I love Zelensky and I think he's a hero, but I don't think he did well at all. People think he did well because they love him, but objectively I think he made quite a few mistakes besides the one you mention.
The first one is getting emotional in the first place. His team and Ukraine's intelligence services should have spent weeks interrogating and trying to provoke him in order to desensitize him to this kind of shit. Trump, Vance and Musk are primarily trolls and they should be dealt with as such.
He should not have interrupted Vance answering him either. That was fatal.
He needed to stay calm and slow. He did better than any of us could ever have done, but it wasn't quite enough for this situation. He could have looked a lot stronger and I think we need everything we can possibly get in the situation we're all in right now.
Given the situation, he did stay calm and slow. He did an excellent job trying to keep the cadence measured.
But Trump jumped in angry at the implication that one day Putin will come for the US. That is when Trump stated his machine gun speech … millions will die, world war 3.
This was a shameful day for America. Period. Full stop.
When Trump jumps in like that, it's a real fear he has. Trump is really for real scared of the Russians. Why? Well, one can muster a couple of hypotheses.
He’s not scared of the Russians. He’s scared of the voters thinking they should be scared of the Russians. When Zelenskyy said the Russians will come for America, Trump was angry because he knew it was going to scare voters and lose him support.
Based on the livestream of the incident, I personally think the issue was the lack of a Ukrainian-English translator.
Vance was absolutely trying to score domestic political points by undermining Zelenskyy, but Zelenskyy was unable to communicate or respond in the manner he wanted to, and definetly committed some obvious Russian L1 / English L2 mistakes (Zelenskyy's first language is Russian and this can be seen by his "costume" statement, because the direct translation for suit across the CIS is костюм/costume [0][1][2][3] because of French influence), and he inadvertently insinuated that Trump wasn't doing enough even though he was trying to join Vance in dunking on the previous admin.
This is why the Japan and India meetings with Trump had English translators despite Ishiba and Modi having a similar level of English fluency to Zelenskyy.
The first one is getting emotional in the first place. His team and Ukraine's intelligence services should have spent weeks interrogating and trying to provoke him in order to desensitize him to this kind of shit. Trump, Vance and Musk are primarily trolls and they should be dealt with as such.
He should not have interrupted Vance answering him either. That was fatal.
He needed to stay calm and slow. He did better than any of us could ever have done, but it wasn't quite enough for this situation. He could have looked a lot stronger and I think we need everything we can possibly get in the situation we're all in right now.
I want to highlight this comment too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43211604