WASHINGTON — On Saturday, the President told reporters it was time for Ukraine to get a new president, and Americans everywhere exhaled, because for four years the war in Ukraine has had exactly one problem: nobody had thought to check the contractor’s performance review.

The sequence was clean. Ukraine kept hitting Russian diesel refineries. Diesel got expensive. The President, having just arranged a deal to flood the market with Russian diesel, explained that a man who makes your fuel bill go up is a man whose services are no longer required. “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal,” he said, in the tone of a man describing a dishwasher return policy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he added, “wants to make problems for the world.”

"A sanction is one thing. A performance review is another. The President is simply doing what any homeowner does when the plumber keeps jacking up the bill."

That is not meddling. That is procurement. Every American understands the arrangement, because every American has lived it: you hire someone to handle a problem, the problem gets more expensive, and the problem starts explaining why the expense is actually your fault. At that point you have two choices. You can keep hiring the same guy, or you can do what the President did and announce on the South Lawn that the position is open.

Ukraine’s foreign minister responded that Zelenskyy has the backing of the Ukrainian people, which is technically true and completely beside the point. The Ukrainian people were not asked to approve the refinery strikes, the same way nobody in Toledo was asked to approve the diesel surcharge. The people who were asked are the people now being reviewed. That is how accountability works. It just usually stops at the county line for reasons nobody has ever satisfactorily explained.

MANAGEMENT TRANSITION: WHAT EVERY HOMEOWNER ALREADY KNOWS

  • Track record: Four years on the job. War still ongoing. Bill still rising.
  • Communication: Calls the homeowner's fuel costs "a weak decision of strong partners." Homeowner disagrees.
  • References: The homeowner has begun taking calls from the competing vendor, who offered a better rate on diesel and, notably, answers the phone.
  • Severance: Under discussion at the IMF meetings beginning Monday in Bangkok.

“I think people get confused by the word ‘sovereignty,’” said Deb Kessler, the Toledo precinct chair who has by now been quoted in this newspaper more times than some senators. “Sovereignty means you own the problem. It does not mean you get to keep the problem. My water heater had sovereignty right up until the day it flooded my basement, and the plumber said the exact same thing the Ukrainian foreign minister said, word for word, except in a heavier accent.”

The President also noted, with the patience of a man reading terms and conditions aloud, that Zelenskyy has lost 30 percent of his country and over a million people between the two sides, figures that critics called cynical and supporters called the quarterly numbers. Both readings are available. Only one of them is on a spreadsheet.

Kyiv called the peace talks a smokescreen for the diesel deal. Washington called the refinery strikes a smokescreen for the price of diesel. At this point both sides have agreed the smoke is real, which is progress of a kind. The position, per the President, remains open. Applications are being taken at the IMF meetings in Bangkok, where the desk is set up between the debt panel and the coffee station.