Politics & Power Quote by Bob Schaffer

It is a politician’s fantasy of people-power rendered as tactical instruction: don’t just defeat the state, seduce it. By framing protesters’ “objective” as winning “the affection of the armed agents of the government,” Schaffer recasts confrontation as courtship, swapping street-level chaos for a cleaner morality play where the decisive audience isn’t the crowd or the international press, but the men with shields.

The word “affection” is doing heavy lifting. It softens the stakes of coercion and violence into something almost sentimental, implying that legitimacy is emotional and transferable, not structural. That rhetorical move flatters demonstrators as disciplined and strategically mature while offering police an off-ramp that preserves dignity: you’re not defecting under pressure; you’re choosing the “people” out of moral recognition.

Then comes the second sentence’s political payoff: “Most of the Kiev police have now pledged their support.” It reads less like verified reporting than a momentum claim, the kind that can become self-fulfilling. If “most” have already switched sides, any remaining loyalty looks both isolated and futile. It’s persuasion by inevitability, aimed at wavering officers, but also at foreign audiences who decide whom to back once a regime appears to be cracking.

Context matters: “Kiev” places this in the orbit of Ukraine’s mass protests, where the struggle was as much about the security apparatus’ cohesion as it was about slogans in the square. Schaffer’s intent is to narrate a hinge moment: the instant when power, supposedly monopolized by the state, begins to leak back into the street.