It was a remarkable moment in the war in Europe: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky gave a 90-minute Zoom interview on Sunday to four prominent journalists from Russia, the country invading his own.
Hours later, the Kremlin responded. A government statement informed Russian news media “of the need not to publish this interview”.
Journalists outside Russia published it anyway. Those who were still in Russia did not. The episode exposed the extraordinary and partly successful attempts at censorship that President Vladimir V. Putin’s government is undertaking in Russia as his bloody invasion of Ukraine enters its second month, along with Mr. Zelensky’s attempts to circumvent that censorship and reach the public directly.
In the interview, Mr. Zelensky graphically describes what he believes was the Kremlin’s disdain for both Ukrainian and Russian life, to the point, he said, that the Russian military was slow to retrieve the bodies of its fallen soldiers.
“First they refused, then something else, then they offered us some bags,” said Mr. Zelensky, who described Ukraine’s efforts to hand over the bodies of Russian soldiers. “Listen, even if a dog or a cat dies, people don’t do this.”
Mr Zelensky generally speaks Ukrainian in public – the official language of his country – but he is native Russian, and he has switched to Russian repeatedly in the video addresses he posts on social media in an attempt to critics of Putin in Russia. But Sunday’s interview was the first time since the war started that Mr. Zelensky had spoken at length with Russian journalists, in their language.
The journalists were Ivan Kolpakov, the editor of Meduza, a Russian-language news website in Latvia; Vladimir Solovyov, a reporter for Kommersant, a Moscow-based daily newspaper; Mikhail Zygar, an independent Russian journalist who fled to Berlin after the war broke out; and Tikhon Dzyadko, the editor of the temporarily closed independent television channel TV Rain, who had left Moscow for Tbilisi, Georgia.
After they finished the interview, the journalists posted about it on social media and promised to publish it soon. Hours later, Russia’s telecommunications regulatory agency, Roskomnadzor, released a statement ordering Russian news channels not to publish the interview and warning that an investigation had been launched against the reporters involved to “determine their responsibility”.
Even by the standards of contemporary Russian law enforcement, the statement was remarkable and offered no legal pretext to justify the order not to publish the interview. But in the wake of the law signed by Mr. Putin early this month — potentially punitive coverage of the invasion of Ukraine deviating from the Kremlin narrative with as much as 15 years in prison — the government directive had an impact.
Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper whose editor, Dmitri A. Muratov, shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year, decided not to publish the interview, even though Mr. Zygar asked a question on behalf of Mr. Muratov. Unlike many other Russian journalists, Mr Muratov has remained in Russia and has kept his newspaper going despite the new law, although that meant using Kremlin terminology to refer to the war as a “special military operation”. and no invasion.
“We have been forced not to publish this interview,” Muratov said in a telephone interview, noting that his newspaper was based in Russia and came under the jurisdiction of Russian law. “This is just censorship in the time of the ‘special operation’.”
Kommersant had also not published the interview on his website since early Monday in Moscow; Mr Solovyov did not respond to a request for comment. It was unclear whether he or his newspaper would face legal consequences for conducting the interview.
But the publication of Mr. Kolpakov, Meduza, as well as Mr. Dzyadko and Mr. Zygar, who are all now based outside of Russia, did publish it, both in text form and on YouTube. Although the Meduza website is blocked in Russia, YouTube remains accessible. (Probably not for long, many analysts think, as Facebook and Instagram were blocked earlier this month.)
Videos of the interview had been viewed more than a million times within hours of publication, giving Russians a very different view of the war than what they see on their television screens on a daily basis. Most independent news organizations have been either banned or forced into exile, while polls show most Russians depend on state television for their news – which see the war in Ukraine as a just crusade against extreme nationalism and necessary to threat posed by an expanding NATO.
“It was very important for us to speak, for him to address the Russian public,” said Mr. Zygar about mr. Zelensky in a telephone interview from Berlin, citing Ukraine’s Kremlin propaganda tropics as overrun by Russia-hating Nazis. “For him, it seems, this was important too.”
As the fighting continued, Ukraine and Russia agreed on Sunday to hold another round of negotiations in Istanbul next week. It will be the first time senior officials from both countries have met in person in more than two weeks, following a series of lengthy sessions conducted in the interim via video link.
With Russian forces failing to secure a quick victory and seemingly stranded, Mr. Zelensky towards a negotiated end to the war without relinquishing Ukrainian sovereignty. But the two sides still seem far apart. He said in Sunday’s interview that Ukraine did not talk about two of Mr Putin’s main, vaguely defined demands: the demilitarization and “de-nazification” of Ukraine.
However, he said Ukraine would be willing to talk about lifting restrictions on the Russian language and adopting neutral geopolitical status. Any deal, he said, would have to be validated by a referendum to be held after Russian troops withdraw.
He described a potential deal as including “security guarantees and neutrality, the non-nuclear status of our state.”
“We are ready to go for it,” he said.
In the interview, Mr. Zelensky mr. Putin blamed for creating the enmity between Russia and Ukraine. He said the war would have the opposite effect of what Mr Putin apparently intended — marking a clear split between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, rather than somehow reuniting them.
“This is not just any war, this is much worse,” said Mr. Zelensky. “This month there has been a global, historic, cultural rift.”
Mr. Zelensky’s descriptions of the violence of the Russian invasion went directly against the Kremlin’s narrative, which accuses Ukrainians of shooting at their own cities and blames them for any civilian casualties and urban destruction. He said the port city of Mariupol was “strewn with corpses – nobody removes them – Russian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians.”
He also accused the Russian government of forcibly removing more than 2,000 children from Mariupol, saying that “their location is unknown”. He said he had told his officials that Ukraine would stop all negotiations with Russia “if they steal our children”.
Mr Putin has received grossly exaggerated reports of the attitude of the Ukrainian people towards Russia and its government, Mr Zelensky said.
“They probably said we’re waiting for you here, smiling and with flowers,” he said, adding that the Russian government “doesn’t see Ukraine as an independent state, but as a kind of product, part of a larger organism that Russian president sees himself as the head of.”
After Meduza, Mr. Dzyadko and Mr. Zygar published the interview, the Russian prosecutor’s office released its own threat. It said it would conduct a “legal review” of Mr Zelensky’s statements and their publication, given “the context of massive anti-Russian propaganda and the regular posting of false information about the actions of the Russian Federation” in Ukraine.
“It would be funny if it wasn’t tragic,” said Mr. Zelensky in a video on his Telegram account, in which he commented on the Kremlin’s frantic censorship efforts. “This means they are nervous. Perhaps they saw that their citizens began to question the situation in their own country.”