On the menu today: Just one brief air-raid alert Tuesday afternoon, otherwise all was quiet in Kyiv yesterday. A conversation with an experienced journalist running a popular and trusted news site in the Ukrainian capital reveals the cost of the war on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, and offers serious questions about whether Zelensky wants to keep running his country after the war ends. Also, a nuanced assessment of the Ukrainian government’s restrictions of television networks; the explosion of alternate, uncontrollable news-gathering and dissemination through social media; and the challenges of running a newspaper in a city that endured Russian bombardment, and still lives with that continuing threat. Plus, an ordinary Ukrainian asks me if America will help Ukraine save itself.
In Zelensky, ‘I See a Man That’s Exhausted . . . Burnt Out’
Kyiv, Ukraine — Bohdan Nahaylo says you can see the high costs of the Ukrainian defense against the Russian invasion on the face and in the body language of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.
“I see a man that’s exhausted,” Nahaylo, the chief editor of the Kyiv Post, an English-language newspaper and website based in Kyiv, told me. “I see him much more impulsive. I see the wear and tear and the impact this war has had on him. I’m not sure that he’s determined to hang on [to political power] at any price. Personally, I think he’d love to get this war over with, on favorable terms to Ukraine, and then see what happens, and earn his hundreds of thousands as a guest speaker in the [United] States or wherever. Maybe [he’ll] come back to politics a few years down the road, but I think the guy’s burnt out.”
“I’m sure he knows, because it’s not just [former British prime minister] Boris Johnson who has compared him to [Winston] Churchill, and he knows how Churchill ended up,” Nahaylo said. Churchill, arguably the greatest leader of the 20th century, lost the 1945 election in Great Britain.
Nahaylo is a spectacularly well-traveled journalist and former diplomat of the old school, who for the past two years has had a front-row seat to Zelensky and the Ukrainian government’s attempt to manage a war for survival against difficult odds.
No one knows when Ukraine will hold its next presidential election; had Russia not invaded in February 2022, the Ukrainian presidential election would have been held on March 31 this year.
It’s not hard to find American critics of Zelensky contending that Ukraine is not holding a presidential election this year because Zelensky wants to stay in power. Putting aside all the constitutional, safety, and logistical objections spelled out earlier this week, a member of parliament who isn’t a member of Zelensky’s party, Servant of the People, told me that as far as she could tell, while Zelensky’s approval rating has dropped from its immediate highs at the war’s beginning, it remains well above 50 percent. She felt certain that if an election were held today, he would win another term. It’s not merely that Zelensky is still relatively popular, it’s that no other Ukrainian figure, inside or outside of the government, has acquired anything close to Zelensky’s stature with the public.
Nahaylo said Zelensky is “still providing the leadership and the sense of decency and propriety at . . . an acceptable level, and one simply cannot throw stones at him and say, ‘get rid of the man’ or ‘we need someone else.’”
But looking at the current trajectory of public opinion, that could change in a year or two.
“Zelensky earned his reputation as a great communicator, internationally, not just domestically, and even the skeptics and his domestic critics said, ‘Wow, he’s not just an actor, he’s very skillful.’ He obviously has some very skilled speechwriters,” Nahaylo said. “But after a year and a half, even Zelensky is getting déjà entendu [a sense of already having heard something] in the West, in his outfit, and everything else. The first year was very successful. The next six months, it was already, ‘seen this before, heard this before,’ even domestically.”
“If the war continues in a kind of stalemate mode, and the conscription issue becomes a bitter one, and corruption exists particularly within the war effort, then more serious issues will be raised,” Nahaylo warned.
The odd thing about Zelensky’s critics in the U.S., particularly on the political right, is that their criticisms are often the opposite of the truth, and obscure fairer and more accurate criticisms. Zelensky was not a Russia hawk, and before the 2022 invasion, repeatedly tried diplomatic outreach to Vladimir Putin, apparently believing Putin could be reasoned or charmed out of his aggressive ambitions. In the run-up to the war, Zelensky repeatedly publicly declared that he didn’t think a Russian invasion would happen, and shrugged off warnings from the U.S. government. It’s jarring to see critics attempting to paint Zelensky as some sort of crazed and unreasonable warmonger today, when his pre-war record was the exact opposite.
Before the war, the Kyiv Post had reasonable print-distribution numbers; publication of the printed version of the paper stopped once the war started — supplies and distribution just became unmanageable. But now, the website reaches between 3 and 4 million readers per month. Only 5 to 6 percent of the Post’s readers are in Ukraine; 58 percent are in North America, and only a small percentage of that figure is the Ukrainian diaspora.
You can find those who argue that the Ukrainian government is suppressing or censoring the news media, which is not entirely accurate, but it is accurate to say that the Ukrainian television news is tightly controlled to avoid divulging sensitive information, and offers only a limited range of opinion and perspective. Masha Gessen of The New Yorker summarized:
Zelensky’s office created the United News TV Marathon, a round-the-clock program of war-related news and talk shows, supplanting what had been a vibrant and varied television news market. The segments appear on six of Ukraine’s major channels and, at any given time, all of them are showing the same thing.
Nahaylo says Marathon “was supposed to reflect the different viewpoints of the different channels. But de facto, it represented what the president’s administration thought. I’m not going to say it was brutal censorship of any form, you’ve got different viewpoints, but it tended to reflect the line coming out of the president’s administration and his office. So, people are a bit fed up with that. But it’s not as bad as it seems, because in the meantime, the role of social media bursts out, and Telegram channels have become a major source of news.”
(Nahaylo said Twitter/X has not really caught on in Ukraine, beyond with a group of journalists.)
“The last two years have also been the heyday for the bloggers — anybody can talk confidently, and they can build a following, and they will be treated as gods and oracles, etcetera,” Nahaylo said. “Society, in its own way, found its way around the mainstream projection of news and are able to check out reality. Now, people are reporting on their phones explosions, deaths, atrocities — you can check what the official line is with what is actually happening on the ground. And it’s very difficult to control, unless you’re in Russia, in the way that they do it. But here, it’s not possible.”
I asked how different the coverage of television news is from the kind of coverage found on Ukrainian social-media platforms such as Telegram.
“Nuanced,” he answered. “Emphasis. A little bit more detail about things that are glossed over. It’s not black and white. . . . The state-run channel is not in electioneering mode. It’s still, ‘The war, we have to win, we need the help, we need the support, we need your understanding.’ It’s not, ‘Vote for us, only we can save you.’ There’s still the appeal to collective efforts, ‘We need to be united at this stage, and pull together towards [a victory] message. That’s the underlying message.”
I asked Nahaylo about the wide-ranging challenges of running a newspaper website in a country experiencing an invasion.
“The big issue was first the attacks on the infrastructure,” Nahaylo said. “The internet was down, the electricity was often down. I have people here with young families, young women with children at home, security with their kids going to shelters. Getting a Starlink set up, getting generators just in case for the worst-case situations. But we went through that, and I wouldn’t say people got blasé about the sirens, but more or less took it in their stride — realizing from the signals when it was very serious, and when missiles were coming as opposed to drones.”
Living and working in Kyiv, Nahaylo explained, was a matter of managed risk and rational recognition of the odds. “It’s like a needle hitting you within a haystack. [There are] chances, in a big city, of a drone getting you — but you could be hit by a car crossing a road.”
Like a proud father, Nahaylo understandably takes pride in his newspaper’s staff, putting out the news, day after day, through the war’s most difficult moments. “It was never a problem of morale, dedication, commitment. Now, I think, the worry among the younger people is conscription. How many of that team — ” he gestured toward the newsroom — “the younger men, might be forced or asked to go to the front? How will that leave us? Will there be another major push towards Kyiv? Not necessarily by land, but destroyed infrastructure, or command centers, or even media centers? They’ve gone after hotels where journalists stay.”
As alluded to above, day to day, life in Kyiv can seem almost normal at times. Traffic is in the streets, shoppers are in the stores, restaurants are full of patrons, and kids play in the parks. Last August, I heard about 13 or 14 air-raid-siren alerts during my stay of a week or so; I’ve only heard three this week, and two were in Lviv, to the west of the capital city. But the threat of Russian bombardment, which feels close to minimal now, could change with little warning.
Nahaylo hypothesizes, “Let’s assume the Ukrainians destroy the Kerch bridge” — the bridge connecting Crimea to Russia discussed in yesterday’s newsletter. “I could imagine that the Russians would then blow up the bridges across the Dnieper River. That is probably a factor that is holding the Ukrainians back. Which would cause chaos here, of course. Split the city in two.”
ADDENDUM: Last night, my traveling companions and I dined with Daniel Bilak, a longtime Ukrainian official, businessman, and devoted member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and an activist attempting to call attention to the barbaric torture of Christians by Russian forces.
Another patron overheard us speaking English, asked if we were Americans, and asked if the American Congress would send more aid. I told the patron I was doing what I could to persuade House Speaker Mike Johnson and passing along what I’m hearing from Ukrainians.
This is not that complicated. If we help these people, they have a chance to live. If we stop helping these people, a whole lot of them are guaranteed to die. Everything else is just the details.
The first wave of the Russian invasion sent about 6.4 million refugees fleeing out of their country, mostly into our NATO allies’ countries. If the Ukrainian lines fall and the Russian ground forces advance west toward Kyiv and Odesa, the resulting wave of refugees will make the initial wave look like a trickle. Everybody in Ukraine knows about how the Russians treated civilians in Bucha, and everybody knows that under Russian occupation, they would live on their knees, watch their family members get raped, or get a bullet in the back of the head. Or all three.
You want to make part or all of it a loan, then make part or all of it a loan. Ukraine’s got resources to put up as collateral.