Rudyard Kipling, a modern classic of the Western literary canon, was both a champion of British imperialism and too honest not to know its very sordid underpinnings of greed, lies, and sheer selfishness.

That’s why the same man who extolled the “white man’s burden” also wrote ‘The Man Who Would Be King,’ a story of two lowlife, ambitious adventurers who manage to swindle their way to becoming kings as well as rich in a remote country on the fringes of the empire, then at its late-nineteenth-century zenith of global primacy. Until, that is, one of them makes the mistake of messing with the wrong woman, who ends up biting him in public. Seeing him bleed, his subjects realize he is a mere mortal and mercilessly dispense with the two imposters.

Ukraine’s ruler – and de facto king (of the old-fashioned, non-constitutional kind) – Vladimir Zelensky is a social climber, too. In his formative years, his native Krivoy Rog was a provincial post-Soviet rustbelt town with a lively gangster scene, a “bandit city” in his own words. Zelensky is also an expert in make-believe by profession, a cynically profane showman of the ‘give-them-whatever-they-want-as-long-as-it-pays’ variety, the cruder and smuttier the better.

Indeed, Zelensky even has a sidekick, who, as in Kipling’s dark story, has shared in the scheme of power-grabbing and plunder: Andrey Yermak, his former chief of staff and very intimate friend, making headlines (again) for being so corrupt and sinister that he stands out, even in Kiev.

And now Zelensky, the man who, it seems, would be Ukraine’s president forever, has just been bitten in public by a woman. Judging by the fierce, clearly orchestrated reaction of his media propagandists in Ukraine and the fact that the Western mainstream media are largely pretending not to have noticed, he must be bleeding, too.

The woman is his former press secretary Yulia Mendel. And she has been able to draw (metaphorical) blood because Tucker Carlson, American alternative-media heavyweight and conservative dissident from Trumpism, has interviewed her for his........

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