Zelensky is Everywhere

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You're listening to Radio Atlantic.

I'm Claudina Bade, executive producer of Atlantic Audio.

The Atlantic is taking this moment to focus on Ukraine.

And for this episode of the show, we're looking back at the early days of the war and the unlikely figure leading Ukraine's defense.

Only a few years ago, Volodymyr Zelensky was a comedian.

Today, he's the symbol of his country's resistance and a stark contrast to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In April of this year, a time that was still precarious in Kyiv, staff writer Ann Applebaum and editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg journeyed to Zelensky's compound to meet the man of the moment.

I don't have so high a level of intellect to speak about.

Okay, so medium?

I'm happy with medium.

It's fine.

Okay, it's fine.

You couldn't think of a leadership style more different from that of Vladimir Putin than Zelensky's.

It's almost too neat.

If you're writing a screenplay, you'd be like, oh, these guys, they're too opposite.

Give me a break.

I've been writing and working on Ukraine for many, many years, and I always felt that it was a very minority interest.

And to have it suddenly become a mass phenomenon has been really amazing.

And I think probably that mass phenomenon is not possible without Zelensky.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

I'm the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

My name is Ann Applebaum, and I'm a staff writer for The Atlantic.

Ann Applebaum and I were meant to go to Ukraine what turned out to be two days before the invasion.

So we postponed the trip because there was an assumption at the very outset that Russia would just roll over Kiev

and that we would be stuck there and bad things would happen, and it just seemed like an odd moment to go.

But we

kept on planning.

It's just a matter of the getting in because there's no flights, obviously.

And so we took a very, very long train ride on a very, very slow-moving train.

It wasn't a train that you could buy tickets for.

We got on the train because an old friend of mine works for Zelensky.

He's actually a Ukrainian journalist.

He's now got a job both in the president's office and also in the railway administration.

And he gets you the tickets.

And so

when we landed in Warsaw, Jeff said to me, do you have the tickets?

And I said, no, Jeff, I don't have any tickets.

Because what happens is we get to the platform, we find the conductor, and we say, Sarah, he sent us.

And Jeff said, you're joking.

And I said, nope, I'm not joking.

And then we went to the platform and we found the conductor and I said, Sir, he sent us.

And he said, Okay, here's your car.

Much of the trip was at night across the Polish countryside.

And in the middle of the night, you arrive at the border.

There's a Polish border check.

Then the train moves a little bit.

And then there's a Ukrainian border check.

The fascinating thing about trains that move between Poland and Ukraine is that the the old Soviet Union made sure that its tracks were different size than tracks moving to the west because

assuming that NATO was going to invade through Poland, the Soviets wanted to make sure that their trains couldn't move.

So what they have to do at the border is literally change the wheels.

This was meant to prevent Germans or whoever from riding their trains into the country.

It's funny in retrospect.

It's actually not funny in one sense because one of the reasons why Ukraine now has trouble exporting its grain by road, historically, it's always exported it through the ports, through the Black Sea, is because of this wheel problem, because it would take a long time and a lot of effort to move that kind of cargo by train.

We arrived in the station.

We were met by some people who were there to help us.

The

elegiac, beautiful, evocative thing was that there was a concert, a free concert, taking place in the main hall of this train station, Balalaika Orchestra, with a couple of very big Ukrainian pop stars singing Ukrainian patriotic songs.

One of the performers was Oleg Skripa, who is one of the musicians in Ukraine now seen as a real symbol of the resistance.

So it would be the equivalent of Taylor Swift showing up in Union Station to, you know, make the crowd feel like life was worth living or that, you know, we can have some normalcy.

So we stood there and listened for a few minutes.

It was quite, it was quite moving.

But the city is mostly empty.

The streets are not filled with people.

Some stores are operating.

A couple of restaurants are operating.

But we moved quickly to our hotel.

There were soldiers banning roadblocks.

There were these metal contraptions, the Russians call hedgehogs, that were around many of the bridges and blocking some of the roads.

I had been there in December, only three months earlier.

And in December, it was a completely normal city.

I remember there was an ice skating rink set up outside the presidential administration.

You know, there were little children ice skating on the rink.

So it had been absolutely normal

a couple of months into the war.

It was very different.

So the meeting was at night.

We got there before curfew.

You get to a checkpoint, and then you go through to another checkpoint, and there are soldiers of different units, and some of them are very young.

Some of them are clearly been soldiers for a month.

You get into the presidential compound,

and it's all blacked out.

You have no sense of where you are in the building because it's dark, because you're going down long, winding, circuitous hallways, and then

rights and left and upstairs and downstairs.

I mean it's I assume it's a way of evading bombers or somehow protecting people inside.

You know eventually we arrived at must be a kind of secure room that's in the center of the building which had no windows but had sort of Ukrainian flags all around.

And this was where we met Zelensky.

We could hear him coming in with his chief of staff and one or two other people.

And he was swearing as he was walking in.

He walks in, he looks at us, and he sort of raises his hand shyly, like to wave, and says, Hi, in English.

Hi.

Same with my back.

Back problems?

Oh, yes.

Really?

A little bit tired.

It's okay.

No problems.

No.

No back, no problems.

You see, I have a back.

That's why I have some problems.

And then he made a joke about, you know,

something about having an old back.

And my first thought was, that's so un-Putin-like.

You know, there was the first thing he was showing us was, I'm a normal person.

I'm not pretending to be pompous.

I'm not making you wait.

I'm going to talk to you as if we were in a coffee shop and I'm not going to act like, you know, I'm so important and so on.

I mean, it was a very different atmosphere than that created both by by previous Ukrainian presidents, but also very, very different to the filmed meetings that we've seen people having with Vladimir Putin, where there's a big, huge, long table and there are these very grand rooms, and the guests are kept at arm's length and so on.

This was not like that at all.

This is very collegial.

He's very informal in his approach.

You're reminded that he actually is a comedian and entertainer.

He's not trying to intimidate with the size of his office, with his bearing, with his personality.

He's just

Vlodymir Zelensky, this television comedian who wound up becoming the president of a country under siege.

He's not living some exceptional life.

You know, he hasn't escaped to Monaco.

He's suffering the same things that they are and feeling what they feel.

And so I think it's become very politically effective to do that.

I mean, and you can even see it by what he's wearing.

He was wearing his typical green shirt and green semi-army pants.

You can imagine a different Ukrainian president wearing a uniform.

You know, he's the commander-in-chief.

You know, he might want to dress up in something with epaulettes or even just a, you know, even just camouflage, but mostly he's wearing t-shirts.

And I think this is

the uniform both of ordinary Ukrainians.

It's also more or less the uniform of the territorial army, which lots of Ukrainians are serving in.

So he's demonstrating all the time that he's one of them, he's like them, he feels what they feel, feel, and you know, the same message is being sent to the West.

There is something incredible about this story in that he's like some Jewish comedian who somehow ended up the president of Ukraine and then Putin invaded and somehow he had to figure out how to stop being a comedian and

be a wartime leader, be Churchill, you know, moving from Larry David to Churchill.

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Every day that goes by

is a day that the Russians can get there

because they unite all these techniques, all these weapons.

They are coming, coming, they are each day coming.

Each day, we know it.

They know it.

We talked about what weapons the Ukrainians needed.

And this was, of course, one of the big themes of the interview because it was really what that particular moment, especially what they wanted to get across.

And Zelensky describes calling world leaders.

He says, well, you know, I speak to the, I don't know, the Chancellor of Austria and the President of Germany, and I call them every week.

And every week I they say what how can we help you what do you need and the West doesn't understand that if they will occupy all our Donba they can come back to Kiev and they have to understand that they can help us very speedily and we have little window yes open window little time for this open window how big is the window I don't know I don't know and he says well actually here's a list and I need these things I need I don't know airplanes howitzers so on and so on.

And then a week later, they call back again and they say, how can we help you?

What do you need?

And he says, well, actually, I told you last week, but here's the list again.

He gets tired of all the same questions.

And what he really gets tired of, he told us, was having to explain over and over and over again what weapon systems and what kind of support he needs.

At that moment in April, it felt like there was still a pretty big gap between what the Ukrainians needed to defend themselves and what America in particular was able to supply.

I think in the early part of the war, there were several things going on.

One was that the Americans, first of all, didn't believe the Ukrainians would last that long, that they would defend Kiev.

Second of all, there was some kind of lack of understanding between the two sides.

Ukraine is not a traditional American ally.

You know, it's not Israel, it's not Britain, it's not Australia, it's not a country that we've been working with for decades, and we have decades of, you know, understandings and treaties and and joint military exercises with that we can draw on and so I think there was some lack of fellow feeling in the beginning and some Americans weren't sure you know should we really send these things will they know how to use them will they lose them what will what will happen I mean I'm I'm I'm guessing that that was what was going on I don't I don't really know that but there was some reluctance initially there has also been from the beginning reluctance on the part of the United States to give weapons that would seem to be very provocative to the Russians.

The most interesting thing about his request for weapons was the

subtext.

The subtext was,

if you want to defeat Russia, you're going to have to give me this stuff.

And if I don't do it with your material, one day you're going to have to do it yourselves.

So you might as well have Ukrainians fight this fight.

I find the appeal of Zelensky in America fascinating because I think it comes from something quite specific.

So for the last decade, maybe two decades, Americans have been divided by a culture war, which, to be incredibly crude about it, is something like liberal values on the one hand versus, I don't know, nationalism or patriotism on the other.

And what Zelensky has done is demonstrated what it's like to do a national patriotic defense of liberal values.

You know, he's very much defending a, you know, a free society, an open society, but also a multicultural society.

He's Jewish.

People around him speak both Russian and Ukrainian.

There are people of other faiths and nationalities in his entourage and in the Ukrainian leadership.

And that's part of what they're fighting to preserve.

That definition of Ukraine as a form of civic patriotism, Ukrainian civic patriotism.

And that's one thing that I think, even if everybody doesn't articulate it that way, I think that's part of his appeal in the United States and in Europe.

I

surmised that he is psychologically a very healthy person because he's been basically trapped

in this complex.

Every day is new information about nightmares that are happening across his country.

He can only deploy so many soldiers, and the army is only so effective.

It can't defend everything at once.

He's having endless Zoom conversations and phone conversations with people he has to repeat himself to.

He doesn't have his family near him for obvious security reasons.

It's

a miserable life.

And I got the feeling, again, this is more of a vibe than an explicit conversation, but I have a feeling that he's at peace with the fact that he's a wartime leader, that he might never make it out of this place, right?

But he's not going to leave.

And that

somehow history has chosen him to be the leader and spokesman for his country.

And so he's just going to sit there and do the task.

But

he doesn't get a lot of sleep.

He doesn't get a lot of rest.

He doesn't get any breaks.

But, you know, he made the most important decision he probably has made in his life, at least as a public figure, by not running away in the first days.

You know, we all remember Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, who got the hell out of Dodge right as the Taliban was at the gates of Kabul.

And

Ashraf Ghani has to live with himself forever with that decision.

And

no matter what happens in the future, Zelensky should be remembered for his decision to stay and stand with his people and stand with his country.

And that was an act of supreme bravery.

There were a lot of people in Europe and America telling him to get out.

Obviously, the CIA and other agencies had figured out ways to move him out of the country if they had to.

And he stayed.

Sorry, we weren't more intellectual.

Great.

Final.

That's good.

That's good.

But it was interesting.

Thank you so much.

As long as it's interesting.

Thanks very so much, everybody.

Good luck.

Thank you.

We spent about an hour and a half with Zelensky and then about an hour and a half with Yermok, with his chief of staff.

And so by the time that was done, it was very late.

And the presidential administration building was totally empty, and we had the same scene as as before with people leading us out through the darkened stairways with flashlights.

There was one street cleaning vehicle going down the road, I remember, which is incongruous because it was the only vehicle, and it was a street cleaner, which shows that they're still trying to maintain some level of order and safety and cleanliness.

But

it was very interesting to walk out into that kind of

absolute quiet, absolute dark.

And it made me think of

Zelensky in his bunker alone with his thoughts.

Like eventually everybody has to go to sleep for at least a couple of hours and then he sits there and I wonder what that's like, you know, thinking, oh,

what will tomorrow bring?

I'm Claudina Bade, and you've been listening to Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced by me, Kevin Townsend, and AC Valdez with editing from Theo Balcom.

Right now, The Atlantic is featuring special coverage of the war in Ukraine.

To read those stories, including the latest from Ann Applebaum, visit theatlantic.com.

When we came back from the interview, it it was quite late at night.

We hadn't had dinner because of the travel schedule and so on.

And the bar was still open, so we went to the bar and Jeff walked into the bar and he said, Oh, you know, here I am in Ukraine.

What I really want is a bowl of barsht, you know, and some potato pancakes.

You know, that's what you eat here in Eastern Europe.

And we walked into the bar and we said we'd like, you know, barsch and potato pancakes.

They looked us like we were crazy.

They said, Sorry, we have only one thing on the menu, and the thing available is sushi.

So there we were in Ukraine, very far from the sea.

God knows how they got the fish there, you know, in the war,

eating sushi at sort of midnight in Kiev.

And that was how we finished the day.

Was it any good?

It was edible, yeah.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jack.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.