“We believe in victory,” Volodymyr Zelensky told The Economist in a face-to-face interview in Kyiv last week
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskin a government building fortified with sandbags and surrounded with tank traps, Mr Zelensky is disarmingly authentic and humane. So great is the real-life tragedy that has befallen his nation that there is no room for acting. He talks of Ukraine’s need for weapons, of his views of President Joe Biden and his other Western backers, of what victory would mean.
Mr Putin and Mr Zelensky are both native Russian-speakers, but they talk a different language of power. Mr Putin’s world, where life is cheap and history belongs to great men, has no place for pity and no room for Ukraine. “I don’t think he visualises in his own mind the same Ukraine we see,” Mr Zelensky says. “He sees Ukraine as a part of his world, his worldview, but that doesn’t correspond with what’s happened over the last 30 years.
He is emphatic about what that end will be. “We believe in victory,” he says. “It’s impossible to believe in anything else. We will definitely win because this is our home, our land, our independence. It’s just a question of time.” However, getting there depends not just on the fighting spirit of Ukrainians, but also on support from the West. If Ukraine is to defend its way of life, he says, it needs tanks, armoured personnel vehicles and military aircraft—and it needs them now.
Mr Zelensky is equally frustrated by the reactive nature of sanctions that are designed to punish Russia for what it has done rather than prevent it from going further. Existing sanctions have loopholes. Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, for example, has not been cut off from thepayment system, because it is one of the main ways Europe pays for its gas. America has imposed an embargo on Russian oil and gas but Europe, a far bigger customer, has not.
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