A Ukrainian Diplomat on the Future of Russian Aggression

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2022

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters a third month, prospects of ending the conflict are still nowhere in sight, and there seems to be no end to the destruction that Vladimir Putin is willing to inflict. Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, tells David Remnick that he expects Russia to continue escalating its attack leading up to May 9th, a day of military celebration in Russia commemorating the German surrender in the Second World War. “They will escalate attacks by missiles from the sky to terrorize Ukraine in general,” he predicts, “and to make the government more susceptible to surrender.” In contrast to President Volodymyr Zelensky—who was a political rookie when he took office, in 2019—Kyslytsya has spent his career in Ukraine’s foreign service. In the years after the Soviet breakup, he says, Ukraine wanted to both placate its neighbor and ally itself with Western institutions. This created a “cognitive dissonance,” he says, that prevented Ukraine from recognizing the extent of Russian aggression. Having watched as diplomacy failed, Kyslytsya still has to separate his work from the personal toll of Russia’s invasion on his family and friends. “I try not to engage emotionally because if I engage emotionally too much, I am not operational,” he says. “And if I am not operational . . . I’m of very little use for my government.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters a third month, its brutality escalating all the time.
0:20.7	Prospects of ending the conflict are still
0:22.6	really nowhere in sight. For all the astounding resolve of Ukrainians, we're looking at a
0:29.0	relatively small country up against one of the world's largest militaries, and there seems to be
0:34.1	no limit to Vladimir Putin's destructive impulses.
0:39.4	Ukraine's most senior diplomat is Sergei Kislyza, the country's permanent representative to the
0:45.3	United Nations. Kisleetsa has spent his entire career in Ukraine's Foreign Service, trying to
0:51.0	avoid precisely the kind of catastrophe that's playing out now. And I talked with him
0:56.6	last week. Now, when you listen to the rhetoric of Putin, when you hear his version of history,
1:02.7	this mystical, selective version of history, what is happening here? What's your analysis of what
1:08.3	Putin wants and why he decided to invade your country?
1:12.8	It cannot be analyzed from the scientific or scholarly point of view.
1:19.1	His narrative and his vision and his speeches, they are beyond the academic world and how the classic historians and
1:33.0	sociologists see the history. So it is rather to be analyzed by politicians, if not psychiatrists.
1:44.0	So the narrative he advances,
1:50.1	nevertheless, is still popular and very attractive
1:53.6	to the majority of the Russians.
1:55.7	Why?
1:57.1	Well, let's go back to Germany after the Treaty of Versailles.
2:04.9	It's following the World War I.
2:07.0	Right, and see how and why Hitler was successful in selling to the majority, overwhelming majority of the Germans.
	...

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