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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses President Trump’s announced diesel deal with Russia, the administration’s abandonment of Ukraine, and why Trump is giving up so much to gain very little.
Then, David is joined from Kyiv by Illia Ponomarenko, a Ukrainian journalist and the author of the new book The Land of Tears and Hope. David and Illia talk about the history of Ukraine, its current state as the war with Russia rages on, and how and why the Trump administration seems so hostile to the country.
Finally, David concludes with discussion about why so little literature exists about the history of slavery in Eastern Europe.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Those Americans who want the United States to take a more pro-Russian point of view or who denigrate the Ukrainian cause—the vice president of the United States and the people around him—they will insist that this war is about NATO expansion. But when you actually listen to actual Russians, they say, No, no, no; this is all about Yaroslav the Wise. And from a Russian point of view, this is not about NATO expansion, except when they’re talking in English to gullible Americans.
[Music]
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Illia Ponomarenko, author of a new history of Ukraine, Land of Tears and Hope, available from Bloomsbury in the month of November. Illia and I will discuss the deep history of Ukraine, the recent onslaught of Russian drones and missiles on Ukrainian cities, and how Ukrainians feel about their abandonment by the Trump administration.
This week’s book will also be Eastern European–focused. It’s not a book that exists. It’s a book that I would like to read, and I set out a research assignment for some intrepid Eastern Europeanist to deliver a book I would like to know more about in, again, in the deep history of the lands that are now Ukraine, now Poland, and now Russia.
But before either the dialogue with Illia or the book discussion, some opening thoughts about the most shocking recent turn in the U.S.-Ukraine story.
When Illia and I recorded our dialogue, we did not yet know about this announcement that was pending from the Trump administration, declaring or imagining or proposing, or whatever the word is, for what is likely vaporware. Not a real deal; a big purchase, a massive—in the words of President Trump—a massive purchase of Russian diesel fuel for the United States.
Now, I wrote an article for The Atlantic this past weekend with the facts and figures about just how negligible an achievement this so-called deal really is. The United States is a diesel superpower. It’s probably the largest producer of diesel on Earth. We don’t exactly know that for sure, because we don’t know really how much China produces, but probably the United States is the largest producer of diesel in the world. It is certainly the largest exporter of diesel in the world. And it produces much more than it uses at home. So it exports about a million and a half barrels of diesel fuel a day.
The reason American prices have been rising so fast for truckers and farmers and others who use diesel fuel is not because of anything that’s happening in the U.S. market, or even the North American market. The United States imports a little diesel fuel from Canada because it’s easier sometimes to import from Canada and then to export from the Gulf Coast than to supply the United States entirely from its own resources. The reason that the price has been rising is because of disturbances in the global market. What matters is world demand and world supply of diesel, not U.S. demand and U.S. supply of diesel.
Now, if this Russian deal exists at all, it’s a matter of a few hours’ worth of U.S. production and U.S. consumption. It’s not a big event, and it won’t change world prices because Russia doesn’t have a lot of diesel to sell. Although Russia used to be a big diesel producer, Russian oil facilities have been damaged so intensely by Ukrainian missile and drone fire that Russia has very little diesel to contribute. In fact, Russia has had an export ban on diesel since July. If Russia has any diesel to sell, it’s going to take it from another consumer; India, maybe. And by diverting diesel oil from India to the United States, it doesn’t do anything for the United States, which has more than enough diesel here at home. It makes life a little tougher for India, and it doesn’t change the world price at all, because nothing happens in global supply and demand. The whole thing is a complete nothingburger.
But it does two things that are important. The first is: The Russians have dangled in front of the Trump inner circle the prospect of enormous wealth for them if American sanctions on Russia are dismantled. And it’s taken a first step toward the dismantling of those sanctions and put the United States on the path to confrontation with Ukraine, because President Trump now has to worry the only way he can get Russian diesel is if the Ukrainians stop attacking Russian energy facilities, which they are doing in retaliation for the Russian attacks on their cities and schools and historical societies and hospitals, on their civilian population. They have struck back against Russian energy infrastructure to cramp Russia’s war-making ability.
President Trump has now created a situation where his goal of seeming to do something about diesel and maybe also enriching a lot of people who are in his inner circle is in conflict with Ukraine’s self-defense, and the only way he can get what he wants is by ordering Ukraine to stop defending itself. And we have seen already Trump’s pressure on Ukraine: If you continue to strike the Russian energy infrastructure, you are making an enemy of me.
He is taking away Ukraine’s war-making ability for his own reasons, in ways that will not help American motorists even slightly, American farmers, American truckers. And of course, he is doing nothing to bring about a resolution of the conflict in the Persian Gulf, which has removed so much diesel fuel from Europe and Asia because that’s where those countries get their supplies from.
Trump from the beginning of this second presidency has taken Ukraine as a kind of personal affront. Now, a lot of this is a little hard to understand, but maybe we don’t need to understand it. You know, when I was working on my story about Trump’s vaporware diesel deal, an editor asked me, Do you think Trump believes it? Do you think he imagines that these few barrels he’s getting from Russia are, in fact, going to make any difference to American supply? Or is he totally delusional? And I had to answer, I don’t actually—of course, I don’t know the answer to that question. My instinct—it’s just an instinct—is that President Trump was much more of a self-aware con man when he entered politics a decade ago than he is now. He now may be kind of lost: truly in a world of illusions, where he no longer himself knows what is true and what is a lie.
But it doesn’t matter, because there’s a consistent through line, whether these are deceptions of others or deceptions of himself. The through line is: He just is tantalized by the prospect of vast wealth for himself and others by doing deals with Russia. And he’s willing to sacrifice the lives and security and independence of Ukraine to his ambition. And he treats Ukraine’s self-assertion and self-defense as an act of impudence and defiance—not against those who are trying to invade and aggress and annex Ukraine, but against himself. Because Ukraine bothers him, and he doesn’t like it, and he wants it to go away.
What he’s leaving all Americans with is one of the most shameful passages in the history of American foreign policy. A people that are defending their national sovereignty, that are fighting back under the most difficult conditions with the supremest forms of human bravery. Who ask only from the United States the wherewithal with which to defend themselves, and who are being denied that wherewithal by President Trump for reasons we can’t understand, but none of which look good. I hope anyone who can hear my voice will join me in sharing their dismay and their shame at what President Trump has done to the good name of American democracy and American world leadership.
And now my dialogue with Illia Ponomarenko.
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Frum: Illia Ponomarenko was born in 1992 in a small town in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. He studied at Mariupol State University. When Russia invaded his home region in 2014, Illia began his career as a reporter. He has never stopped.
His first book, I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv, was published in 2024 to global acclaim. Illness closed his path to military service, so he turned to a deeper fight: the fight over whether Ukraine has a history of its own. His new book, The Land of Tears and Hope, tells the Ukrainian story from the Slavic tribes and the Vikings through the Cossacks, Soviet terror, and the Maidan to this very war today. It will be published next month. Order it now.
Illia Ponomarenko, welcome to The David Frum Show.
Illia Ponomarenko: Hello. Thanks for having me.
Frum: Illia, you have written this deeply moving history of Ukraine, and I want to address it in full, but the events of the past days in Ukraine have been so dramatic and so horrible I think we must start there.
So tell us, we’re speaking in the early part of October, tell us the situation as it is now and what has happened in the past days to your country.
Illia Ponomarenko: Well, of course, the centerpiece of any news and the spotlight is Kyiv, this capital city, and what’s happening. The air battle over Kyiv that’s going on nonstop for days and weeks already, with drones, missiles. Never stopping, day and night.
So the central attention is given to the defense of the capital and to preserving life in the capital. And Russians are really trying to abrupt the very existence of the city, to instill fear, to abrupt transportation, normal food supply, water supplies. Bridges over the Dnipro River that divides the city, which is extremely vital. So Russians have switched to this tactic of trying to absolutely paralyze the very heart of the country—to install fear, to enforce the capitulation, since they can’t get any substantial military success for the fifth year of this war.
But I must say that, you know, I live just outside Kyiv in suburbs, and also in several places in Kyiv Oblast, in the outskirts. But I spend as much time as I can in the city, in many ways just to be there with my city, in there. And I would say that over the last three days, which is what I said on social media, the air battle—this constant attack—the entire environment had become a little less stressful, a little calmer. I would say I think, this my feeling, that Ukrainians managed—the Ukrainian military managed to overcome this surprise and shock and managed to adapt to this new situation. And I think if the situation continues, we might say that Russians have weakened in terms of their ability to strike Kyiv on the daily basis. So Ukrainians have made another move to adapt to what Russia does, and it goes on and on and on. So it’s constant battle between Ukrainian adaptation and Russian attempts to paralyze the city.
Frum: Let me try a little context. I think from the point of view of a lot of people in the Western world, in the United States—we’re so far away. It seems like this is an endless story of Russian attacks, Ukrainian defense. But there was a true intensification of the Russian air attack on the capital of Ukraine beginning at about the end of September, with some new technologies, some new methods. And the first effect was very devastating. A much greater loss of life, much greater damage than had been the case until the later part of September, the beginning of October. And so it is this new campaign—this intensified campaign at the end of September, beginning of October—that you say is now running out of impetus and faltering a little bit?
Ponomarenko: It gets significantly visibly weaker in terms of the number of drones, Russian drones, that made it to the capital and strike. So there are far less booms in the sky over Kyiv over the last few days, which is good. Which is something that enlightens us, because the military also reports a lot of new technologies, counter-technologies that are being applied to intercept jet-powered Russian drones that are super difficult targets to get.
Frum: These jet-powered drones, this is the new—because drones, until now, have been slow. And they could be shot down with a .50-caliber machine gun if the weapon-wielder was fast and skillful enough. But a jet-powered drone moves much faster, and so can’t be intercepted by a machine gun. You need a much more sophisticated technology to catch the jet-powered drone.
Ponomarenko: Yeah. One of the bright pictures of life in Kyiv is always seeing, in the streets, pickups with machine guns—sometimes it’s M2 Browning machine guns—with the mobile air-defense groups that try to shoot these things down.
But when it comes to jet-powered drones, which is the next step essentially, and especially when it comes to mass-produced, jet-powered drones, it’s a huge problem. Because they move at velocity of 700, 600 kilometers per hour. So it’s an insanely complicated target to get. And they are cheap; they are easy, simple. They are massive. So could be swarms of them over the Ukrainian cities.
Nonetheless, within weeks we started getting new solutions to this. There are—you know, Ukrainian defense in many ways is comprised of many, many private companies that suggest many, many technical solutions. Right now we have five or six prototype interceptor drones that are engine-powered, or jet-powered, that are being presented by various companies in Ukraine. And they are simply showing the first results, just the first results, on videos intercepting these Russian jet-powered drones. So surprisingly, it goes fast. The entire Russian campaign against Kyiv was a shock. It was sharp. It intensified really quickly and shockingly. But at the same time, the Ukrainian response to this is very fast and very sharp. So our big question is whether we could launch the mass production of a successful prototype that works well. And this is exactly, essentially, how this war works.
Frum: Ukraine is striking deeply at Russian targets, especially energy-production targets, ever farther into Russia. And there are reports—I don’t know how much weight to put on them—of surrenders among Russian ground troops, of deteriorating performance among Russian ground troops, that make us think that maybe something deeper is happening in the war than just the strike, counter-strike—the cycle of innovation and counter-innovation you describe.
Ponomarenko: But also, another front of this war is actual battlefield war, that’s happening along from the frozen front line in Ukraine’s south and east. And we have a situation in which Ukrainian military, in one of the most important, if not the most important axis of Russian attack, which is near the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk—the very core of the industrial part of Donbas that’s still under Ukrainian control, and also the belt of the fortress cities in Ukraine’s east.
The Ukrainian military, over the months of very careful, very clandestine operations, managed to inflict a very, very serious defeat to local Russian forces. So that’s why we get pictures of surrendered Russian troops, because they got encircled; they got captured. That’s how the Ukrainian military, and it’s pretty open, and it could be independently verified that Ukrainian military have tactical gains. And also they managed to cut off one of the accesses of Russian attacks on these fortress cities: the northern claw, as we call it.
So Ukraine, despite all the bombs, despite all the bravado from the Russian side, Ukraine has pretty significant tactical successes on the field, on the battlefield. Which are pretty impressive on the scale of this war, five years on.
Frum: What can you tell us about the present state of American assistance to Ukraine?
The Trump administration has cut off aid to Ukraine. Such American weapons as you get are paid for by your European counterparts and allies. Is there any American intelligence flowing to Ukraine? Is there any non-material assistance you’re getting? Or is the attitude truly as hostile in Ukraine as it seems to be from the point of view of Washington, D.C.?
Ponomarenko: Well, of course, we are very far from being in the place where we’ve been under the previous administration when we had consistent and very serious and very regular packages of assistance. Right now, you are right to say that what’s being delivered to Ukraine from the United States is being purchased as part of the Pearl program by European backers. It’s mostly about supplies, technical maintenance, things that help maintain the U.S.-made hardware in possession of Ukraine. Very important part of this American participation is, of course, the intelligence. And I must say that despite all the complexities or all the complications that Ukrainian administration has with the United States, this intelligence sharing is one of the most important things that Ukraine has from outside the country, because it’s about saving lives. It’s about giving early warnings about Russian missile attacks. This is what we get from Americans, essentially.
So in many ways, what you see, from the point of view of [President Volodymyr] Zelensky—the way he talks to Donald Trump, the way he tries to preserve a more or less stable relationship with the United States and with the Trump administration—it’s about intelligence. Because this is something that we would be extremely, extremely reluctant to lose. Because it’s about saving lives; it’s about air defense.
Frum: Can you offer any generalization about how Ukrainians today feel about their relationship with the United States? And what the United States has done for them as it has become less generous, but not yet zero generosity?
Ponomarenko: Well, I’m really trying to give you a very average attitude that’s been present in the Ukrainian public opinion. Of course, a lot of people are dissatisfied. A lot of people are stressed about this, because one of the things that we always thought of as unshakable, as static as the Earth itself, is the American support. Bipartisan support in both house chambers of the Congress, in the White House. We always thought that our interests are 100 percent complacent with America’s interests, and this is what we thought was unshakable and unmovable.
I am not going to lie to you that Donald Trump remains one of the least popular figures in Ukraine. Because of many reasons, mostly because of a lot of words that he said about Ukraine. And I cannot lie to you that this image also affects really badly on the image of the United States as a country, or on the United States as a people, in the eyes of Ukrainians. A lot of emotions are involved into this. We must understand that war, being at war, is a very emotional thing. It’s about a lot of strong words; a lot of strong thoughts about this.
But I would not say that a lot of people here still respect the United States, still consider America to be the leader of the free world, the cornerstone of this free world. And despite everything that has happened over the last couple of years, still consider America to be probably back anytime soon in terms of its presence and its posture and its leadership.
So I would say that, you know, of course, feelings are very complicated. Feelings are very emotional about Americans. I cannot say that I agree with a lot of those things that I hear from my fellow Ukrainians about Americans and American aid. I really try, and I think it’s extremely fair and just to separate what this administration, what politicians do, what they say about, about us, what they do. And also, I try to remind my fellow Ukrainians of how many Americans do support Ukraine up to this day. We have figures between 60 and 70 percent on both sides of the political spectrum. I cannot stress this enough that, after all these years, having so many people across the ocean being so eager in terms of supporting Ukraine—the country that they probably never heard about before this war—is something that is to be deeply appreciated and something that is very ours to have.
Frum: For those of us who, like you, believe in the role of the United States as the guarantor of the free world, and who believe that the phrase free world means something, this has been a shameful hour. And the patience, and maybe someday the understanding and even forgiveness of the Ukrainian people to this deviation from America’s role in the world, is felt here too, and should be felt.
Let me talk to you about your book. And again, the title is The Land of Tears and Hope. It is, as you say, it’s emotional. And it is not a classic history written with chapter one, chapter two, that we—you jump like a film director from scene to scene, and pass over a lot of years, and have a very arresting technique.
Frum: Ukraine is one of the world’s newest states. Or the present Ukrainian state is one of the world’s newest states, founded in 1991. You make us feel the antiquity of Ukrainian culture, language, sensibility. How do you manage this contrast between the newness of the government, the newness of the constitution, the newness of the state, and the antiquity of everything that the state is built on?
Ponomarenko: That’s a very interesting thing about modern Ukraine. By saying modern Ukraine, I mean the country that was built after the revolution of 2014, which is the newest phase of Ukrainian existence. Because Ukraine is very young in terms of being a political entity, especially when it comes to being very independently thinking, sensing itself as an independent nation-state, not someone’s backyard, not as also Russia. But in terms of feeling itself like an entity, a country, a nation with its own home. It’s a very new thing to Ukraine even compared to its just 35 years of its independence.
And at the same time, Ukrainians—and Ukrainian people in general as a people, as ethnicity—have a very long historical memory. And a lot of things that are dearest to us, that are part of our culture, of our everyday thinking about traditions, of the fairy tale that we tell to our children through the night, and many of those things date back to medieval times. Date back to the early modernity, like Ukrainian Cossacks. They date back to pre-Christian times, ancient Slavic tribes.
You know, when I was writing this book, it was a surprise even to me when I realized this: how many things we have from our everyday traditions, from our holiday celebrations, from our sayings that we get back from pre-Christian times, from thousands of years ago. A lot of things in our life go back to those times—when there was no Ukraine, neither as a nation, neither as a state, neither as in, even in a word in this. But they live with us.
Frum: I think this is something that Americans especially have a hard time understanding. Those Americans who want the United States to take a more pro-Russian point of view or who denigrate the Ukrainian cause—the vice president of the United States and the people around him—they will insist that this war is about NATO expansion, about verbal undertakings to Mikhail Gorbachev back when there was a Soviet Union. And then what, well, what does it say in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994?
But when you actually listen to actual Russians, they say, No, no, no; this is all about Yaroslav the Wise. And from a Russian point of view, this is not about NATO expansion, except when they’re talking in English to gullible Americans. For them, this war is about whether Ukraine exists—as a culture, as a polity, as a society—or whether you’re just sort of charming primitive, rural Russians who don’t understand that you need to belong to the greater entity of Mother Russia.
And you talk a lot about that in the book, about the distinctiveness of Ukraine. And maybe begin with this question: So, how many years separate the founding of the city of Kyiv from the founding of the city of Moscow?
Ponomarenko: Whoa. It’s even a complicated question to answer when the city of Kyiv, as we know it, was founded. Because there are lots of evidence, lots of arguments among scientists. But let’s try to set the beginnings of Kyiv as a continuous city around the fall of the Roman Empire’s time. And when it comes to Moscow, a lot of people barely realize that. They imagine Kyiv and Ukraine and what ended up being Ukraine, and then what ended up being Russia, as in the model that Moscow gave birth to Kyiv, gave birth to Ukraine. It’s an offshoot of great Russian tradition. But at the same time, the situation was just exactly vice versa.
There was ancient Kyiv—ancient great kingdom of those people who are ancestors. And those people, once upon a time, many years after their best time, after their blossoming time, they established what was a very distant fort in the forest that was named Moscow. So essentially, those cities, those lands that ended up being the historical core of Russia—we’re talking about the city of Vladimir, of Suzdal, the very core of Russia—they were settlers. They were settled from, say, historical Kyiv to those places, because people were seeking land, new territories. So, simple truth is that what ended up being Ukraine gave birth to what ended up being Russia—not vice versa.
But at the same time I do give this information, I do provide the reader with these thoughts about the past and the common roots of Eastern Slavic peoples, Russians, Ukrainian people, Russians. But at the same time, I do not stick to this very nationalistic and very radical and simplified view that Ukraine is the only country that has the roots in this long past, and no one else does. I think that Russians and Ukrainians have a common origin, and also Belorussians.
But Ukraine—what we have right now in Ukraine—has the biggest share of these roots belonging to it. So that’s my position about this. And why I wrote about this book is that in Ukraine of today, a very important part of life is getting back to these roots, appreciating this. Stopping to think about us, ourselves and this country as the backyard of Russia—but a country that has its roots back through to the Middle Ages, to ancient times, that was the cradle of Christianity in this region of human civilization. That has very ancient and very beautiful and in many ways unique historical wonders in this land. A huge part of Ukrainian life right now in this national awakening is getting back to its roots, its ancient roots.
Frum: In more recent times, and by that I mean the past few hundred years, Ukraine has been entangled in very grim, bloody, complex relations with not only with the Russian neighbors, but with Poles and with its Jewish minority. And these swirl together in stories that are sometimes very powerfully resonant, but sometimes very ugly and bloody. And you talk about that a lot: about the Ukrainian-Polish duality, the Ukrainian-Jewish duality, as well as the Ukrainian-Russian duality.
Ponomarenko: I do talk about this. And my central point in this regard is that Ukraine is a very rich country. Ukraine is a very beautiful country. And because of this, it has a very tragic history. And Timothy Snyder, historian that is insanely popular in Ukraine, he was just brutally right to include Ukraine as part of the so-called bloodlands. Because Ukraine, with all its riches, with all its geographical position, it has always been a target for many empires that wanted to possess Ukraine and its riches. And its geographical positions, its human resources, its brains.
So in many ways, the Ukrainian history—and I realized it myself as I was preparing for this book—I realized that we are essentially as a people, Ukrainian people have been moving for many centuries in this closed circle of trying to get independence and its own nationhood, and losing it again. And becoming a powerhouse for new empires and a donor of resources for new wars, new empires. Such as the Russian Empire was in many, many ways built on the conquest and possession of Ukrainian riches. Same goes about Stalin’s USSR. Hitler wanted Ukraine badly as part of his Lebensraum, because Ukraine is a very fertile land. It’s a very pleasant land to be on.
Ukraine is a part of human civilization where it’s really good to be a master in. You have a really rich empire if you have Ukraine. And this moving on this vicious circle of history, it always comes with insane blood, with insane national intra-ethnic feuds, violence, social tensions. Such as with Jewish population, with Polish population. So my very central point of this book eventually is that it’s a land of tears because of many, many wars; many, many tragedies. Some of the worst tragedies of human history happened in Ukrainian lands between parties that wanted to possess this land. But also a land of hope, because we hope that with this independent Ukraine and in this war in which Ukraine may again lose its freedom and its independence, there is hope that at least at this time—for the first time in many, many centuries—we could break through this vicious circle, and upheld this democratic, free, strong Ukraine that would never be a powerhouse and a donor for new empires and new wars.
Frum: I grew up in Canada, which was the center of a lot of diaspora Ukrainian intellectual activity. And I don’t want to make this too much of a generalization, but I would say, when I was young anyway, that diaspora Ukrainian intellectual activity tended very much to the reactionary side: ultra-nationalist and very defensive of Ukraine and all that it had done. And so there was a tendency to say, to think that the bloodshed between Ukrainians and Poles, it stretches back to the 1600s, but was very intense during the Second World War. The Ukrainians were innocent; the Poles were guilty. The crimes against the Jews, well, they didn’t happen, and if they happened, the Jews deserved them.
And what has been striking about Ukrainian culture since 1991, and especially since 2014, and very much in your book, is the ability to tell a story of national pride while integrating national shames, without letting those shames detract from the future. And understanding that Ukrainians and Poles had a very tangled history. Ukrainians and Jews have had a tangled history, a lot of suffering. And yet something new and modern and liberal can emerge from this by recognizing the full truth and all the components of the Ukrainian national identity.
Ponomarenko: In my book, I specifically stay away from radical views or idealizing the history of this land. I state it very clear, and I think it’s a very just thing to say that Ukraine is a very complicated place. It’s a very brutal place in history. It’s a very terrible place in terms of all the blood that was shed for this country, and in this country. It’s one of the crossroads of this world where many people wanted to be a master in.
So I specifically say that when it comes to, for instance, the killings of Jewish and pogroms. For instance, we have a national hero of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who led the greatest and the biggest rebellion of Ukrainian Cossacks since the 17th century, that almost led to the installment of the Ukrainian nationhood within the old Polish crown. And right now, especially in the last 100 years, Bohdan Khmelnytsky is idolized. It’s his own monuments. He’s on Ukrainian money. He’s the symbol of the founding fathers of the Ukrainian nationhood. But at the same time, one of the darkest pages of Ukrainian history is the way the Jewish population was treated during those uprisings, because the uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks against the Polish crown in the 17th century was the outburst of anger of extremely poor people. Of extremely oppressed people in terms of their religion, in terms of their money. It was an outburst of anger against the very system they were living in, with nobles being absolutely unpunishable with religious oppression. So it naturally fell upon Jews, as part of this system that was also unjust toward them in this regard.
Frum: Because the Polish nobles were far away, and the Jews were neighbors right next door.
Ponomarenko: Yeah; it was a very complicated social system. In which Jews, for instance, when it comes to 17th century—in that period, for instance—Jews were laid upon with duties like taxes, or they were the only ones that are allowed to with banking operations. And who loves people who you owe money, or who collect taxes, or who run bars, for instance. Who have monopoly on producing drinks, for instance.
So it was about a lot of hatred, about a lot of injustices. And try to explain to a very angry peasant—who has been robbed, who has been poor, extremely destitute, who has barely any education when it comes to basic things—when emotions go through, try to explain to these people, to this angry crowd ready to take up arms and commit massacres, that, for instance, Jews are not guilty of this; that they are surviving also on the last wheels.
So in general, Ukrainian history is full of such things. And in my book, I do not represent any radical. I do not provide any justifications. I explain how it happened, what happened. But I do not idealize. And I simply speak on behalf of very average, young Ukrainian that’s thinking about this country with no nationalism, with no radical points, with no attempts to idealize Ukraine and its history.
Ukraine is a complicated place. And what’s important also about this country, especially when it comes to the Ukraine of today, is that I see it with my own eyes from everyday life in my country. That we have overcome a lot of those things that drag us down from the past. We mentioned Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Despite all this past, despite such a bloody history of pogroms dating back to 20th century, what we have right now in Ukraine is that the chief rabbi of Ukraine is a hard advocate for Ukrainian victory, and he spends basically entire his life advocating support for Ukraine. His son, his adopted son, died fighting for Ukraine as a volunteer in the armed forces. When it comes to Islam, for instance, we have a chief mufti, former chief mufti of Ukraine—which is the top priest, or top clergyman, for Ukrainian Muslim community—he resigned from his position, and he’s a battlefield medic with the Ukrainian military.
We have Jewish presidents as of now.
Frum: Well, I sometimes think that it’s going to be fascinating to explain when my grandchildren or great-grandchildren visit Kyiv that the biggest statue in Kyiv is Khmelnytsky—who ranks along with, just behind Hitler as one of the greatest villains in Jewish history—and the second-biggest statue in Kyiv will be of President Zelensky.
Ponomarenko: I’m not sure about this, because Ukrainians tend to be highly critical towards the leader that they have as of the moment.
Frum: While he’s alive, sure.
Ponomarenko: Yeah; as of the moment, yeah. One of the things that really saved this country and continues moving forward is that we have a tendency of being extremely critical towards any sort of authority. So, Zelensky might, could have been like a war hero. He could be a president that was elected by a landslide. But it always happens that Ukrainians fall in love very quickly, and they get dissatisfied and extremely critical very quickly, even quicker than that.
But when it comes to—you have a very good point about monuments. I take a walk in downtown Kyiv, and I see a monument for Sholem Aleichem, the great Jewish writer. We have a museum for him in downtown Kyiv. We have—what’s the word for this? It’s the placard with the commemorative placard, commemorative plate. Toward, yeah—that marks the building where Golda Meir was born and raised in Kyiv. She’s a girl from Kyiv.
At the same time, we have a lot of Jewish places. There are Middle Eastern cuisine restaurants, and what’s important in this is that they often share the same street with Muslim places, with halal places for Muslims. One of the most important and popular Kyiv restaurants is, it’s called Musafir. It’s Crimean Tatar food. Like a Muslim place that gives you, essentially, gives you a vibe of a Muslim homecoming and Muslim cuisine. And I can give you a lot of examples of such things in a predominantly Slavic country with Christian churches and all those things.
But what I really appreciate about my country—and I really feel about this—is that I see that in this country, with its feeling of purpose that unites confessions, religions, many ethnicities. I really like this, about my Ukraine.
Frum: Well, let me ask you about another painful historical passage. And there’s been, especially in very recent weeks, an attempt to stoke Polish-Ukrainian animosities that date back to the events of the Second World War. Poland and Ukraine had claims on overlapping territories. The ebb and tide of wars sometimes favoring the Poles, sometimes favoring the Ukrainians. Led to terrible massacres. And Poland has been an indispensable ally of Ukraine in its struggle for freedom, but there have been attempts politically to sort of trigger, push those painful memories of the past in a way that would sever the Polish-Ukrainian relationship. How does that play in Ukrainian culture? How does that play in Ukrainian politics?
Ponomarenko: I too confidently can say that something that could be called “a Polish question” is absolutely absent in Ukrainian politics. Nobody talks about Poland. Nobody talks about the complicated Polish-Ukrainian history. Average Ukrainian—especially when it comes to those who are beside arguments on Twitter with Poles—average Ukrainian thinks about Poland as a neighboring country that has not wasted any time, just like we did, with its independence. That has gained enormous successes as an economy. Essentially the example of what could have happened to Ukraine if we haven’t wasted our time.
Frum: I mean, both of you—Poland in 1989 was almost as poor as Ukraine was in 1989.
Ponomarenko: Yeah, if not poorer. If not poorer, yes.
Frum: And Poland made a series of very bold free-market choices, ripped the bandage off, took a real—I was there in 1990. It was tough. But Poland has had this remarkable growth. The free-market policies have paid off, and Poland is now on its way to becoming a fully developed—if it’s not already a fully developed country, it’s minutes away from being a fully developed country.
Illia Ponomarenko: It’s very cool. It’s very impressive in this regard. And my entire point in my book, and in my entire presence on social media and everywhere, is that I’m trying to talk like an average, simple Ukrainian, that has no extreme political views of this. An average, simple Ukrainian says that Poland is a cool place. It’s very impressive that they have achieved this. Two million, if my memory doesn’t fail me, two million Ukrainians live in Poland and work in Poland. And we spend a lot of time using Polish airports, in general using Poland as a hub. Not only for, you know, the military supplies and everything, but also for substituting things that are not available to us because of the wartime.
Most of the people go—if we need airports, most of the people in Ukraine still go to Poland to cross the border and to get to the airports and travel for anything. So, it’s really sad to see that from the Polish side, we see that this complicated history between Ukrainians and Poles often gets used as a political tool within Poland.
I definitely can say that nobody talks about this in Ukraine, because we have far more pressing problems on our heads, to be honest. But I must say that it’s really sad, and it was pretty shocking to me to see that, beyond those fiery rhetorics and playing politics about this, we have pretty material things happening. Like continuing and shocking attacks on Ukrainians in Poland. That’s happening. They are popping up in the news, way too frequent, which is kind of shocking to disregard.
Frum: One thing that you very eloquently write about is something that Ukrainians, as you say, do feel strongly about, and that is the flag of the European Union. And you have this very poetic passage in the book where you describe as Ukraine was negotiating a kind of auxiliary membership in the European Union, just before the Maidan in 2014, that the European flags began to appear. And I think in most of Europe, the European flag is associated with regulations on fishing, food safety, air [control]—you know, what kind of coolant you can use in a refrigerator. A series of boring bureaucratic technicalities to make sure that goods and services can move across borders.
It isn’t any kind of inspirational idea anymore. It’s just a bunch of rules. But you describe very movingly how, for Ukrainians, it became an idea.
Ponomarenko: We have a pretty long history of this European Union flag of being a symbol. It dates back to 20, 25 years ago, when Ukrainians started massively thinking about going west, essentially turning away from Russia.
Essentially it’s about the emergence of my generation, of the people in their 20s and 30s. It is in our childhood that we started getting things like democracy from school. Human rights; the rule of law. We started understanding this as something very normal—something very good to aspire to.
So I’m not sure if I had this in my book. But there was, in early days of Euromaidan revolution, it was late 2013 in Mariupol. We had a little rally in support of signing this association agreement with the European Union, and I remember myself leading a small crowd of my friends, students, and also a couple of lecturers. And all holding this European flag and moving through Mariupol avenues.
It has always been a symbol of hope. It has always been a symbol of a generation that is pretty different from our parents. It has always been a symbol of us really wanting to be in this place where our biggest problem is regulations—you know, the temperature in our ACs, boring laws, these arguments over percentages. It’s just an idealized, very romantic dream of Ukraine overcoming a lot of things that drag us behind. And a romantic dream of Ukraine as a nation, as a state. Just getting closer to who we were. Very modern, very Westernized in our mindsets, in our tastes and everything. A generation that is really not different from any generation right now in the West.
But we had a state that was incompatible with our values, especially when it comes to hyper-corruption during the [Viktor] Yanukovych presidency. And this state, the mafia state, under the wing of Moscow, has become so incompatible with our values—with our aspirations for the future, with the way we think about our country, the way we want it to be—that it essentially led to a revolution. And the symbol was moving towards that place where people argue about ACs as their biggest problems, instead of us.
Frum: It’s now a dozen years since that revolution in the Maidan. Historians write about the past. I don’t know if you consider yourself an historian. I don’t know whether your next book will also be in history, but sometimes they’re tempted to make a comment about the future. Can you look out and say—if your future self could write one more chapter of the book, what would that chapter look like?
Ponomarenko: If I could, I would want to give an afterword in the history, in the book, about the way it came to be for Ukraine after the end. Because I end not on a strictly positive mode. My book’s ending is about hope. It brings a reader to a moment when the full-scale Russian invasion starts in 2022. And I’m not promising myself and the reader a victory. I’m not promising myself, and the victory a success. I’m not saying that Ukraine will win. I’m talking about hope, and essentially the last word in my book is hope. The hope that we will prevail—we will break through this vicious circle that we have been discussing right now.
And one of the images that I had in my head, and I expressed in my final words in this book. is this idea of Christmastime. Christmas Eve in Kyiv in the evening, in the frosty night, in the first Christmas after the war. Kyiv is one of the most beautiful places to celebrate Christmas in terms of the spirit, the spirit of Christmas here.
And I would want to write an afterword of how this first Christmas after the war in free, independent Ukraine would take place. Because it’s just like the European Union flag—it’s a dream. It’s something to aspire to. It’s something to hope for. And it would mean that our hope came true: of saving this country and giving it, handing it over to our children.
Christmas in postwar Kyiv, in independent Ukraine—that would be my afterword, I’d say. Yeah.
Frum: And Christmas is so symbolic for Ukrainians, because even the date on which you celebrate Christmas expresses your vision of the kind of future you want for your country. Whether that is December 25th, as would be celebrated to your west, or a different date, as would be celebrated to your east.
Ponomarenko: We officially switched to having two Christmases. Officially in Ukraine, there are two Christmases, so it serves both traditions. [December] 25th or January 7th. And, of course, it’s part of the de-Russification, the getting out of the Russian-style traditions. With—it goes along with the disgust with everything that’s represented by Russian church, Russian traditions, Russian way of life and everything. And I truly believed that this thing with Christmas on December 25th was more of a formal thing, or more about the youth, you know? Westernized youth; we want the same Christmas, just like on Home Alone day. It’s more about us being too westernized as distant from, you know, most of the population that sticks to the older traditions.
But at the same time, with every year of this war, I see it with every Christmas. That really, far more people that I expected do celebrate and switch to Christmas on December.
Frum: Whatever day it is, I wish you that future Christmas in peace and freedom. I hope it comes soon. Illia, thank you so much for joining me. The book is The Land of Tears and Hope. It will be published in November by Bloomsbury. As you said, it was written originally in English. It’s a very moving book. It is very cinematic, very dramatic. And it was both exciting and very touching to read, and I was grateful to have a chance to read an early edition of it. Illia Ponomarenko, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.
Ponomarenko: Thank you. Thank you very much for this.
Frum: Bye-bye.
[Music]
Thanks so much to Illia Ponomarenko for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is not a book I have read. It’s not a book I can read, because it’s a book that doesn’t exist yet, but that I want to read. Let me explain.
Our modern world has been shaped by slavery and the traffic in slaves. Illia makes the point, in his remarkable history of Ukraine, that Ukraine was a target of slaving through much of the past 500 years.
That point is made briefly in Illia’s book, because there’s not a lot that is known about that compared to the other great slave traffics that made the modern world.
Imagine a map of Western Eurasia. Draw a line from the Ural Mountains that separates European from Asian-Russia through the Middle East, putting Iran on our one side of the line and India and what’s now Pakistan on the other side of the line, around Africa and into the Western world, North America, South America. In that world, in the past 500 years, there have been four massive, horrifying slave traffics.
By far the best known is the one that took African slaves across the Atlantic to the New World. That slave traffic is very well documented. If you want to learn more about it, you can go to the website slavevoyages.org, and there you will find a database of every known slave ship that crossed the Atlantic over the past 500 years. About 36,000 ships’ voyages, in all, that moved about 12 million people. Twelve and a half million people got on the boats; about 10 and a half million people got off the boats. Of those people—the 10 and a half million who got off the boats in the New World—about 46 percent went to Brazil, the rest to elsewhere in Spanish America. About three and a half percent went to what became the United States. Their fates, their destinies, their horrors, their sufferings: Those are as well studied as any topic in modern history.
But there are three other slave traffics that are not nearly so well known. Maybe the runner-up in terms of well-knownness is the slave traffic that took people from Italy, southern France, southern Spain, as far away as England and even Iceland, into the western part of North Africa, to what’s now Algeria and Tunisia, the Barbary Coast. That also is reasonably well studied, because the languages of the people who were enslaved are well known to Western scholars. They spoke French; they spoke Spanish; they spoke Italian. And the slavers spoke Arabic, a language that is also quite well known to Western scholarship. And there’s an estimate that in the 200 years or 250 years from 1530 to 1780, about a million people were taken from France, Italy, Spain—as far away as England, Ireland, and Iceland—into western North Africa.
The two other traffics, however, are not nearly so well known. The traffic from Africa east into the Middle East. That’s not so well known. And the traffic from what is now Ukraine, Poland, and Russia into what is now the Middle East, into what was then the Ottoman Empire, is also very poorly studied. And that last is the book that I want to read about.
The estimate that scholars have—and it’s a very rough estimate—is that over the past 500 years, about 2 million people were taken from what is now Poland, Ukraine, Western Russia, into what is now the Middle East, into the Ottoman Empire. The records on this are very poor, and they are in languages that are not well understood in the West. They’re in the Ottoman archives. They’re in other small languages of Eastern Europe. And of course, Eastern Europe has been subject to all kinds of horrifying violence in recent times that destroyed archives, that destroyed archeological sites. So it’s kind of a mysterious topic.
And the topic has also been distorted because, for much of the past 100 years, Eastern European history was channeled through institutions dominated by the former Soviet Union, which propounded a heavy-handed Marxism that—for reasons of its own ideological internal necessity—didn’t take seriously the slave operations. Of what affected the foreign slave operations. They’re very interested in serfdom: the people who were held to the land inside Eastern Europe. But not so interested in the people who were removed from it.
But as Ukraine and Poland and these other countries find their own destiny, this is a topic I think we need to know better. Slavery is violence. Slavery is inflicted by people more capable of organized violence on people less capable of organized violence. People and nations. What does it do to a nation to be on the receiving end of organized violence, foreign-organized violence, century after century in the way that Eastern Europeans were? How does it change them? How does it shape their national sense of themselves? That’s a subject I’d like to know a lot more about, and there isn’t the literature to tell me about it. But as Ukraine and Poland and the others find their place in the modern world, I think it’s a story that we need to know more about, and that I’d like to read more about.
So if there’s anyone out there who has fluency or familiarity or even competence in Ottoman archives—Turkish language, Polish language, Ukrainian language, Russian language—here’s an assignment for you: Help us understand what it did to Eastern Europe to be on the receiving end of this organized violence for so many hundreds of years. And how that experience feeds, if it does feed, into the rising national consciousness of Eastern Europe today.
That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope you will share this program on whatever platforms are available to you. Remember, as always, the best way to support the work of this program, if you’re minded to do that, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. Please consider that. See you soon here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.