Both warlords of a bombed-out country, both are looking for American support… Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s visit to Washington is an echo of Winston Churchill’s visit to the US capital in 1941, AFP reports.

“President Zelensky will stand here as Winston Churchill stood here generations ago, not just as a head of state, but as an ambassador of freedom,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday ahead of the Ukrainian president’s speech scheduled for the evening at the Capitol.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi recalled that her father was a member of Parliament when the British Prime Minister addressed Congress on December 26, 1941.

“It is especially moving for me to be present as another heroic leader addresses Congress,” the influential Democrat said in a statement.

Comparison is not intelligence, and parallelism has its limits, both in form and content.

The British Prime Minister spent three weeks from late December 1941 to early January 1942 at the invitation of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Historians say that this long stay greatly strained the nerves of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who did not like the long night-time conversations between the two men, amid cigarette smoke and alcohol.

The White House staff, somewhat surprised, complied with the demands of this guest, who sometimes walked around in pajamas and a silk robe: sherry before breakfast, French champagne at lunch and old brandy before bed.

Such oddities are unimaginable in 2022, a world where transportation is much faster, diplomatic exchanges much more polite and, above all, subject to incomparably tighter security conditions.

Therefore, the Ukrainian president, who will spend only a few hours in Washington, will content himself with a fireside discussion in the Oval Office before a joint press conference with Joe Biden, and then a long-awaited speech to Congress.

Biden’s limitations

Winston Churchill ventured abroad despite the threat of German submarines, and the plane trip of the Ukrainian head of state was prepared in the strictest secrecy and announced at the last minute.

On Capitol Hill, Volodymyr Zelensky could certainly have appropriated the words of Winston Churchill shortly after the attack on the US base in Pearl Harbor.

“We are faced with enormous mandates. They are relentless, they are unprincipled,” the prime minister told American lawmakers, referring to Nazi Germany and its allies, primarily Japan.

“And here we are together defending all that is dear to the hearts of free men,” this formidable orator also declared.

And here the comparison ends.

When Winston Churchill arrived in the United States, he found the country stunned by Japan’s attack on its own soil and embroiled in an international conflict.

Volodymyr Zelenskyi has nothing like that. He will meet with Joe Biden, who is determined to support him. But the US president made it clear that he would definitely not send troops to Ukraine, not even planes or long-range missiles.

If the 80-year-old Democrat wants to be compared to FDR for his ambitious economic reforms, he does not want, and has repeatedly said, to be dragged into a “third world war.”