‘The pressure had become too intense’: Journalist Simon Shuster on Trump’s peace deal, Yermak’s ouster, and Zelensky’s postwar future

It’s been less than two weeks since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s longtime chief of staff resigned, and the country is still reeling. The timing of Andriy Yermak’s ouster, prompted by a scandal involving an energy sector embezzlement scheme, couldn’t have been worse: it came just as Washington was pushing a new round of talks to end Russia’s full-scale invasion, and Yermak was Kyiv’s lead peace negotiator.

On the latest episode of The Naked Pravda, Meduza turned to journalist Simon Shuster to put this shake-up into context. Shuster, a Ukraine expert and staff writer at The Atlantic, enjoyed extensive access to Zelensky and his circle when writing his 2024 biography ‘The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky.’ The following Q&A, based on that interview, has been edited for length and clarity.

— Were you surprised by Andriy Yermak’s resignation on November 28? When you interviewed him the day before, did you get the sense he knew his time might be running out?

—I was surprised. Even after speaking to him last Thursday [November 27], I was surprised, because he is such an instrumental part of the administration. It was a little bit hard to imagine Zelensky governing without Yermak — they’ve been so inseparable. And Zelensky, in conversations with me and others, has been so insistent [in saying]: “You cannot have a claim against Yermak without also having that claim against me. He executes my orders.” Zelensky has tried in his public statements to leave very little space between himself and his chief of staff.

So that was the main reason why I was surprised that Zelensky would ask him to resign. But when I heard more about how it happened, it was clear enough that essentially the pressure had become too intense.

As for whether Yermak saw it coming, he certainly saw the investigators closing in over the previous weeks and even months. Dealing with these investigations and trying to head them off in various ways occupied a lot of his time this year. But I don’t think he knew that the investigators were about to show up at his house the following morning, the day after we spoke. I know that because he texted me when they arrived and he expressed surprise.

— Ukrainska Pravda wrote that Zelensky “will now have to rethink the role of the presidential office itself.” What do you think that might look like?

— The way that [Yermak] ran the presidential administration is similar in some ways to previous chiefs of staff, but it’s also unique because of the circumstances of the full-scale invasion. As Ukraine transitioned into martial law in February 2022 — which is perfectly appropriate when you have an existential threat to the country — power was concentrated in the executive branch, which means the President’s Office.

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Because of that legal transition, as the head of the President’s Office, Yermak gained an enormous amount of power. For example, many functions and duties that in peacetime would normally be handled by the Economy Ministry or Foreign Ministry were taken over by the President’s Office and, therefore, Yermak. Some officials — namely those in the various ministries whose authorities and duties the President’s Office took over — found it obnoxious or annoying over time: “Why are they doing the work that we’re perfectly qualified to do and should be doing?” So he was also accused for that reason of monopolizing power.

[Yermak’s] replacement will still be working under martial law, but I think as they transition to a new team, they will have to think very hard about whether they’ve used the powers given to the President’s Office under martial law appropriately, and whether they should delegate more authority to the ministries or to the Rada.

I think the answer in many cases will be yes, and Zelensky may be uncomfortable with that. He’s been comfortable with the amount of authority and power that he has under martial law, and has generally chafed at attempts to curtail that power or delegate it to other institutions. But I think that now the pressure will be on to reverse some of that centralization or monopolization of power. And I think when he’s choosing his next chief of staff, Zelensky will be aware of that and will choose someone who is a bit more of a team player and more willing to share power.

— Yermak was also Kyiv’s lead peace negotiator. How do you think this will affect the negotiations with Russia and the U.S.?

— It’s not a good look when your chief negotiator has to step aside because of a corruption investigation. That weakens Ukraine at the negotiating table. It opens up opportunities for Russian propaganda and informational warfare aimed at dismissing Ukraine as an illegitimate state ruled by corrupt elites and so on. The corruption investigation and Yermak’s ouster help along these narratives.

Generally, though, I think the problems with the negotiating process are deeper and more fundamental than Yermak or any one negotiator. So if he had remained, it wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem that Russia just does not want to negotiate or compromise on any of its demands. So it doesn’t matter who’s there at the table. Until Russia is pressured to the point of needing to accept some compromises, I don’t think it’s going to matter at all.

Now Rustem Umerov, head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, is leading that negotiating team. He’s very experienced, but also has the downside of being a little bit in the crosshairs of the anti-corruption investigators. So we could, in the coming days, weeks, and months, see another situation where the chief negotiator has to step aside. That would also be quite bad and embarrassing. But in any case, the larger point is that the problem with the peace process is not who is representing Ukraine at the table — it’s who is representing Russia and what freedom they have from their bosses in the Kremlin to make any kind of compromise. Putin wants to continue pushing on the battlefield, and that’s it.

— You wrote in The Atlantic last week that after Zelensky’s disastrous Oval Office meeting in February, the Ukrainians “adopted a new rule in their diplomacy: Never allow Trump to see Kyiv as an impediment to peace.” Have there been any changes to Ukraine’s actual red lines? Or are they just more willing to go to the table?

— It’s hard to tell sometimes. But what we see publicly, and what the Americans see when they sit down to negotiate with the Ukrainians, is that Ukraine’s answer is never no. It’s always, “Let’s talk about it. Let us explain to you why this is so impossible for us to accept.” This gets annoying for some of the American interlocutors, including Trump, who just get tired of hearing these lectures from the Ukrainians about why this or that part of Donbas is so critical and why all hope is not lost and that region shouldn’t be given over to Russia, for example.

But it’s hard to tell where the red lines are. I was very surprised on Thanksgiving morning, when Andriy Yermak, who was then still the chief negotiator, told me in an interview that Ukraine’s red line is: no land for peace. They will not trade away territory. I was very surprised because Ukraine generally had not taken such a categorical position. And what those red lines do is they limit the space for the negotiators to come up with a deal. In his public statements, Zelensky has not been that categorical.

Yermak resigned the day after talking to me, so it’s hard for me to say to what extent he was expressing Zelensky’s views. I believe he was, but Zelensky himself has not said so categorically, “We will not trade land for peace.” That’s a key point of the negotiating process, and he’s tried very hard to not draw very explicit red lines publicly, because the Trump administration could interpret that as an unwillingness on Ukraine’s part to engage constructively in the peace process. And the Ukrainians are very eager not to give the Americans that excuse to reduce or curtail assistance.

— Do the talks that began in November feel any different to you from the previous ones? Are the two sides actually inching closer to a deal, or are they just rehashing the same non-starters?

— I’m afraid it’s more the latter. It feels like deja vu. This time, we saw the 28 points written out on paper, which was different. And of course, that caused a whole lot of public debate and discussion about what the 28 points meant and how close they were to a demand for capitulation. It was a debate that we hadn’t seen before in the peace process, just because we’d never seen all of the positions spelled out so explicitly. My understanding from reading them was that this is what the Russians have been saying all along. And when Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff goes to the Kremlin to talk to Putin, he [consistently] comes back and says stuff like what’s in those 28 points. Fundamentally, it’s the same outrageous demands that would be unacceptable to the Ukrainians. So it was very clear that we would end up basically where we started.

The Americans have shown quite a lot of flexibility, I have to admit. Trump basically repeats the rhetoric or the positions of the last person he spoke to. We saw it again when the Ukrainians had their say in Geneva and then sat down with the Americans in Abu Dhabi. We ended up with a very different document, which Yermak described to me as totally in line with Ukrainian interests and not crossing any of Ukraine’s red lines, including on the question of territory or land for peace. So the pendulum of these talks swung back toward the Ukrainian position. Then Witkoff went to Moscow with this amended version and presented it to Putin, who basically said, “Hell no, get out of here.” So all of this is a cycle that we have tragically experienced before.

— If Kyiv is prepared to make compromises, such as freezing the war along the current lines, is there a plan for what to do if Russia is given de facto control of the occupied regions as part of a peace deal?

— I’ve talked to Zelensky about this, probably a few times now in various contexts. For one thing, he really hates to envision what that looks like, because it reminds him of the demilitarized zone along the 38th parallel that separates North and South Korea. “Demilitarized zone” is a misnomer, because that’s a highly militarized border patrolled by artillery, drones, and aviation, and there’s skirmishes. In the 70-plus years that border has existed on the Korean peninsula, hundreds of soldiers have been killed in various ceasefire violations.

Zelensky was disgusted to think about that as a possible vision for the future of this contact line or ceasefire line in Ukraine, almost emotionally or viscerally. He said that would be a dead zone and nothing would grow around it; people couldn’t live or start businesses there. There would always be ceasefire violations. The Russians would not hold to their agreements; they would shoot across the line and provoke the Ukrainians in various ways. He really hated to think about that, but it’s increasingly the vision we’re coming to.

— The role that Zelensky’s background in entertainment and acting played in the early days of the full-scale war is well-documented, but he’s clearly gone through a major transformation in the last three years. Is he still the “showman” that he was before? Or has he increasingly begun to rely on other skills?

— His transformation has been very striking and complete, to the point where it’s hard to recognize him as the same person that he was before he went into politics. He’s become much more stern, tough, harsh. He has this armor that he wears.

I see elements of the “showman” now and then. His skills as an orator and his ability to write and deliver speeches is still phenomenal and very impressive. He delivered a very powerful speech right after the 28-point peace proposal was leaked to the media and delivered to him. But I do think that he has lost some of his flexibility in shaping the narrative.

Earlier in his political career, he was very nimble in finding new arguments and twists in his rhetoric to grab people’s attention in new ways. And in following very closely his speeches and his general demeanor in more recent months, and even in the last couple of years, there’s been a kind of stagnation in the messaging. He and his team haven’t been able to find a very convincing new direction in the information space. They’ve been stuck repeating the same arguments over and over again, which become less convincing over time. Specifically, rather than trying to prepare the public for some of the realities that could emerge from a peace deal or ceasefire, they try to stick to vague rhetoric that relies on tropes and sloganeering. And that’s not really the Zelensky that I knew and observed as a politician before and in the early months of the full-scale war, when he was so effective and flexible and agile as a communicator.

— Based on your book, it seems that nobody who knew Zelensky before the war expected the transformation that he’s had in the last three years. What do you expect his postwar chapter to look like?

— I talked to Zelensky about this in detail during our last interview in March. I asked how he envisions his life after the presidency — and whether he has considered fighting as hard as he can to get the best [possible] conclusion to the war, the strongest security guarantees, signing it in his capacity as president, and then dropping the mic and saying: “I did the best I could. A new person has to come in now and implement this thing.”

I proposed that idea as a possible future that might help secure his legacy as a wartime leader, who has been very effective and very inspiring in many ways. He didn’t really reject it out of hand, but he didn’t really jump at the idea of leaving the stage once this period in Ukraine’s history is over.

What he did talk about is that once there’s a ceasefire stable enough to resemble a lasting peace, Ukraine will need a new kind of leader — not a wartime icon but an administrator to manage the somewhat more mundane tasks of reconstruction, getting the economy back on track, and so on. And it wasn’t clear to me whether he sees himself being able to transition into that role. I think he’s still entertaining the possibility that after the war, he will have to transform himself again as a postwar leader, which would require a metamorphosis not much less dramatic than the one we saw in February 2022. But he wouldn’t say — and I asked him repeatedly — whether he’s considering handing the reins over to someone else.

Interview by Sam Breazeale

Portrait of Simon Shuster: Richard Bord / Getty Images for Cannes Lions