Wartime Kyiv

A discussion with the Ukrainian journalist Illia Ponomarenko, co-founder of the Kyiv Independent and author of the new book "I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv"

Illia Ponomarenko, my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, is a Ukrainian journalist known as a former defense and security reporter at the Kyiv Post and subsequently a co-founder of the Kyiv Independent. He has covered the war in eastern Ukraine since the conflict’s earliest days, as well as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 2022. He has also had deployments to Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as an embedded reporter with UN peacekeeping forces. Ponomarenko won the Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellowship and was selected to work as USA Today’s guest reporter at the U.S. Department of Defense. He lives in Bucha outside Kyiv.

His new book, I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv, is both a moving memoir and a vital historical document, critical to our understanding of what happened in Ukraine’s capital before, during, and immediately after Russia’s ill-fated invasion. Luke Harding hails it as “brilliant, dark, and devastating” and a “vivid, dramatic, and moving account.” I quite agree. If you want to really understand what happened, when, and why, this is essential reading.

Ponomarenko was kind enough to spend an hour talking to me about his background, his book, the war, Putin, Zelenskyy, and more. Here are three takeaways from our discussion:

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Putin is delusional. It is impossible to negotiate in good faith with madmen.

In one memorable passage from the book, Ponomarenko lists all the myriad reasons why it would be illogical if not suicidal for Putin to invade Ukraine. Russia’s ambitions made no sense, everyone concluded. But Putin invaded regardless.

“We have a sort of a saying in Ukrainian, also in many other Slavic languages—a saying that, you know, what a fool has done, many wise men would not comprehend in their lives,” he tells me. Because the Russians, “they don’t need this when it comes to like full-scale, World War II style war on Ukraine…Why would they need it? They are far more comfortable when it comes to occupying parts of Ukraine, essentially getting the status quo of what happened in 2014. They essentially have Ukraine on the hook when it comes to Ukraine’s ability to join NATO. Ukraine is spending insane resources when it comes to re-arming its military. It’s pretty bad in terms of [de]stabilizing its economy. It’s occupied the East, and also Crimea is a sort of an incurable wound on Ukraine. So it’s on the hook. I mean, you don’t have to essentially do anything.”

But Putin did. Why? Ponomarenko says,

What’s the reason? What’s the brain behind this? At the same time, you know, we knew a lot about what Putin is, what his system is, and how he was always dependent and really relying on intimidation, on bluffing, on many other things, on showing off….So it gives you another similar rational idea that this is probably the answer. He couldn’t be that dumb….But seriously, I mean, these people, they rule entire nations— nuclear powers with hundreds of millions of people under them. So they couldn’t be that dumb. If I understand this, I think he does too.

But the problem is that we are definitely super mistaken when it comes to rationality, especially when it comes to dictators who live in the world of their own imagination, who live in the world of yes-men that surround them, who live in the world in which they essentially need nothing, nothing else that could be happening to the material world. When it comes to money, wealth—they don’t need it, and so [money has] no control over them. They have no sort of system of checks and balances over them. And essentially, it drives you insane. It brings you to an inadequate way of thinking and inadequate assessment of things.

He adds, “And why they decided to do this? Because of the delusional things that inevitably happen to dictators, to regimes of this kind. And the more I think about this…I started having an idea about sort of a self-destruction mechanism that any dictatorship inevitably has in itself. Inevitably.”

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We are right to be cautious about Russia’s nuclear arsenal—but we cannot be so cautious that we allow Putin to take the entire civilized world hostage, as we have done so far.

There is, I think, a line where the NATO powers would push back on Russia militarily. If Putin invaded, say, Italy, and bombed Milan and Genoa the way he’s lain waste to Mariupol and Kharkiv, the West would not sit back and hold meetings about which oligarchs to sanction. We would respond with force, and we would not let the threat of nuclear weapons deter us. Even if there were no NATO, I think, the U.S. would regard an attack on Italy as an attack on the West and hit back hard.

And yet when it comes to Ukraine, we allow it. We were slow to deliver conventional weapons. We remain wishy-washy about the war. And the minute Vladimir the Puny brings up nuclear arms, we freak out. This is, tactically, a mistake.

Ponomarenko compares Putin to a street thug, and says that the way to handle him is not with kid gloves, but with brass knuckles:

When you come upon a bully or a street thug, you can’t bargain with him, you can’t reason with him. The best way to secure yourself and your properties and everything in your life is to be clearly and obviously ready to fight back. So they’re not persuaded, not reasoned with. The best way to secure [yourself] is to have a...I’m not sure what the word is…like a sort of a cold weapon for your fist. I don’t know the English word for this. It’s the best way to prevent [escalation]…

So that’s the best instrument. Not your kindness, not your willingness to cooperate. Sometimes you have to be ready. And sometimes you have to take action because if you don’t do this, they will get back for more. And you are inviting trouble by demonstrating your clear disability, your unwillingness to stand for yourself. This is how streets work around the world. This is how human nature works.

And you can be afraid of Putin's nuclear arsenal for as long as you can, for as hard as you can, but you have to understand that by showing your weakness, by doing nothing, by finding an excuse to stand away, you are only inviting for more and more and more and more and more. Every single time you do this. So if you do not want to precipitate World War II, you do not invite Putin by expanding his aggression, by using new and new weapons of war, by expanding the the history of his war crimes in Ukraine and the scale of this war by keeping him unpunished about this.

This, he explains, is what worked in Kyiv:

What happened two years ago in this area where I live, in the Battle of Kyiv, Russians, by the end of the month—by the end of March, a little bit more than [one month] into the invasion—they scaled back and they withdraw. They withdraw from Kyiv—not because they were persuaded to, not because they got enough concessions from our side, from our allies, but because they were defeated. They couldn’t go on. They couldn’t go on. So we can talk about this for hours, but this is the way it works. If you want to not to prevent the escalation of this war, you [must] prevent Putin from doing so by fighting back. And the more time you lose, the more you allow him to do, the heavier is the price for you at the next level.

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The war only ends when Putin withdraws.

Even if there were a ceasefire, and Ukraine were to cede parts of the Donbas to Russia, Putin would not stop trying to take all of Ukraine. Therefore, any ceasefire or negotiation that maintains the current status quo is doomed to fail.

“The problem is that many people seriously underestimate Putin’s zealous desire to take all of Ukraine,” Ponomarenko tells me. “You know, many people ask us the same question: why can’t you just cede some territory to Putin?….The problem is that this is not the way it will end….There’s no territory that you can cede to stop this. There is no concession that would make people put a stop to this because it’s not about a certain city or region or something else. It’s about the entire organism of the Ukrainian nation. It’s about 100 percent.”

A ceasefire would accomplish little more than giving Russia a chance to regroup, reset, and repeat its aggression:

Any sort of concessions that you could do this is simply the way to facilitate [Putin] in the next steps. So of course right now he’s tempting publicly, and I’m pretty sure in official too on diplomatic channels, I’m pretty sure that they are tempting, they’re sending this tempting message of “Let’s better get out of this war. Let’s go the easiest way possible and make Ukraine stop fighting and surrender something and we’ll forget about this. I promise, I’m a man of my word. I promise I will stop.”

The problem is that, [first], Putin has never served any sort of agreements with him. He never respected [treaties]. And [second], the best you can get from such a compromise on Ukraine is Putin having a short respite to compensate his losses, to fix a lot of mistakes also, and to continue because the goal remains the same: 100 percent of Ukraine. There is no concession that would stop this, unfortunately. It’s far more complicated than that. And he is extremely irrational when it comes to the reasonableness of what he can sacrifice for the sake of his dark desire….

If he could, if that helps him, he will definitely and willingly sacrifice and massacre millions of Russians for the sake of this thing, because he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care.

“One of the worst discoveries of this war,” Ponomarenko adds, “is that Russia in general, and Putin in particular, they do not have very reasonable limits of what they are ready to pay for to reach the goals.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S7 E19: Wartime Kyiv (with Illia Ponomarenko)

Greg Olear opens with his thoughts on Project 2025, Trump’s odd fascination with Hannibal Lecter and his bromance with Jeffrey Epstein, and the Democratic palace coup, led by Danny Ocean.

Then, Greg welcomes the Ukrainian journalist Illia Ponomarenko for a discussion about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin, Zelensky, and his new book, “I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv.”

Plus: dictator disco!

Follow Illia:
https://x.com/IAPonomarenko

Buy his book:
https://www.amazon.com/Will-Show-You-How-Was/dp/1639733876

Check out ROUGH BEAST, Greg’s new book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D47CMX17

Prevail is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/greg.

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