Podcast: "Zelensky is in no mood to negotiate"
Simon Shuster discusses his fly-on-the-wall portrait of a government at war
Simon Shuster with Zelensky on the train from Kherson in November 2022
Back in April 2022, I read Simon Shuster’s Inside Zelensky’s World - a 5,000-word Time account of the Ukrainian president’s life inside the bunker on Kyiv’s Bankova Street in the first, profoundly uncertain days of the all-out war with Russia. Since learning last May that Simon had a book in preparation, I’ve been itching to read it and The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky - out on Tuesday (23 January) - didn’t disappoint.
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Born in Moscow but raised in California, Simon has reported from Russia and Ukraine for 17 years. Before joining Time, he worked in the region for The Moscow Times, Reuters, and AP. He first met Zelensky during his 2019 presidential run and built sufficient trust to be granted extensive wartime access at the highest levels. Based on off-and-on-the-record conversations with the principals – including the president, his wife, their childhood friends, his chief of staff, his defence minister, and the head of the armed forces – The Showman provides unique insight into the command of the war.
In this New Books Network interview, I asked him whether he thought a ceasefire or negotiations were close. “If the war is moving to a negotiation. I think Zelensky is not ready for that. And he is looking for ways to sustain the fight, to stay in the fight, even if someone like Donald Trump comes in and tries to pressure him to negotiate. Zelensky does not like to be pressured. He is very stubborn. He does not like to be pushed around … Zelensky is in no mood to negotiate, and he is attempting in recent months - I'd say starting in the summer of 2023 for sure - to kind of hedge his bets against the possibility that Western support would continue to decline and possibly be cut off completely if and when … Trump is re-elected … The way they're preparing for that is a massive focus and huge investments in domestic arms production. That's their kind of Plan B … They've had an enormous amount of success, I think, and we see that success in the dramatic attacks against Russian targets in Crimea and deep inside Russian territory from Belgorod to Moscow to Sochi”.
“I can only tell you what they tell me repeatedly in our conversations, and I believe them … that freezing the war, giving up parts of the territory and then freezing the front line somewhere in eastern Ukraine or the south, would only delay the inevitable. It would give Russia a chance to regroup, rearm, to build up its forces for another attack that will, they expect, again attempt to take over the entire country … They don't see Putin's war aims changing … I think they want to keep pushing as long as they can and to regain momentum so that, if they do end up in a negotiation, it's from a position of strength and not on the back foot”.
What caused the March 2022 Russia-Ukraine negotiations in Istanbul to fail? "What happened was: Ukraine began winning. It began winning on the battlefield. You know, the Russians withdrew from Kyiv, not as a humanitarian gesture of goodwill, but because they were defeated by the Ukrainians. At the same time, a lot more Western weaponry began arriving that also gave a boost to the Ukrainian sense that: 'Hey, maybe we could win this thing on the battlefield. Let's see how far we can push it. We have the momentum, right?' There were a couple of other incidents. One was the arrest of Viktor Medvedchuk, Putin's closest friend. That was a major boost to morale ... and the other thing was a big one was the sinking of the Moskva ... That was the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. A pair of Ukrainian-made missiles - Neptune missiles - sank that ship. And that was an enormous boost to morale. I mean, a huge, huge victory - symbolic victory. It's not going to end the war, but it showed again the Ukrainians that: 'Hey, maybe we're not as weak as we thought. Maybe we don't really need to grant these enormous concessions that the Russians are asking for. Let's see how far we can push this on the battlefield'".
Do you trust Zelensky to cede his emergency powers when the war ends? “Time will tell. I don't know. I remain somewhat concerned, but I'm also heartened by … - not to overestimate my role in history here - … the fact that Zelensky allowed me, an independent journalist, to get the access that I had and to write a book that he still, from what I understand, hasn't read. He never asked to see it. He never asked for any kind of approval. He said: ‘Yeah, go for it. Knock yourself out’. So, that shows a certain commitment to independent journalism, for which I'm really grateful and which I have to acknowledge is a good sign of his democratic bona fides. But we'll see. It's an open question. History shows that that's always a very difficult and fraught transition, from absolute power back to democratic competition. That's tough for anybody”.
For my Writers’ Writers tip sheet, he chose Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham (Bantam Press, 2019) and Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick (Viking, 1993).