Zelensky’s Odessa Summit: A Stage for Surrender

Zelensky begged the West for solidarity, then bowed to Putin’s puppet. In Odessa, he didn’t defend sovereignty, he betrayed it. Kosovo excluded, Vucic applauded.

Volodymyr Zelensky knows what occupation feels like. He knows the sound of air raid sirens, the weight of losing cities to a foreign boot, the bitterness of watching allies wring their hands while invaders redraw maps. And yet, in Odessa this June, on his own stage, the President of Ukraine welcomed with open arms a man who has done for Serbia what Vladimir Putin has done for Russia, Aleksandar Vucic. Worse still, Zelensky did so by actively excluding Kosovo, one of Ukraine’s most reliable and morally consistent allies since the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The irony is so sharp it cuts through the Black Sea air like a blade.

Zelensky did not merely ignore Kosovo, he snubbed it. At the personal request of Aleksandar Vucic, the Serbian President and Putin’s Balkan vassal, Kosovo’s representatives were denied entry to a summit that billed itself as a meeting of equals united in defence of territorial integrity. The insult is staggering. It was as if a man with his house on …