The Betrayal of Volodymyr Zelensky
Last May, in the weeks leading up to his presidential inauguration, Volodymyr Zelensky learned that a man named Rudy Giuliani wanted to meet with him. The name was only distantly familiar. But the former mayor of New York City was the personal attorney of the president of the United States, and he apparently wanted to make the case that certain investigations deserved the full attention of the new Ukrainian administration. Zelensky understood that it might be hard to say no.
Zelensky had won his country’s highest office despite having been a politician for little more than four months. Even as he prepared to assume the presidency, he remained a professional comedian and a fixture on television shows, including League of Laughter. Unsure of whether he should agree to meet Giuliani, Zelensky gathered advisers in the headquarters of his entertainment company.
As a film actor and sitcom star, Zelensky thrived in the role of the everyman, often playing the average guy who wins over the beautiful woman seemingly beyond his reach. His former offices, on the top floor of a middle-class apartment building, match the modest characters he liked to portray. Air-conditioning units bulge from the facade; their exposed wires crawl up the cement edifice like ivy. The wooden walls of a cramped elevator have been treated like a Basquiat canvas by vandals. Only upon arriving at the top floor does one confront a brushed-steel door, a metal detector, and the trappings of wealth. Zelensky wasn’t just an entertainer; he was also arguably the nation’s most successful producer.
During the campaign, experts would regularly visit the office to provide him with tutorials on corruption and the other mind-bending problems he promised to confront. Zelensky did little to disguise his inexperience in these meetings, taking extensive notes on a pad of paper. When John Herbst, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, met with Zelensky, he was struck by his seriousness. “He’s a very intent listener,” Herbst told me. “With his body language, he gave the sense that he was paying careful attention.” Zelensky would ask questions in an unmistakable basso profundo, which scrapes along the lowest registers. (His company’s website described his voice as “sexy.”) Only rarely did Zelensky reveal his own opinions in these sessions.
Of the many subjects he struggled to understand over the months, Giuliani was among the most nettlesome. Since the late winter, the city’s elite had been aware of the mayor’s emissaries, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, whom he had dispatched to uncover incriminating material about Joe Biden and his son. The bumbling pair, who had won a meeting with the incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko, spoke a little too freely about their “secret mission.” But while Giuliani’s strip-club-going proxies could be dismissed, the arrival of President Trump’s lawyer himself was another matter.
Zelensky realized that he needed an American understanding of the situation confronting him, so he sought the advice of a former Obama-administration official named Amos Hochstein, who served on the board of supervisors for Ukraine’s state gas company. During a nearly three-hour session, Zelensky asked pointed questions; he found the mayor’s relationship with the president maddeningly unclear. Was Giuliani an official representative of the Trump administration or a freelance operator? Did Zelensky have a diplomatic obligation to meet with him? And why did Giuliani want to cause so much trouble for a presidency that hadn’t even begun?
Zelensky seemed to sense Giuliani’s capacity for troublemaking. Today, impeachment proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives are focused on a single question: Did the president of the United States attempt to extort the president of Ukraine?
Volodymyr Zelensky—slapstick practitioner, lovable protagonist of romantic comedies—always hoped his name would become ubiquitous. Representative Adam Schiff’s impeachment hearings made it so. For two weeks in November, American members of Congress talked about Zelensky with casual intimacy: They offered insights into his thinking; they expressed outrage on his behalf; and they bandied about his past statements, as if they could be sure of exactly what he’d meant.
If Zelensky was
