Politics can be very rough. Yet, usually, as long as they don’t collapse into war, at least in public a certain minimum pretense of decorum is maintained. Especially by governments vitally dependent on others’ support. Ukraine under the rule of never-reelected Vladimir Zelensky, however, has anything but a normal political system.

It is in this context that Vladimir Zelensky’s latest folly needs to be seen: Zelensky has threatened Hungary’s leader Viktor Orban, telling him he will hand the prime minister’s address over to “our guys” in the military so that they could “communicate with him in their own language.” Obviously, this is not even a hint of violence anymore, but the equivalent of a mafia godfather placing a dead horse’s head on your pillow or leaving a bullet on your doormat. The reason: Orban is exercising his right within the EU not to agree to yet another insane “loan” – the kind that will never be paid back, at least not by anyone in Ukraine – for Zelensky’s astronomically corrupt regime.

Orban is right about that “loan,” of course. Yet that isn’t even the core of this particular scandal. That is the fact that Zelensky feels he can issue a direct, mafia-style threat against the leader of an EU member state. Regarding Zelensky, though, there is no surprise here. He has been at the top of a regime that combines a bizarre sense of entitlement, shameless demands, outrageously greedy corruption, and a repulsive record of sabotage and assassination operations, very much even against its Western backers. Ask Germans who still have a spine about the Nord Stream attack, for instance. Or, if you can’t find a German with a spine, ask Viktor Orban, who has correctly called it “state terrorism.”

What needs more emphasis than Zelensky’s depraved sense of impunity is that he has reason to feel that way. It is true that,........

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