In May 2022, Russian troops prepared to cross the strategic Donets River in Donbas. The Ukrainians on the other side were under heavy fire and, like other brigades, were running low on ammo. Then, midway through the battle at Bilohorivka Crossing, M777 howitzers, artillery guns furnished by the United States, were rushed to the front lines. The Russians were routed after they tried nine times to cross the river.
President Biden’s team initially feared that providing Ukraine with advanced weapons might lead to a nuclear standoff with Vladimir Putin. Gradually, though, the administration overcame those concerns, sending Kyiv an ever-increasing array of missile systems, tanks and even F-16 fighter jets. That Ukraine received such unprecedented military assistance from the United States is a testament to the influence of one man: Volodymyr Zelensky.
It’s hard to imagine a more gifted communicator or a more effective representative of a country. Those capacities are on display in two new books that explore, from above and below, how the war in Ukraine is being fought. They go into its first year in great depth and examine what may come next as the conflict sits at a standstill. “Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence,” by Yaroslav Trofimov, the Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent, captures some of the most gruesome, difficult stories of the war, told by the women and men who fended off “the orcs,” a pejorative Ukrainians use for the Russians. For Trofimov, who was raised in Ukraine, it’s personal. “The city that invaders had come to take had been my home,” he writes from Kyiv on the war’s fifth day. “How dare they, I thought.”
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A second book shines a more direct spotlight on Zelensky himself. “The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky,” by Simon Shuster, takes the reader inside the nuclear bunker under the presidential palace in the first hours of the invasion. It was designed by Soviet planners, and somewhere in the Kremlin, in a dusty archive or maybe even on Putin’s desk, is a blueprint of the brutalist lair, down to the location of the presidential toilet. Knowing that, Ukrainian security advisers still decided it was the safest option for Zelensky, and it’s there that the always-on comedian became a wartime decision-maker.
At that moment, Trofimov was riding in an SUV with a photographer and his own security adviser through parts of the country where it wasn’t at all clear whether Ukrainians or Russians were in charge, or where the battle lines were drawn. An adage he repeats throughout the book is that an empty road is “always a bad omen,” and yet he often finds himself on one, wondering whether a bombardment is imminent.
Both authors are talented explanatory journalists, vividly rendering parts of contemporary Ukrainian history that often get lost amid headlines. Shuster connects the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Maidan Uprising to Zelensky’s political education. Zelensky was a civilian at the time, and performing comedy for Ukrainian troops on the front lines of Donbas in 2014 proved formative for him. Trofimov, for his part, brings expertise in weapons systems, brigades and troop movements, as well as patriotic memes. He also situates the battles of Kharkiv, Kherson and Donbas within the broader shape of the war.
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Zelensky’s experience in improv comedy, it turns out, would become his greatest asset, as leadership is so often about making stuff up as you go along. The president’s comedy-troupe friends speak of his cutthroat personality from his days onstage. At times, the comedian’s overconfidence may have contributed to his missteps. Zelensky had been a popular performer in Russia who ran a major entertainment production company jointly there and in Ukraine, and he thought he could connect with Putin and Russians on a personal level to avert war. But throughout the conflict, the art of performance has been crucial to Zelensky’s efforts, from his intuitive understanding of a vertical phone screen’s intimacy to his sometimes-daily video addresses to foreign audiences.
Shuster, who grew up in Moscow and has corresponded from Ukraine and Russia for Time magazine, used to interview Zelensky in Russian before the war, but more recently the president suggested it was in bad taste. He also spoke with Zelensky’s wife, Olena, as well as many of the president’s friends, business partners and members of his inner circle. He has a knack for writing immersive scenes and re-creating exchanges in Zelensky’s situation room.
This access doesn’t mean that “The Showman” is a hagiography. Shuster recognizes that Zelensky’s embrace of martial law and wartime powers could evolve in authoritarian directions. He seeks inspiration from the muckraking newspaper Ukrainska Pravda. “Don’t be too generous to him,” an editor there warned Shuster. “You don’t know what he will become.” Shuster digs around the oligarchs in Zelensky’s orbit and doesn’t shy away from the questions surrounding endemic corruption in Ukraine. (Zelensky shows Shuster a secret elevator in the presidential palace that one of his predecessors apparently had built to more effectively sneak in bribes.) Of note are details about how Zelensky streamlined media under a state-run broadcasting umbrella (called Telemarathon) to strengthen his power over the war narrative — and to drown out critical, off-message voices.
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Still, what emerges from “The Showman” is a portrait of a brave, inspirational and bold leader, with flashes of his humanity and the personality hidden behind the makeup. Zelensky, not surprisingly, says he’s inspired by Charlie Chaplin, and he’d rather be his country’s Orwell than its Churchill. Even some of his most dangerous public appearances are pure showmanship. In August 2022, he held a news conference outside the presidential compound soon after the United States warned him of an imminent bombardment of Kyiv. “Was this briefing necessary?” Shuster wonders. “No one could accuse him of hiding or cowering before the Russian threat. He had shown the world his tolerance for danger. His need to look fearless now resembled an end in itself.”
Trofimov’s panorama of a rapidly mobilized country is part war correspondence, part road trip. His front-line dispatches from across pockmarked Ukraine are episodic and dark, with the photographer or security guy doling out occasional punchlines. He encounters Ukrainians in their late 50s manning tanks, ragtag legionnaires who traveled to the country just to be part of a war, and expatriates who left lucrative jobs in safe places to come and defend their homeland. There are also many dead bodies of Ukrainians and Russians, and unsparing accounts of the atrocities of war. With so much wanton destruction at the hands of the Russians, the eastern front looks like the aftermath of a zombie movie. Those details are so intense that they sharpen everything around them: You can practically taste the gas station hot dogs and Lavazza espressos, or the negronis Trofimov can sometimes find at a hotel bar.
Shuster’s book concludes with Zelensky’s secret journey to Washington in December 2022 to meet with Biden. Billions of dollars of U.S. weapons had sustained the country, and Zelensky came to appeal to Congress for more. “Is it enough?” he asked rhetorically of the unprecedented military assistance. “Honestly, not really.” For Shuster, this Washington visit was the culmination of Zelensky’s “transformation into [a] wartime leader.”
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In the process, and “after nearly a hundred billion dollars spent, the conflict had become the West’s own war,” Trofimov argues. And yet “Western prevarication,” he says, slowed down those transfers, and key materiel has not been in place when Ukraine needed it most, during the attempted counteroffensives that failed to break through Russia’s positions. He faults America’s cautiousness in getting Ukraine more powerful weapons as a “self-imposed taboo” that has prolonged the war.
Now, such taboos are likely to deepen. A year after he was spirited to Washington, Zelensky has yet to win over Republicans who are angling to cut aid, chief among them Donald Trump. The war is far from over, and the world’s attention has moved on. Zelensky’s speeches to foreign audiences are no longer novel, and the decisive battlefield wins that Trofimov captures have given way to a frozen conflict, where Russia and Ukraine battle over feet and inches.
“Cynical as it sounds,” Zelensky acknowledges, “everyone wants to be on the side of the winner.”
Jonathan Guyer is a foreign policy reporter and editor based in New York. He has recently written for the Guardian and New York Magazine.
Our Enemies Will Vanish
The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence
By Yaroslav Trofimov
Penguin. 385 pp. $32
The Showman
Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky
By Simon Shuster
William Morrow. 363 pp. $32.99
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