THE FIGHT OF OUR LIVES

The former press secretary to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy lays out the stakes of the current war.

“Perhaps he had not always been a perfect leader,” writes Mendel. “There had been difficulty in mustering the necessary support around his initiatives, managing his staff, and navigating the shoals of partisan politics. But in the chaos of war he knew exactly what to do. He became our national protector.” Indeed, Zelenskyy came into his own as a wartime leader of unflinching courage and a deeply wrought conviction that Ukraine is a bulwark of Western democracy and a nation that belongs in the 21st century. By contrast, Mendel writes in a closely observed portrait, “there is only one way to describe Putin: ‘old age.’ No matter how much I looked at him and his delegation, no matter how much I listened, everything about them conveyed old age: old ideology, old principles, old behavior, old thoughts.” Readers will find a generally admiring but not entirely uncritical depiction of Zelenskyy as well. He is a masterful negotiator who understands that peace is preferable to war, for “only with peace can he focus on rebuilding his nation.” That rebuilding involves guiding Ukraine to forward-looking economic, social, and cultural standards and shaking off the power of oligarchs, but it also acknowledges that Ukraine is a multicultural society that includes ethnic Russians—who, in the course of the current war, have discovered that their language is now associated with “inhumanity and cruel aggression,” so much so that they’re switching to speaking Ukrainian as an expression of solidarity. Readers will also find a cleareyed look at both the reasons for Russia’s intransigence and the countervailing force of Ukrainian resistance in a war that “has burned away all that was artificial and superficial in our lives.”

A nuanced portrait of a leader in a time of crisis who has definitely risen to the occasion.