A talk with Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal
Editor’s Note: The below is a version of a piece that appears in the March issue of National Review.
In the Ukraine war, there has been a great deal of excellent reporting. And brave reporting. Many journalists have been killed. I think of Vira Hyrych, a Ukrainian who worked for RFE/RL (that combination of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty). I think of Brent Renaud, an American documentary filmmaker. And others.
A lot of us have relied on Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. He is a veteran war correspondent. “I’ve been doing mostly wars and mayhem since the beginning of the century,” he tells me. Trofimov has been in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Georgia, Somalia, etc. Even when he has not been in a war zone, he has witnessed violence. In 1995, he was ten steps behind Yitzhak Rabin when that Israeli leader was murdered.
Along with countless dispatches, Trofimov has written four books. In the 2000s, he wrote Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu. He then wrote a work of history: The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam’s Holiest Shrine. He has also written a novel, due out this coming summer: No Country for Love, a family saga set in Ukraine between 1930 and 1953.
And just now, he has come out with Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence. It is filled with reporting very hard-earned.
This war, the Ukraine war, has been different from all the others Trofimov has covered — different for him personally, that is. He was born and raised in Ukraine (or in that part of the Soviet Union, if you like). He is from Kyiv.
So, as he tells me, “missiles have fallen on the hospital where I had my childhood exams. And the park where I had my first kiss.” And so on.
He was born in 1969, making him 21 when the Soviet Union dissolved. His father was a professor of statistics; his mother was a piano teacher. I ask Trofimov about identity, one of the great themes of today (and always): How did he feel? Ukrainian, Russian, Soviet? Some blend of those? He felt Ukrainian, he says.
Like most people in Kyiv, the family spoke Russian at home. But Trofimov went to an art school. There, the language was Ukrainian. Teachers and others were determined to preserve Ukrainian culture, and resist Sovietization, or Russification.
Young Trofimov aspired to be a painter. But journalism — war correspondence, in particular — it was to be. Along the way, incidentally, he has acquired a slew of languages: Polish, English, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, Italian. He is an Italian citizen. He got French early on, when his parents lived for a few years in Madagascar. The breadth of Trofimov’s experience is unusual.
He served for a year in the Soviet army — barely being spared a tour in the Afghan war. He was a spokesman for the Ukrainian independence movement.
Did he ever think it was possible? The end of the Soviet Union, followed by Ukrainian statehood? It was a dream, he says, and the dream came true. For many Russians, he continues, it was a nightmare: the end of their empire. “That’s a trauma they are still dealing with,” he notes.
He cites the examples of Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov. (The latter is Russia’s foreign minister.) Putin was a rising officer in the KGB; Lavrov was a rising diplomat. They were part of a superpower. Yet, in mid career, when they were about 40, their world collapsed. Russia was just another impoverished country (with nukes). This gave them a deep and furious grievance.
In many Russian elites, says Trofimov, there is “a psychological need for relevance” — they need to be major players on the world stage (even if they are hated). Also, many Russians trace the roots of their civilization to Kyiv: “to Prince Volodymyr and Prince Yaroslav, after whom I am named,” says Trofimov. Ukrainian independence is a terrible affront to some number of Russians.
It is amazing that Ukraine is still standing, almost two years after Russia began its full-scale assault. “Miraculous,” says Trofimov. “It’s a real David-and-Goliath story.”
Putin and his men badly misread Ukraine, Trofimov says. “They didn’t think Ukraine was a proper country, with a proper army. They didn’t think Ukrainians were capable of competent resistance.” But then, others had their doubts too. “The U.S. government shut down its embassy in Kyiv and withdrew all personnel.” The Americans offered only token military help, on the assumption that Ukraine would fall within days or weeks.
Earlier this month, on January 17, the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, made a speech. He said, “Today is the 693rd day of what Russia thought would be a three-day war.”
Trofimov, in his book, quotes Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Referring to Putin, Zelensky said, “He opened his mouth like a python and thought that we were just another bunny. But we’re not a bunny, and it turned out that he can’t swallow us.”
That said, the Ukrainians are at a critical, terrible juncture: They are running out of weapons, cut off by the U.S. Congress. This has given Goliath the upper hand. “Russia is outgunning Ukraine on the battlefield,” says Trofimov. “The Russians are firing two, three, five shells for every shell that the Ukrainians are able to fire. And, in an artillery war, that’s probably the most important metric.”
What’s more, Ukraine is running out of personnel – of human beings. Russia faces no such problem. As in the past, Russia has any number of bodies, expendable. The Kremlin “doesn’t care about casualties,” as Trofimov says. He further says, “Russia has emptied its prisons and sent tens of thousands of inmates to the frontlines.” The upshot: “Ukraine is losing its best, very often, while Russia is losing its worst.”
You often hear that the Ukrainians are motivated whereas Russian soldiers are not. This is not necessarily true, says Trofimov. Russian soldiers are motivated by fear. Trofimov puts it this way: “The Russians follow orders. People are more afraid of the state than of dying.” And the Ukrainians? Their motivation?
“They have seen what happens when the Russian state takes over. They have seen Bucha, near Kyiv, where 450 people were slaughtered by the Russians — pretty much for fun. They have seen what happens to the cities that the Russians capture, such as Mariupol. So it’s not like they can stop fighting. The long history of Ukraine suggests that, if Ukraine surrenders, much worse things will happen, and many more people will die or suffer.”
In the West, including the United States, a variety of myths about Ukraine are believed. One of them is that Russian-speakers in the east of the country want to be ruled by Moscow. Addressing this belief, Trofimov is patient. Think of “the legacy of colonialism,” he says. Many Ukrainians grew up speaking Russian because their parents or grandparents had been barred from speaking, or being educated in, Ukrainian. This does not mean they regard themselves as Russian. This does not mean they want to be ruled by Moscow.
Think of this too, says Trofimov: “In Ireland, you don’t have to speak Irish to be an Irish nationalist or patriot.”
Zelensky is certainly a Ukrainian patriot — probably the leading symbol of the country. “He grew up in Kryvyi Rih,” Trofimov says, “where pretty much everyone spoke Russian at the time. The TV show that made him famous was in Russian. He built his career on Russian television in Moscow.” So what?
Trofimov recalls the words of the mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov. The two of them were speaking in a bunker as the city was being shelled. “He told me that the most ferocious enemies of Russia are the Russian-speakers in the east, because they are the ones who find themselves on the wrong end of Russian guns, they are the ones whose cities are being destroyed, whereas people in western Ukraine mostly watch the war on TV.”
Where I live, there are people who regard Zelensky as a hero — a Churchill for our time — and people who paint him as an outright villain. How would Yaroslav Trofimov assess him? He begins by speaking about Afghanistan.
“I was in Kabul on August 15, 2021, as the city fell to the Taliban. The evening before, I had watched President Ashraf Ghani rally the troops, saying, ‘We will fight to the last soldier, we will never surrender.’ Twelve hours later, he flew off to the St. Regis in Abu Dhabi. And the Taliban were marching past my hotel.”
Zelensky? “I was in Kyiv when Russia invaded and I had in the back of my mind that Zelensky might do the same.” But “when the war began, he showed steely courage.”
The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, invited Zelensky to set up a government-in-exile in London — the site of many governments-in-exile as Hitler and Stalin were conquering Europe. Zelensky said no, asking for weapons instead. He made a video on the street, surrounded by close advisers and cabinet members: “We are here, our soldiers are here, the citizens of our country are here.”
“This had a colossal effect on the war,” says Trofimov. “The Russians were about to surround Kyiv, and Zelensky knew that he would be executed if the Russians took over. His courage in that moment saved Ukraine.”
Trofimov adds, “Lots of Ukrainians don’t necessarily like Zelensky. But this is not a fight for Zelensky. It’s a fight for Ukraine. It’s a fight to hang on to independence.”
War correspondents such as Yaroslav Trofimov are pretty battle-hardened. Still, what they see and experience must take a mental toll. Trofimov says he does a good job of holding his feelings in check while he goes about his work. But sometimes, feelings catch up with you — in unexpected moments.
He was in Kyiv on the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion. In a park, he met a young mother, Anastasia Lisnychenko, pushing her daughter in a stroller. He asked how things were going. She had had a “good war,” relatively speaking. Her family was intact. But she had something interesting — and not uncommon — to tell the reporter.
“You know, the really bad thing is that I really hate the Russians now. I never hated anyone in my life. And now I just can’t stop. I wish them the worst because of what they have done to us.”
Says Trofimov, “I just looked at her and all of a sudden we both started crying.”
Before we part, I ask Trofimov a cliché of a question, but not a bad one. “Is there anything else you’d like to say? Anything you think people ought to know?” Trofimov answers:
“I think people ought to know that Russia seeks to wipe out Ukraine. Russian plans for Ukraine haven’t changed. It’s eliminating the elites physically. Eliminating language. Eliminating culture. Basically genocide. This is what Medvedev, the former president of Russia, says openly, and what Putin says more or less openly. And if the Ukrainian army collapses, it will happen.”
And “the cost to the West will be much, much higher than the cost of sustaining Ukraine now. Because an emboldened Russia — a Russia that takes over Ukraine — will not stop there.”