Ukraine's Greatest Showman

A conversation with author Simon Shuster about his new biography of Volodmyr Zelensky

It’s the fall of 2020 and Vladimir Putin is holed up at his palatial Lake Valdai estate.

This gargantuan second home cost, according to an exposé from the late Alexei Navanly, north of $1 billion. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic still ripping through Russian society, the notorious hypochondriac preferred to stay far away from the busy capital.

Most visitors would need to quarantine for weeks before being allowed to enter the purified air of the president’s abode. A rare exception was made for Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch. The billionaire was there to receive the first dose of his Sputnik V vaccine, live on television — something not even Putin would do.

The Ukrainian left the meeting with a deal for millions of doses, to supply Ukraine with the as-yet-unapproved vaccine. That was a useful political gambit for Medvedchuk, who was gearing up to challenge incumbent Volodymyr Zelensky for the presidency of Ukraine. It was also a pretty transparent one.

Medvedchuk was leader of an explicitly pro-Moscow political party, Opposition Platform — For Life. His image needed some serious rehabilitation, and quick. He had been close to ousted president Viktor Yanukovych and spent years trying to reorient an increasingly liberal Ukraine back towards Russia. Just weeks after his meeting with Putin, his party was slated to contest local elections: A trial run for his eventual presidential bid.

Zelensky was, at that moment, in Europe trying to secure doses of, in his words, a “real vaccine.” But, like every other country, anxiety was mounting. More than 100,000 Ukrainians had died from the virus and plenty of people were keen to get any vaccine, no matter where it came from.

Zelensky’s party fared just okay in those local elections, but polling showed his support began to collapse in the months that followed. By early 2021, his popularity has fallen by half in just a year — meanwhile, Medvedchuk and his party were growing in popularity.

“And what’s bad about that?” Medvedchuk asked journalist Simon Shuster. “We stand up for restoring relations with Russia. That’s what our voters want.” It helped that he had the direct support of the Kremlin, and that he owned three major Ukrainian television stations.

And so Zelensky did something about it. Consequences be damned, he banned the stations by sanctioning Medvedchuk. “I consider them devils,” Zelensky told Shuster. This move was probably unconstitutional and undoubtedly an assault on the free press. But Zelensky knew Medvedchuk’s game, and he believed he would never win it by playing by the rules. In the weeks that followed, Zelensky moved to seize Medvedchuk’s assets, including an oil pipeline connecting Russia to Europe.

Putin, used to being the one breaking all the rules, decried the unfair treatment of his friend, shedding crocodile tears for Ukraine’s independent press. He responded by holding a massive military training exercise along the border with Ukraine. A year later, those troops would be storming across the border.

Volodymr Zelensky has entered the pantheon of great wartime leaders, saddled with comparisons to Winston Churchill and FDR. His leadership over the past two years has kept Ukraine together, a disparate Western coalition united, and Russia at bay. His skills as a communicator and his knack for performance made him uniquely suited for this moment.

And yet there are flaws, too. In Simon Shuster’s new book, The Showman, he leverages his years of experience with Zelensky — and those closest to him — to explore the good and the bad about the Ukrainian president.

Last month, the Toronto Public Library invited Shuster to talk about his book and asked me to moderate the discussion. So this week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I present our conversation.¹

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Justin Ling: I think we need to do some scene-setting, because a lot of people were introduced to Volodymyr Zelensky, in a real way, when the war began — more than two years ago. But you've known him a lot longer than that. So give us a bit of an introduction to who Volodymyr Zelensky is, and how he became relevant to the Ukrainian people.

Simon Shuster: Well, he was relevant and very famous for many years before he went into politics. He was, before the presidency, his generation's greatest satirist. And, I'd say, Ukraine's greatest showman — in the broadest sense imaginable. As a filmmaker and actor; a comedian; a star of variety shows; cooking shows; reality shows, he won Dancing with the Stars; as a voice actor, he did Paddington Bear’s voiceover in the Ukrainian version. So he was all those things.

His television productions were always in the Russian language, his native language, and he was a huge star in both countries — up until the war began in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, and Zelensky stopped doing business with the Russians. When he went into politics, he was already an extremely famous household name in Russia and Ukraine.

The idea that he would run for president was not so far-fetched. Because he had, three years before he went into politics, played the Ukrainian president on television, in a very funny sitcom called Servant of the People — where a high school history teacher accidentally becomes the president.

We don't need to do a synopsis of the show, because it is on Netflix. And it's really, actually, good. The subtitles are great. My Ukrainian, Duolingo keeps reminding me, is not very good. But tell me a bit about that show, because he really made the decision to run for president in between the second and third seasons. And the third season ends up becoming sort of a campaign manifesto that helps define who he wants to be to the Ukrainian people.

Yes, the comedy was the campaign. I mean, it was very difficult to separate them. So I arrived in early 2019 to cover the elections. And the way I pitched the story to my editors was a report on the two mainstream candidates who were vying for the post. But then Zelensky came out of nowhere. And he continued producing and filming episodes of the comedy during the presidential elections. The third season, the final season of the show, was released a few days before the first round of voting. So people had just enough time to binge-watch the final season before heading to the polls. And the third season, as the previous seasons, depict him as this just eminently good hearted, honest, uncorrupted, normal guy of a president who does a fantastic job of cleaning out the corrupt elites and so on. So it was a very convincing pitch to the Ukrainian electorate.

The character he plays in the show, Vasily Goloborodko, is this sort of everyman teacher who just gets fed up with the corruption, who goes viral for recording this expletive-laden rant about all of the corrupt idiots. And then he’s faced with that corruption when he becomes president. How does that differ from the real Zelensky — before you started the book, while you're writing the book; during the war, before the war. How do you distinguish them? And at what points have they started to sort of overlap?

There was some overlap. I mean, certainly going into the presidency, there were two main promises: One was fighting corruption; two, he wanted to make peace with the Russians and end the war in the Donbas, which had then been raging for about five years. I'd say that overlaps pretty well with the goals that the television president had in the TV show. The key difference is that on the TV show, Zelensky and his screenwriters could control the reality in that contained world. Whereas once he became president, reality very much smacked him in the face.

I think many people in the United States certainly got to know him for the first time a few months after he became president. He became enmeshed in the scandal that led to Donald Trump's first impeachment, where Donald Trump tried to extort political favors from Zelensky in exchange for military aid. So that was his first confrontation with the ugliness, the meanness of international affairs, of politics.

I was spending time with him, I was observing the impeachment scandal from Kyiv. And from the perspective of Zelensky and his team, it was just a very painful and humiliating experience — very much unlike the world of the TV show, where things were ugly and messy, but there was a happy ending. I think reality stubbornly refuses to give him the happy ending that he had on TV.

You paint a picture of Zelensky, his initial administration, as being very ad hoc, picking people on a whim to manage critical affairs for the Ukrainian government. And you tell the story of him trying to manage Donald Trump. Tell me a bit about that. I think it's a really nice preview of what will come when the war begins.

When he came in, it was a very chaotic administration — people from all walks of life, a lot of Zelensky’s friends from the world of entertainment, there were some people from the tech scene in Kyiv. There was also a group called, informally, ‘the professionals’ or ‘the reformers,’ who had had experience governing. And they would advise Zelensky on: Okay, this is how an economy works, this is how international affairs works, this is how you make a phone call on the secure phonelines to another world leader.

In terms of managing relations with the Americans, there is this one episode that always comes to mind when I think about the impeachment. They were sitting around, early on in the administration, and talking about how they could get a meeting with Trump, a visit to the Oval Office. This is extremely important for any Ukrainian leader to demonstrate that relations with the Americans will be strong and solid, and will improve. Zelensky needed to show this, he needed to visit Washington and have that sit-down in the Oval Office. So they were talking about how to do this. And one of the people who was there was a guy from the tech scene named Igor. He did talks, like TED Talks, in Kyiv on futurism and technology, and he was a friend of Zelensky. And they were talking about how to deal with the Americans, and Igor said: Is there anyone in the administration who's dealing with this problem? And they're like: Not really. And Zelensky says: Do you want to do it? And Igor was like: Okay, yeah.

I got to know Igor quite well. And he told me that night, after agreeing to play this fairly significant role in the administration, he leaves the office of the president and gets into his car, sits down, opens his phone and types in a search page: US political system. And he starts learning, from Wikipedia, basically how America works.

Zelensky’s two main rivals, Petro Poroshenko, the President; and Yulia Tymoshenko, he actually satirizes them on his show. I mean, he literally turns the existing Ukrainian system into a bit of a joke. And then he has to run against them in real life. It would be so unbelievable if it weren’t actually true. What does that do to him and his relationship with the political system when he finally comes in?

He knew Ukrainian politics quite well, because he had been satirizing every major Ukrainian politician for many years. So he knew all of them. They knew him. They generally didn't like him because he made fun of them all the time.

Yulia Tymoshenko, who was the favorite to win the 2019 elections before he entered the race, he had personally impersonated her on stage over the years — in drag. So it was strange. I met her during the elections and she had trouble getting her mind around what she was living through. She compared Zelensky to the kind of anti-establishment figures that were emerging in many democracies around the world at the time, including Trump and others in Europe, that were coming in as outsiders and promising to break the system from the inside. I think that is a fair parallel. I think he does fit into that anti-establishment, populist mold.

Once he was in office, it was an interesting transition. I remember I talked to his wife a lot about this. She — before they went into politics, and also after — was a writer on his TV shows. She was a screenwriter, she wrote his jokes. And she told me how awkward it was to suddenly be in the position of power. And all of their friends were still in the world of comedy. Well, not all: Some had come into politics with him. But their main comedy troupe continued to put out these satirical TV shows, and she described these fairly tense conversations that they would have about how harsh they could be in satirizing their friend, who is now in the hot seat in the seat of the president. And she was encouraging them not to hold back, not to pull punches, to keep making fun of him the way they would do with any president. But they found that very difficult.

When he does win, all of this sort of naiveté becomes very clear. And I think the two things that you underline very clearly about Zelensky is naiveté about how the system actually works — it's one thing to satirize something, it's another thing to actually function within it — and a level of arrogance. Sometimes I think you could say it's confidence. Sometimes I think you can say it's foolhardiness. How do those two things really come crashing together when he's trying to root out corruption, make the system work, deal with Donald Trump, deal with Vladimir Putin, deal with the EU?

I’d say he's transformed over the time I've known him, significantly, but there are a few character traits that have been consistent throughout his life. And extreme confidence is one of them. I think you see that in the figure that you've probably come to know, the wartime leader. He's very sure of his ability to achieve impossible things. You could call it hubris. You could call it arrogance. Take your pick.

I think where it really came crashing down for him was in his first confrontation with Vladimir Putin. That happened at the end of 2019. So again, his main promise upon taking office was to make peace with Putin, to end the war in the Donbas, somehow in a way that would not be humiliating to the Ukrainian people. And he very quickly began preparing for some kind of negotiation with Putin, a face-to-face meeting. He was very intent on setting up this meeting as soon as possible, largely because he felt an extreme confidence in his ability to reach Putin, to find some kind of pragmatism or humanity that he could turn in his favor, to somehow break the ice.

And he was warned that he would fail. An American diplomat I talked to told him: Don't get sucked in with Putin, you will not succeed. One of Zelensky’s close allies, an expert in foreign affairs, told him the same thing: You won't manage to get anything out of the Russians, they are not willing to accept a peace that would be acceptable to most Ukrainians. Zelensky was generally offended by that kind of advice. He said: We have to try. Why not? I can do it, give me a chance. And they met in Paris, they had these talks at the Élysée Palace. The French president, Emmanuel Macron was a mediator, and the then-German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, was a mediator. And I talked to many people who were there. Zelensky essentially tried to break the ice with a joke with Putin. Another thing he did was to speak Russian, which is not customary for those kinds of high-level negotiations — usually every country's representative speaks in their native language. But he said he wanted to be understood. It didn't work. I mean, Putin was very irritable, icy, dismissive.

I talked to people who saw Zelensky on his return: They described it as the lowest they've ever seen him, the most dejected. He had found the limits of his skills as a communicator that day.

In the coming years, before we wind up at the full scale invasion, you do a really fantastic job of highlighting the inflection points along the way where — whether it's Putin machinations, or Zelensky’s decisions, or the EU, or NATO's decisions — that sort of inch everything towards the eventual conflict. And I think sometimes when we talk about these things, they become either a very clear binary of: Vladimir Putin is a psychopath who made this decision long ago, and there's nothing that was gonna stop him; or NATO was being aggressive and provoked this conflict. But of course, the reality is somewhere in between. Can you talk about a couple of those inflection points along the way, that set up where we found ourselves in February 2022?

Yeah, there definitely were those moments. I mean, for one thing, Zelensky’s attempts to negotiate with Putin failed. So that certainly was an inflection point. Both sides went to more of a war footing. But I think the main one, that I think isn't sufficiently covered or understood, is Zelensky’s attempt to crack down on Russian propaganda inside Ukraine. And for many years, Putin's close friend in Kyiv was this gentleman named Viktor Medvedchuk, an oligarch billionaire, a member of parliament, the head of an opposition party in the Ukrainian parliament, and a close personal friend of Putin's. And he was basically the conduit for Russian influence inside Ukraine for many years. And Zelensky saw him as a major threat — not only to him politically, but to Ukraine's cohesion and existence as a state, as a nation, because Russian propaganda was constantly stirring up these divisions inside Ukrainian society.

At a certain point, Zelensky decides to shut down Medvedchuk’s television channels. This made Putin extremely angry. And Putin says: They’re purging the political playing field in Ukraine, we're going to have to respond by other means. So I think that was a really important inflection point to understand this conflict, that internal political conflict inside Ukraine between Zelensky and this Ukrainian politician who was very close to Putin. It played out largely unnoticed by people outside Ukraine, but now, if you look back and trace the moments of how we how we got to the invasion, Zelensky’s decision to close his TV channels, to seize his party's assets, and so on, came days before Russia sent troops to the border and began preparing for the for the invasion. So at least in terms of coincidence of timing, they were clearly linked.

One thing that a lot of people often throw out there when they're criticizing Zelensky is: We have to listen to Putin’s concerns, we have to figure out how to go to the negotiating table, Putin has some good points about NATO, he has some good points about Russian minority populations in Ukraine. But so much of what Zelensky did — what he ran on, the negotiations he tried to do with Putin, his effort to bridge the linguistic divide, and even his effort to shut the door on a NATO membership — so much of what he did in the two years leading up to the invasion was about trying to manage that risk. And it didn't work.

It surprised me, the extent to which he was willing to make concessions, to try to deal with some of Russia's demands. I mean, this is a very Zelensky thing to do. He always wants to look someone in the eye and just figure out: What is your problem? What do you want from me? Let's talk this out. This is just his way of communicating. He's very direct. He wants to look his opponent in the eye and try to find some common ground. That is very typical of his style as a communicator. He failed to do that with Putin. It's often forgotten now, but early in the invasion — I'd say in the first two months or so — he was also trying very hard to set up a one-on-one meeting with Putin. He said: We need to sit down. Even as the Russian forces were committing horrible atrocities, even as the war crimes were being uncovered across the occupied parts of Ukraine. Zelensky said: No, we need to set up a meeting, I need to talk to Putin. He started this invasion, he's the one who can end it.

He was willing to make a lot of concessions. I think the biggest one was this idea of permanent neutrality, where Ukraine would forgo its goal of joining the NATO alliance, Zelensky was willing to negotiate about that. That was one of Putin's main excuses for invading Ukraine in the first place — not that NATO had any intention of accepting Ukraine anytime soon. That was Putin's paranoid excuse. But Zelensky wanted to talk about that, to see if that would end the war.

So let's talk about the beginning of the war. Give people a sense of what the atmosphere was really like. So many people didn't believe it. Zelensky did not believe it was really going to come. And there was a suspended disbelief that was broken on that morning. There's a really interesting comment you make at the beginning, where you reference the fact that everyone's collective memories are really shaped by the years that have followed. And so tell me a little bit about the memories that you got from people about those initial weeks after the invasion began.

That's true. I think one of the most fascinating parts of reporting this book is that, during many of the crucial events of the invasion, I was there as they were happening. And I was talking to people, in real time, as they were processing and experiencing these things — that day or the next day, sometimes, within hours. So I was able to speak to them and get their impressions before a kind of narrative took form in their minds, and in their administration of: Okay, this is how we're going to talk about this thing that happened two weeks ago, a month ago. It amazed me to see, while reporting, how quickly that happens. Often that narrative is not the same as what people were saying at the time.

In terms of the atmosphere leading into it? Yes, Zelensky did not believe that the invasion would take the form that it did, that it would be so extreme. The Americans were warning him that this would be a full scale invasion from multiple directions with bombardment of Kyiv, and other major cities, with the goal of capturing or killing Zelensky. He didn't believe that it would be that extreme. The military leaders also didn't expect that. But, as military commanders, they have to prepare for that. And they were urging the political leadership, Zelensky first and foremost, to take serious measures to prepare for the possibility that it would be this full-scale invasion. So: Mobilization of reserves, fortifying the border, putting military equipment into position, and so on.

And Zelensky, as one of the generals told me, was putting political parameters around the military preparations, because he didn't want to panic the public. He didn't want to give Russia an excuse to invade — okay, we bring our troops to the border, and then Russia says: Aha! So you're menacing us. So we will attack you. Right? He was afraid of that kind of escalation. And also, fundamentally, he just didn't believe that that would happen. He didn't believe that those kinds of preparations would be necessary. So leading into it, there was this tension between the military commanders and the political leadership of how to prepare. And when the invasion began, Ukraine was, to put it diplomatically, much less prepared than the military leadership in Kyiv would have liked to be.

We immediately think of Zelensky, this war time president who has this incredible command over the narrative and his people. But Zelensky in those early hours, those early days, was not that guy. He wasn't there yet. He was shell shocked. At what point does Zelensky start to actually figure out how to be that sort of commander?

In the first hours and days, they were improvising. The position that Zelensky found himself in that morning, February 24 2022, there's really no resume, no life experience, that can really prepare someone for something like that — to be attacked by a nuclear superpower that wants to kill you, kill your family, take over your whole country. There's no such profession that prepares you. Maybe military leaders, but not even that, in terms of the diplomatic demands that are required of you. So I think anyone thrust into that position would have had to improvise and think on their feet. And that, on the first day, is essentially what Zelensky proved very good at.

I think what the Russians were counting on is that the complexity and the intensity of the threat would short-circuit the leadership in Kyiv and make them freeze up and run away. Paralysis through fear was part of the Russian strategy. The Americans did the same thing with ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq — you attack all at once, and you just short-circuit, the leadership. But Zelensky was quite nimble. And he proved quite flexible in his ability to take on a new persona, to sort of imagine what this role requires of him and step into that role, and begin acting very decisively and very quickly, with very little preparation, analysis, or planning. He started firing off commands, and some of them backfired. Some of them were ill advised, basically, none of them were based on careful consideration or data or anything like that. They just didn't have those things at his disposal at the time. He had to think fast and make fast decisions. But I think one character trait of his that served him very well was that kind of mental flexibility to change personas, and confidence.

The script says, in this scenario, the president should have fled. Right? The Americans were saying: Please flee. Angela Merkel was calling up, saying: Please flee. I remember sitting on Russian Telegram channels that evening, and all the Russian Telegram propaganda channels were saying: He's already left. His helicopter is in the sky. He's already gone, your president has fled. And then he leaves his bunker, he goes into the street and records this video. And I think a lot of people will say that this is the moment that Zelensky emerges. Can you just tell me a bit about that video?

That video was intended to push back on the Russian propaganda. This was part of the Russian strategy to break down Ukrainian leadership by pumping out this disinformation that the state has already fled: Your leader has fled, he's gone. That makes other people, further down the chain of command, begin to wonder: Hey, maybe I should get out of dodge as well. So Zelensky needed to, very quickly, counter that. And he did that by stepping out into a very recognizable square, right in front of the presidential compound, a street that any Ukrainian would recognize, and just doing a selfie video with a few of his top lieutenants, saying: We are not going anywhere. We are here. And I think that sent a very strong signal, to, most importantly, the hierarchy of the Ukrainian state: The boss has stuck around. It's not time to flee yet. We're still fighting, we're still here. And I think it also sent a very important signal to the West that there is someone there to support. There's someone to get behind. And very quickly, he stepped into the role. As he put it to me in one of our interviews, he gave himself this kind of pep talk where he said: You are now a symbol of the state, of this resistance, and you need to act the way a head of state must act. And he was pumping himself up to take on this new role. And he did step into it very, very nimbly, and I think the first time we saw him doing that was in that video.

Tell me a bit about Zelensky in the bunker. I mean, it’s this old Soviet-era bunker that doesn't sound like a really wonderful place. But later on you talk about some of these officials pining back for the days when they were working out of this bunker. How does Zelensky situate into this quite dour Cold War bunker underneath the presidential palace?

Well, there were a few dozen officials living there with him. So on the first day, the security guards told him: There is an imminent threat of aerial bombardment of the presidential compound, we need to go down into the bunker. And from that first day, around noon, they went down there and they seldom emerged for about six weeks. So for that period, they were living down there.

More people would arrive to help manage all the tasks that were coming at them from emergencies and threats. But they were all living there together. I talked to many people who lived down there with him — yeah, it’s not a comfortable place. They slept very little, the food was bad or there wasn't a lot of it. It's very cramped. But many of them do think back now to the sense of camaraderie and purpose that they felt.

One of Zelensky’s aides described it like being in a submarine in enemy waters. You have to imagine that the situation they were in, it sort of imbues everything you're doing with this importance, this gravity. Whether it's writing a press release or organizing a shipment of bulletproof vests for some military volunteers, whatever task you're undertaking has this enormous significance. And that, I think, is something that they miss. Also, the adrenaline.

But Zelensky talked about this in his first press conference of the invasion. He gave this press conference, almost exactly one week after the invasion started. And at the end of the press conference, a journalist asked him: How are you holding up, Mr. President? And he went on this very surprising speech where he says: My life is beautiful right now. I feel that I am needed. The purpose of any life is to find that your life is useful to others. And certainly you can imagine, despite all the threats that he was facing, despite all the horrors he was seeing, he was in a position of pretty unique influence and significant power. He was in the driver's seat of history. And I think that that was very gratifying to him.

One of the most intriguing relationships that Zelensky builds is with Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the head of the Ukrainian military. In your book, the relationship is still very alive. It's only after the book came out, that it finally kind of came to a head. It was announced, I think today, that Valerii Zaluzhnyi will be the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK. Walk me through just the synopsis of this relationship, and how it sort of reflects Zelensky’s view of his own role in this war.

I'd say there are two relationships that are really at the center of the book, and that I follow throughout. One is the relationship between the President and the First Lady. I spent a lot of time talking to her, and we see his evolution through her eyes, in many ways. The other relationship is the relationship between the President and his top military commander, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. I talked extensively with General Zaluzhnyi, as well, for the book. And I guess, to summarize it, Zelensky early in his presidency, before the invasion, didn't show a great deal of interest in military affairs. He left it up to the generals, and General Zaluzhnyi was very comfortable with that. He thought that is the way things should be, the professionals should run the military.

When the invasion started, that remained the case for some time, some weeks, I would say,. Zelensky was in constant contact with General Zaluzhnyi, and getting updates from him and other generals. And the President's response to them was: What can we do? What can I do? What can I get you? How can I help you? How can I support you? He left the strategic, tactical decisions up to them. But what you see over time is President Zelensky grows more and more confident in his own abilities and understanding of military strategy. And he develops a vision of how to fight this war, right down to the details of when to attack, how to attack, and how to use military resources. And some of those priorities were not always aligned with those of General Zaluzhnyi.

So they began to clash behind the scenes on questions of pretty important military strategy, in terms of how to push the Russians out. And that was simmering under the surface for months. I mean, General Zaluzhnyi was finally dismissed from his post, in February, a couple of weeks after the book was published. But if anything surprised me about that, it was how long it took for Zelensky to finally make that decision. Because the tensions between them were quite serious, and quite distracting for the leadership. It's not a good thing when you have the two most powerful men in the country, at a time of war disagreeing so fulsomely.

Let's talk about the war. Things have been quite dire. The summer counter-offensive didn't go according to plan, aid is being held up in Congress and Zelensky’s charm doesn't seem to be having much of an impact on Republicans there. Things are really tough right now. From your conversations, where do the next few months go for Ukraine — and where do the next few years go, for that matter?

Prognostication, I don't see it as my job. That's something for analysts. But I can tell you, what Zelensky has cooking, this long-term strategy, we are already seeing play out. In the fall of last year, General Zaluzhnyi, when he was still Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, declared that on the frontlines in the ground war, there's a stalemate. That neither side can make fundamental progress, that they're stuck. And there needs to be, as he put it, a technological breakthrough on the order of the invention of gunpowder in order for something to really change on the front lines. So that was kind of a low point in terms of morale.

For the people in Ukraine, also for the president's office, it was very difficult for them to adjust to that new reality. Now they have begun to develop ways to do that. One thing that's important to watch, it's under-reported, is Ukraine's attempt to increase its own domestic weapons production. That will be a really decisive and important factor in how this war plays out. The Ukrainians are investing very heavily, and seeking a lot of support from the West — not only in terms of ready weapon systems delivered to Ukraine, but blueprints, designs. So: Give us the blueprints, we'll make it ourselves. This is increasingly a request that Zelensky is making of President Biden and other foreign leaders: Help us build this stuff so that you don't have to keep sending us these shipments. If you're tired of buying weapons for us, help us build them.

It's a huge task. They are way behind the Russians. The Russian war machine is much stronger, much bigger, much wealthier. But they have had a lot of success on things like drones. I'm sure you've been seeing and reading about the drone strikes. This is the kind of weapon that Zelensky likes, because it really has a dramatic effect. So these images, in the darkness, of a Russian warship sinking, or blowing up; or a Russian oil terminal, somewhere near St. Petersburg, exploding in the middle of the night — these big, dramatic attacks. And these are the kinds of things that, I think, we're going to continue seeing more of, as Ukraine develops more of these over-the-top weapons. So you have a frozen front line, but they're lobbing these missiles and drones over the top to try to hit far behind enemy lines.

It should be lost on nobody that this showman is using weapons that have cameras mounted to them.

Right! That is important to him. And that is very important. I mean, it's been important in his military strategy throughout. If there's one consistent thing about the way he executes this war, it’s that he wants demonstrative victories. He wants something that he can show his people, and all of us, and Western leaders that says: Look, we're still fighting, we're still winning. That battleship just sank, right? So we're still in the fight. We're still having success. So he needs that. And I think it's not just about the fact that it looks good on television for the Ukrainians. It does increase morale, it preserves morale, and it tries to convince the world that Ukraine is still in this fight and still needs support, and is still hurting the Russians, making the Russians bleed.

What comes next for the landscape politically? Again, you don't want to forecast too much. That's alright. But it's already been in the works for quite some time. He was anxious about the upcoming elections before the war began. We don't know when they're going to happen now. There's a lot of speculation that his dismissal of Zaluzhnyi was, in part, because he was worried about a rival more popular than he is. We think of Zelensky as being sort of invincible, but that's not quite the case is it?

Well his popularity has been declining, definitely, from a high in March 2020, when it was upwards of 90%, trust and approval. Now it's in the neighborhood of, depending on the poll, 60 to 70%. So a steep decline, but he’s still extremely popular. And generally, I think his standing among the Ukrainian people is too often discounted in the West. I think he is still, by far, the most trusted, respected and revered political leader in the country. If elections were held now, he would win handily. So I think we're definitely not seeing the kind of twilight of his leadership.

I do wonder, and I end the book with this kind of open question, of what it will look like after, what I sincerely hope will be, Ukraine's victory in this war. You have to imagine what kind of difficult position Ukraine will be in, even after the victory. Its infrastructure will be largely destroyed; the economy will be in tough shape; you'll have millions of refugees returning home, needing a functioning economy, needing schools for their kids to go to; you'll have at least a million military servicemen and women coming home needing psychological support, medical support, also economic and financial support. It's a very volatile political situation. And it'll be a very fraught transition to the post-war period. And a major test for Zelensky, and for Ukraine as a nation. We'll have to see how Zelensky will handle that, but it will require essentially a new transformation in him, to a post-war president — which will be no less difficult than the transformation he's undergone in the last two years.

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That’s it for this week!

Do consider picking up a copy of Shuster’s book: I can’t recommend it enough.

If you haven’t read them already, I encourage you to go back and read through my three dispatches from Ukraine (Dispatches #92, #93, #94).

And keep an eye on your inboxes this Wednesday, as paying subscribers will be getting the full audio and transcript from my interview with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. That’s definitely worth reading.

1. As always, the conversation is liberally edited for style, length, clarity.