There has been much excellent and brave reporting from Ukraine. Many reporters have been killed. I think, immediately, of Vira Hyrych, of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. She was killed on April 28, 2022.
In these past two years, many of us have relied on Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. He is out with a new book: Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence. And he is my guest on Q&A, here.
Trofimov has been a war correspondent for the past 30 or so years. He has reported on Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, etc. His previous books have been about the Middle East and the broader Muslim world.
Ukraine is different for him because he was born and raised there. Or maybe one should say: He was born and raised in the Soviet Union. “I actually managed to serve in the Soviet army for one year,” he tells me, “just before the Soviet Union collapsed.”
For Ukrainians, independence was the fulfillment of a dream, he says. But for many Russians: a catastrophe. They saw “the demise of an empire that the Russian armies had been collecting for centuries, and that’s a trauma that they are still dealing with.”
In our Q&A, Trofimov addresses many of the beliefs common in the West: NATO provoked Putin; Russian-speakers want to be ruled by Moscow; the U.S. government engineered an anti-democratic coup in Kyiv; and so on.
Despite the diminution of Western aid, Ukrainians keep fighting, says Trofimov, “because what other options do they have?” He continues as follows (and I paraphrase slightly):
They have seen what happens when the Russian state takes over. They have seen Bucha, near Kyiv, where 400 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.
At the end of our conversation, I ask him a cliché of a question, but not a bad one: “Is there anything else you’d like to say? Anything that you think people ought especially to know?” Say Trofimov,
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.
Again, to hear this podcast with the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov, go here.