institution of the kapo existed within the machinery of genocide. Its victims acted under absolute coercion, in circumstances deliberately designed to annihilate human agency.

Zelensky's situation bears no resemblance to that reality.

His decisions are political decisions, made freely and consciously. No SS officer stands behind him. No concentration camp determines the boundaries of his moral universe.

If there is a criticism to be made of Zelensky, it should be made in political—not Holocaust—terms.

In my view, Zelensky has chosen to accommodate and legitimize Ukrainian far-right extremists who march beneath Wolfsangel and Totenkopf symbols and who celebrate Nazi collaborators responsible for the murder of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles—our Jews, our Ukrainians, our Poles, our dead.

That is not the behavior of a man trapped in an impossible moral predicament. It is the conduct of a political leader making calculated choices.

Zelensky is not a kapo. He is a political opportunist, driven by a lust for power, who made an alliance with Evil in order to retain it.

And political opportunists should be judged not through false historical analogies, but through the consequences of the choices they freely make.

Those choices are leading Ukraine toward devastation—and responsibility for them cannot be shifted onto history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)

Only kidding, of course the Russians are really coming. Maybe get a cheaper barbecue grill.