Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent

I want to answer the question that was asked before I answer the question everyone is asking, because the two have become confused in the past ten days and the confusion is itself a lesson. The question asked is what Volodymyr Zelensky’s election reveals about dissatisfaction with elites and what it means for Ukraine’s war with Russia. The question everyone is asking is what his telephone call with the American president means for the American president. Those are different questions, and the second has swallowed the first so completely that a man who won seventy-three percent of the vote in a country at war, and who last month brought home twenty-four sailors and a filmmaker from Russian prisons, is now known in the United States chiefly as a voice on a transcript. From the Caribbean, where small countries are accustomed to appearing in American politics only as the backdrop to someone else’s scandal, I recognise the pattern and I would ask readers to resist it for the length of this piece.

So, the election. A comedian who played a schoolteacher accidentally elected president on a television programme was elected president, by the largest margin in Ukraine’s history, carrying every region but one in a country whose politics had been defined for a generation by the split between its Russian-speaking east and its Ukrainian-speaking west. He did it without a party, without a platform beyond the promise to end the corruption that every previous president had promised to end, and against an incumbent who had, by most accounts, governed competently through five years of war and had been rewarded with a quarter of the vote. In July his new party, named after the television programme, won an outright majority in parliament, which no party had ever done. That is not a protest vote. It is a verdict, delivered twice, by a public that had concluded that the entire political class which had governed since 1991, the oligarchs and their parties and the reformers who kept being captured by them, had failed, and that a man whose only qualification was that he was not one of them was preferable to any of them. Small states know that verdict. We have delivered it ourselves, more than once, and we know what follows: the outsider discovers that the state he has inherited is staffed by the people he campaigned against, and he must either govern through them or build a new state, and neither can be done in a term.

What the verdict reveals about elites is the same thing it has revealed in every democracy that has delivered one in the past decade, from Italy to Brazil to the country whose president spoke to Mr. Zelensky on 25 July. Publics have concluded that the political class is a class, that it protects itself before it serves them, and that the ordinary remedies of alternation between parties no longer work because the parties are the same people. Ukraine’s version is extreme because Ukraine’s elite was extremely corrupt, with the oligarchs owning the television channels, the banks, and the parties simultaneously, and because the war made the stakes of that corruption lethal. But the structure is general, and the Americans now reading Mr. Zelensky’s name in connection with their own president’s conduct might notice that their own voters delivered a related verdict in 2016, for related reasons, and that the two outsiders are now bound together in a scandal that is, at bottom, about whether the outsider uses the state’s power for the state or for himself. That is the question Ukrainians asked of their oligarchs. It is now being asked in Washington, and the man asked to answer it in Kyiv is in the position every small-state leader dreads, which is to be the object of a large power’s domestic argument.

Now the war, which is the part of the question with the most at stake and the least attention. Zelensky campaigned on ending it, and he has moved faster than anyone expected. The prisoner exchange on 7 September was the first substantive agreement with Moscow in years. On 1 October he accepted the Steinmeier formula, a German proposal under which the occupied Donbas would hold local elections under Ukrainian law with international observers and receive special status if the elections are judged free, which is the sequence Russia has demanded and Poroshenko refused, and which brought thousands into the streets of Kyiv this week under banners reading no capitulation. A Normandy summit with Putin, Macron, and Merkel is being arranged. The outsider who promised to end the war is discovering that ending it requires a concession his own nationalists regard as surrender, that Moscow will take the concession and demand more, and that his seventy-three percent included a great many people who voted against the old elite without voting for peace at that price. His mandate is enormous and it is not a mandate for any particular settlement, which is the trouble with mandates delivered against something rather than for something.

And here the two questions converge, because the leverage a Ukrainian president brings to a negotiation with Russia is, to a considerable extent, American. The security assistance, the diplomatic backing, the sanctions on Moscow, and the assurance that Washington will not trade Ukraine away are what let Kyiv sit across from Putin as something other than a supplicant. That assistance was held for two months this summer while the American president, by his own account and the released memorandum, asked Mr. Zelensky for investigations touching his domestic rival. Whatever the Americans conclude about their president, the effect in Kyiv has been to teach the new Ukrainian leader that his principal patron’s support is conditional, personal, and entangled in a politics he cannot influence, and to teach Moscow the same thing. A small state learns that lesson once and does not forget it. It hedges. The Steinmeier concession this week may be many things, but one of them is a leader who has just discovered he cannot count on Washington deciding to settle with Moscow while he still has something to settle with.

So my assessment is that Zelensky’s election reveals a public that had reached the end of its patience with a political class it regarded as a cartel, and that delivered the most emphatic verdict any democracy has produced in this era of such verdicts; that his government is discovering, as outsider governments do, that the state must be run by someone and the someone is usually the old class under new management; and that the war may be nearer to a settlement than at any time since 2015, on terms his own voters may not accept, in part because his American patron has shown him that the patronage has a price. The Americans are asking what the call reveals about their president. From where I sit, it also reveals what small states have always known, which is that when a large power’s domestic quarrel reaches your capital, the quarrel is theirs and the consequences are yours. Ukraine did not elect a comedian to find that out. It is finding it out anyway.

Owatonna, Minnesota Correspondent

I was a music teacher before I was anything else, and I will say that the most remarkable fact about Volodymyr Zelensky is one that the past ten days of American coverage have made almost impossible to see, which is that a country at war with the second-largest military power on earth elected, by the widest margin in its history, a man whose qualification for the job was that he had pretended to do it on television. His series ran for three seasons. In it a history teacher is filmed by a student ranting about corruption, the video goes viral, the teacher is elected president, and he proceeds to govern honestly against a political class that has never seen honesty and does not know what to do with it. Ukrainians watched that and then, in April, voted for it, seventy-three percent of them, in every region but one, and in July they gave his party, named after the show, the first outright parliamentary majority in the country’s history. I have spent a good part of my life studying the ways audiences respond to a performance, and I have never seen an audience respond to one like that. The question of what it reveals about dissatisfaction with elites has a simple answer: the dissatisfaction was so complete that the voters preferred the fiction of a good president to any available fact.

Let me put that in the frame I think it belongs in, which is the wave of outsider victories across the democratic world in the past decade, because Zelensky is the purest specimen of the type. Italy elected a party founded by a comedian. Brazil elected a fringe congressman. France elected a man who had never run for anything. The United States elected a developer and television host. Each of those publics had concluded, for local reasons that turned out to be the same reason, that the people who had governed them were a class that served itself, that alternating between the class’s two parties changed nothing, and that an outsider’s inexperience was a feature because experience was what had failed. Ukraine’s version was the most extreme because Ukraine’s elite was the most extreme: a handful of oligarchs who owned the banks, the television channels, and the parties, and who had rotated through power since 1991 while the country stayed the poorest in Europe and then went to war. Zelensky was the man who had never been one of them. That he was made famous by a channel owned by one of them, Ihor Kolomoisky, whose bank was nationalized under the last government and who has returned from exile since the election with a lawsuit to get it back, is the detail that every outsider story eventually produces: the outsider arrives with a sponsor, and the sponsor expects to be paid.

Now the war, which is where the outsider’s promise meets the thing it cannot perform. Zelensky ran on ending it. He has moved with a speed that I think the professional diplomats did not expect: a prisoner exchange on September 7 that brought home the filmmaker Sentsov and the sailors seized in the Kerch Strait, the first real agreement with Moscow in years; and on October 1 the acceptance of the Steinmeier formula, which sequences local elections and special status in the occupied east in the order Russia has demanded, and which brought thousands into the streets of Kyiv this week calling it capitulation. A summit with Putin, Macron, and Merkel is being arranged. The investor in me notes that a seventy-three percent mandate is an asset that depreciates fast when it is spent on a concession, and that Zelensky is spending it in his first six months on the one thing his nationalist voters did not vote for. He may be right to. A country that has lost thirteen thousand people in five years may be readier for an imperfect peace than its parliament is. But the mandate was against the old elite, not for a settlement, and the outsider who confuses the two discovers, as outsiders do, that the public’s dissatisfaction was with the performers and not with the script.

I will address the American matter, because the question was posted this week and I would be dodging if I did not. The President asked Zelensky on July 25, by the memorandum the White House itself released, to look into matters touching a political rival, while security assistance of nearly four hundred million dollars was being held, and the House has opened an impeachment inquiry on the strength of a whistleblower’s complaint. I will say three things about it as a man who has watched a great deal of American political theater. First, the call was improper, in the plain sense that a president should not ask a foreign leader to investigate a domestic opponent, and the people defending it as perfect are defending it because it is their president and would be denouncing it if it were not. Second, the inquiry is political, in the equally plain sense that the opposition has been looking for an impeachable act since January 2017 and has now found one it can describe in a sentence, and the people prosecuting it would be dismissing it if the parties were reversed. Third, and this is the historian’s point, both of those things have been true of every impeachment in American history, and the question of whether the act meets the standard will be decided by the Senate’s arithmetic rather than by anyone’s conscience, as it was in 1868 and 1999. I do not expect removal. I expect a year of this, and I expect Zelensky’s name to be in American mouths for the whole of it, attached to a question that has nothing to do with him.

That is the cost to Ukraine, and it is the part of the American argument that should concern the people asking the question that was actually asked. The new Ukrainian president’s leverage against Moscow rests on the assurance that Washington stands behind Kyiv, and he has just learned, in public, that the assurance was held for two months in connection with a request he could not grant without becoming a participant in American politics, and that he is now a participant anyway, as the man on the other end of the call. Every outsider leader eventually discovers that the system he campaigned against is also the system that keeps the lights on. Zelensky has discovered something harder, which is that his patron’s system has its own outsider, and that the two of them are now bound in a story that neither controls. The investor would call that counterparty risk. The music teacher would call it two performers who wandered onto the same stage in the middle of each other’s plays.

So my assessment is that Zelensky’s election reveals a public that had given up on the possibility of an honest president and voted for the actor who played one, which is the most complete verdict on a political class I have seen a democracy deliver; that his government is already discovering the oligarch behind the curtain and the nationalists in the street; that the war is nearer a settlement than at any time since 2015, on terms his own voters may reject; and that the one thing he needed, a reliable American patron, has become the one thing he does not have, because the patron is in a fight of his own and the Ukrainian president is evidence in it. I would not buy Ukrainian bonds this month. I would not sell them either. I would wait to see whether the man who played a president on television can perform the one scene the show never wrote, which is the one where the outsider has to negotiate with Moscow while Washington argues about him. The show had three seasons. This is the fourth, and nobody has seen the script.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent

I am going to take the question in the order it was asked, which means I am going to spend most of this on Ukraine and the end of it on Washington, and I am going to be blunt about both, because I think the people who are only interested in the second part have stopped being able to see the first and the first is where the money is. Ukraine is a country of forty-two million people, the poorest in Europe, that has been run since independence by a handful of men who owned the banks, the gas companies, the television channels, and the parliament, and that has been at war with Russia for five years in a conflict that has killed thirteen thousand people and that the previous president, a chocolate magnate, could neither win nor end. In April the voters elected a comedian with seventy-three percent of the vote. In July they gave his party, which did not exist a year ago, a majority in parliament, which no party had ever had. I write insurance for people who run businesses, and I know what it looks like when a customer fires his whole management team at once. It means he has concluded that the problem is not any one of them. It is all of them. That is what Ukraine concluded, and it was right, and the question of what it reveals about dissatisfaction with elites is answered by the margin: a country does not vote seventy-three percent for a man with no record unless it has decided that any record is a disqualification.

Here is the thing about firing the whole management team that the customer always discovers afterward, and that Zelensky is discovering now. The new man has to run the company with the people who are left, and the people who are left are the old team’s deputies and the old team’s suppliers and, in Ukraine’s case, the old team’s bankers. The oligarch who owns the channel that made Zelensky famous, Ihor Kolomoisky, had his bank nationalized by the last government after a hole of several billion dollars was found in it, and he has come home since the election and is suing to get it back, and the new president has not said what he intends to do about it. The parliament Zelensky controls has lifted the immunity of its own members and passed a bill to open the farmland market, both of which are real reforms that the old class blocked for a decade. Whether it will touch the bank is the actual test, because the bank is where the new man’s sponsor and the new man’s promises collide, and every outsider I have ever watched take over a business has faced that test and most of them have failed it quietly.

Now the war, where I think the new man has done more in five months than the old one did in five years, and where I think he is about to find out why. The prisoner exchange on September 7 brought home the sailors Russia took in the Kerch Strait and a filmmaker Moscow had held for five years, and it was the first real deal with Putin since the ceasefire agreements of 2015. On October 1 Zelensky agreed to the Steinmeier formula, which sets the order of elections and special status in the occupied east the way Russia wants it, and the people who marched in Kyiv this week calling it capitulation are not wrong about what it is. It is a concession, made early, by a man who promised peace to a public that wanted it and who is now learning that the public also wanted it without giving anything up. A summit with Putin, Macron, and Merkel is being arranged. I will say what an underwriter says about a client who is settling a claim fast: he either knows something about his position that makes waiting worse, or he is being pushed. Zelensky may know that Ukraine cannot sustain the war indefinitely. He may also have learned this summer that the American backing he was counting on has conditions attached that he cannot meet, and that a man who cannot count on his patron settles while he still can.

Which brings me to Washington, and I will keep it short, because I think the coverage has it backward and because I have a long record in this forum of saying what I think about who pays. The President asked Zelensky, on a call whose memorandum the White House released itself, to look into the company that put the former vice president’s son on its board at fifty thousand dollars a month and into the circumstances of a prosecutor’s dismissal that the former vice president has bragged about on video. Those are legitimate questions. I would want them asked about any American official’s family, and the fact that the family in question is the Democratic frontrunner’s does not make them illegitimate; it makes them awkward. What is not legitimate, and what I will not pretend is, is holding four hundred million dollars in security assistance to a country at war while asking its new president for a favor, and the President’s defenders who say there was no connection have not explained why the money moved only after the complaint was filed. That is the whole of it. The ask was defensible. The leverage was not. And the House, which has wanted this President gone since the day he was sworn in, has now found the one thing it can describe in a sentence, and it will spend a year describing it, and the Senate will acquit, and the country will be exactly where it was, except that Ukraine will have learned that its patron’s word is a bargaining chip in somebody else’s game.

So who pays? The Ukrainians, who elected a new man to end a war and are watching him negotiate from a weaker position than he should have had, because the one ally that mattered spent the summer using his country’s aid as a lever in a domestic fight. The American taxpayer, who will fund a year of hearings that will change no votes in the Senate. The new president in Kyiv, whose name is now attached, in the United States, to an argument that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with whether he can govern. And the forty-two million people who fired their whole management team in April because they wanted a country that worked, and who are discovering that the new man’s most important supplier is also in the middle of a management fight, and that suppliers in that position do not deliver on schedule.

My assessment is that Zelensky’s election is the clearest verdict against a political class that any democracy has delivered in this decade, that his government is passing real reforms and avoiding the one that would cost his sponsor, that he is moving toward a settlement with Moscow faster than his own voters are ready for, and that his leverage in that settlement was spent this summer by a patron who should have known better. I hunt, and I know what it looks like when a young animal is pushed out of cover before it is ready. Zelensky is in the open. Putin can see him. And the man who was supposed to be covering him is arguing with Congress about a telephone call. I would not insure that position. I would also not pretend the questions on the call were out of bounds. Both of those are true, and the people who can only hold one of them are the reason this will take a year.

Long Island, New York Correspondent

On September 5, four weeks ago, Ukraine’s High Anti-Corruption Court heard its first case. I want to begin there because it is the fact about Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine that a paralegal notices and that nobody in the American argument has mentioned, and because it answers the question that was actually asked. The court was created under the previous government as a condition of international lending, after years in which the ordinary courts, staffed by judges appointed under the oligarchs, acquitted or stalled every prosecution that reached them. Its judges were selected with the participation of foreign experts, which is an extraordinary thing for a sovereign country to accept and which tells you how little Ukrainians trusted their own institutions to police their own elite. The court opened under Zelensky. His parliament has since stripped its own members of the immunity from prosecution that had made the legislature a refuge for men with something to hide, and has passed a bill to open the farmland market that the old parliament blocked for a decade because the old parliament’s members owned the land. Those are institutional facts, and they are the measure of what the election was about, and they will still be there when the American argument has moved on.

So let me answer the question. What the election reveals about dissatisfaction with elites is that Ukrainians had concluded that their political class could not be reformed by any member of it, and that the only way to replace it was to elect someone from outside it entirely, and that they were willing to accept a comedian with no record rather than any candidate with one. Seventy-three percent, every region but one, and then a parliamentary majority for a party that did not exist a year earlier. I spent ten years in a district attorney’s office and I know what a jury looks like when it has stopped listening to the defense. That was the Ukrainian electorate in April. The verdict was against the class, and the class included the incumbent, who had governed competently through a war and was dismissed with a quarter of the vote because competence within the old system was not what the voters were buying.

Now the war, briefly, because the legal lens has less to offer there. Zelensky secured a prisoner exchange on September 7, agreed on October 1 to the Steinmeier sequencing for elections and special status in the occupied east, and is preparing for a summit with Putin, Macron, and Merkel. The Kyiv street has called the sequencing capitulation. I would note only that the formula, whatever its merits, requires the elections to be held under Ukrainian law with international observation and judged free before the special status takes effect, which is a sequence with conditions, and that the argument in Kyiv is about whether Moscow will honor the conditions, which is an argument about enforcement, and enforcement in that part of the world depends on who is standing behind Kyiv. That brings me to the matter I have been avoiding.

I will take the American matter as a paralegal takes a file, which is by reading the documents and not the commentary. The document is a memorandum of a telephone conversation on July 25, released by the White House on September 25. It is not a transcript; it says so on its face, and the people on both sides calling it one are misreading their own exhibit. In it the President, after Zelensky mentions purchasing anti-tank weapons, says he would like a favor, and the favor is two investigations: one into a cybersecurity firm’s role in 2016 and one into the former vice president and his son and a dismissed prosecutor. Security assistance of roughly three hundred and ninety-one million dollars appropriated by Congress was held from July until September 11; the hold was lifted two days after Congress was notified that a whistleblower complaint existed. The complaint, released September 26, alleges that the hold and the request were connected and that White House lawyers moved the call record to a restricted system. The President says there was no connection and the call was perfect. Zelensky, standing beside him at the UN, said nobody pushed him, which is what a man says when the person who could push him is standing beside him.

Here is the legal frame, stated as neutrally as I can. Impeachment does not require a crime; the standard is high crimes and misdemeanors, which the framers understood to mean abuses of the office, and asking a foreign government to investigate a domestic political rival is, on its face, a use of the office for personal political advantage, whether or not any statute was violated and whether or not anything was explicitly conditioned. The question of a quid pro quo, which the commentary has fixated on, matters to the political case and not to the constitutional one; a president who asks for the favor without the leverage has still asked for the favor. Against that, the defense has two points that are not frivolous. The first is that the questions themselves, about a vice president’s son on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at a very large salary and about a prosecutor’s dismissal that the vice president has publicly claimed credit for, are questions a government could legitimately want answered, and that the illegitimacy lies in who was asking and why, not in the subject. The second is that the inquiry is being conducted by a House majority that has sought this president’s removal since before he took office and has not yet held a vote to authorize the proceeding, which is a procedural point that will matter more than its critics think when the Senate decides how seriously to take the result.

So my answer is that Zelensky’s election reveals a public that had stopped believing its own institutions could discipline its elite and chose an outsider to do it, and that the outsider has so far delivered more institutional reform in five months, an anti-corruption court sitting, immunity lifted, a land market opened, than his predecessors did in years, with the oligarch who sponsored him still waiting for his bank. The war is nearer a negotiated settlement than at any time since 2015, on a sequence that depends on enforcement, and enforcement depends on a patron whose reliability Zelensky has just had reason to doubt. And the American matter, read from the documents rather than the cable channels, is a request that should not have been made, with leverage that may or may not have been attached, the subject of an inquiry that is constitutionally serious and politically motivated at the same time, as every impeachment has been. The file will be litigated for a year. The anti-corruption court in Kyiv will go on hearing cases. I know which of those two I would rather be reading about, and I know which one I will be.

Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent

Two years ago a train of Pennsylvania coal left a port in Baltimore for Odessa, and the people in this valley who still follow coal noticed, because Ukraine had been buying its coal from the mines in the Donbas that Russia now controls and had decided it would rather buy from us than from the men who had taken its mines. I bring that up because it is the one way Ukraine has ever touched the Ohio Valley directly, and because it tells you something about the country that the past ten days of American argument have buried: Ukraine is an industrial country, with mines and mills and a working class that built the Soviet Union’s steel and has spent twenty-eight years watching a handful of men who got the mills for nothing in the 1990s run them into the ground while running the government. I know that story. It is the story of this valley with different names, and when a people in that position gets a chance to vote against everyone who has ever held power over them, I know what they do, because we did it in 2016, and so did they in April, and the question of what it reveals about dissatisfaction with elites has an answer that anyone from here could have given before the votes were counted.

It reveals that the people had stopped distinguishing among the members of the class and had decided to fire the class. Seventy-three percent for a comedian, every region but one, east and west, Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking, and then a parliamentary majority for his party, which had never existed, over the parties of the oligarchs, which had run the country since independence. The man had no program beyond a promise to end corruption and a television show in which he played a schoolteacher who ended corruption. That the voters chose the show over the record is not foolishness. It is what a people does when every record on offer belongs to someone who has already failed them, and when the one thing they are certain of is that the people in charge have been in charge long enough. I organized workers for years who voted for men they did not trust because the alternative was men they knew. Ukraine finally had an alternative it did not know, and took it.

Now the war, which is the part of this that an old labor man watches with the most sympathy and the least hope. Zelensky promised to end it, and he has moved faster than anyone thought he could: a prisoner exchange on September 7 that brought home twenty-four sailors and a filmmaker from Russian prisons, and on October 1 an agreement to the German formula that sequences elections and special status in the occupied east the way Moscow wants them sequenced. The people in Kyiv who marched this week with signs reading no capitulation are the people who sent their sons to the Donbas, and they are not wrong that the formula gives Putin the order of operations he asked for. The new man is doing what new men do when they promised an end to something, which is to find out that the end has a price and to try to pay it before the people who elected him realize what the price is. I have seen that in contract negotiations. The membership votes for the man who promises to end the strike, and then watches him sign the terms, and the terms are the terms the company offered before the strike, and the membership learns that the vote was for an end and not for a win. Zelensky may be about to teach Ukraine that lesson, and I do not know whether it is the right lesson, because thirteen thousand dead is a number that changes what a people is willing to call a win.

I will turn to Washington, because the question was posted this week and because I think the people in this valley have a view of it that the networks are not carrying. The President asked the Ukrainian president to look into the former vice president’s son, who was paid fifty thousand dollars a month by a Ukrainian gas company while his father ran Ukraine policy, and into the prosecutor whose dismissal the former vice president has bragged about on tape. The people here think those are fair questions, and they are right, and they have noticed that the people now most outraged by the asking spent three years asking a foreign-influence question about this president that turned out to have less in it than the one he asked. They have also noticed that four hundred million dollars in aid was held while the asking was done, and they are not fools, and they know what it looks like when a company holds a payment while it asks a supplier for a favor. Both of those things are true in this valley at the same time, and the national argument cannot hold both, and the inability is the thing that will make this take a year and change nothing.

Here is what I actually think about it. The questions were fair and holding the money while asking them was not, and a president who wanted the questions answered could have had the Justice Department ask them without touching a dime of a war-fighting country’s money or involving its new leader in our politics. The House has wanted this president gone since the day he was sworn in and has now found a thing it can describe in a sentence, and it will spend the next year describing it, and the Senate will not remove him, and the forty-two million Ukrainians who fired their management in April will spend that year as the backdrop of an American argument about whether their president was leaned on, which is a question they would rather not be famous for. I have been on the receiving end of a company’s politics before. When the home office is fighting, the plant does not get its parts.

So my assessment is that Zelensky’s election is the most complete verdict against a ruling class that I have seen a democracy deliver, from a people who have more in common with this valley than either knows; that he is moving toward a settlement with Moscow faster than his own voters are ready for, because an outsider who promised an end finds out quickly what an end costs; and that the American patron he needed to settle from strength spent the summer using his country as a lever in a fight that has nothing to do with him. The questions were fair. The hold was not. The people who can only say one of those sentences are the reason the argument will take a year, and the Ukrainians will pay for the year the way the plant pays when the home office fights, which is in parts that do not arrive. I walk the hills here and I think about the men in the Donbas mines that Russia took, who voted in April for a comedian because he was not the men who had sold them. I hope he is not. I have watched a lot of men who promised to be different find out what the office does to them. He has had five months. The office has had twenty-eight years.

Prescott Valley, Arizona Correspondent

The character Volodymyr Zelensky played for three seasons was a history teacher, and I want to begin there, because I taught for twenty years and I think the choice of profession for the fictional president tells you more about what Ukrainians were voting for than any analysis of the oligarchs. The teacher in the show is not clever or ambitious or connected. He is a man who knows the subject, who is filmed by a student losing his temper about the people who run the country, and who is elected because the country recognized the temper as its own. The appeal was not that he was a comedian. It was that he was ordinary, that he was the person at the front of the room who had been explaining for years how the system was supposed to work and had finally said out loud that it did not. Every teacher I know has had that moment. Ukraine elected it. Seventy-three percent, every region but one, and then a parliamentary majority for a party named after the show, over the parties of men who had owned the country since the lesson plans were written in Moscow.

So what does it reveal about dissatisfaction with elites? I would put it in the terms I used with teenagers who had decided a teacher was not worth listening to. A class does not stop listening because one lesson was bad. It stops when it concludes that the person at the front does not respect it, and once it has concluded that, nothing the person says will be heard, however correct. Ukraine’s political class had, by April, spent twenty-eight years demonstrating that it did not respect the people it governed: the oligarchs who bought the parliament, the reformers who were captured within a term, the president who ran a chocolate company and a war simultaneously and did both passably and was still dismissed with a quarter of the vote. The electorate stopped listening. The vote for Zelensky was the vote a class takes when it has decided that anyone who is not the teacher is preferable to the teacher, and the risk of that vote, which every substitute knows, is that the class has not yet decided what it wants to learn. It has only decided whom it will not learn from.

Now the war, and here the teacher’s analogy runs out, because the stakes are real and I will not pretend a classroom prepares anyone for them. Zelensky promised to end a conflict that has killed thirteen thousand people in five years, and he has moved with a speed that has surprised the people who expected a comedian to be slow: a prisoner exchange on September 7 that brought home the sailors from the Kerch Strait and a filmmaker who had been in a Russian prison for five years, and on October 1 an agreement to the Steinmeier formula, which sequences elections and special status in the occupied Donbas in the order Russia has demanded. The people who marched in Kyiv this week under signs reading no capitulation are the parents of the soldiers, and they are telling the new man what every class eventually tells the substitute who moves too fast, which is that they voted for him to be different, not to be quick. A summit with Putin and the Europeans is being arranged. The outsider is about to learn that the war was never a lesson he could teach his way out of, and that the mandate he carries was a vote against the last teacher rather than for his syllabus.

I will address Washington, because the question was posted in the week it was, and I will do it the way I would want a civics teacher to do it in a classroom full of children whose parents watch different channels. Here is what the documents say. On July 25 the President, in a call whose memorandum his own White House released, asked the Ukrainian president for a favor, and the favor was investigations touching a political rival’s son and a dismissed prosecutor. Nearly four hundred million dollars in aid that Congress had appropriated was held through the summer and released two days after Congress learned a whistleblower had complained. The House has opened an inquiry. The President says the call was perfect. Zelensky, standing next to him, said no one pushed him. Those are the facts a student could verify, and I would make them verify every one before I let them say what the facts mean.

Here is what I would say they mean, as a teacher who tries to be fair and knows that fairness is not the same as having no view. A president should not ask a foreign leader to investigate his domestic opponent, full stop, whatever the merits of the questions, because the office is not his and the opponent is a citizen. The questions themselves, about a vice president’s son paid a great deal of money by a Ukrainian company in a field he knew nothing about, are questions a reasonable person could want answered, and the people who say they are not are protecting their own side exactly as the people who say the call was perfect are protecting theirs. The House inquiry is constitutionally legitimate and politically motivated at the same time, as every impeachment has been, and it will end in the Senate with the arithmetic rather than the evidence deciding. And the one party to all of this who did nothing wrong and will pay the most is the man who played a history teacher on television, whose country’s aid became a lever and whose name is now, in the United States, a word in someone else’s argument.

So my assessment is that Zelensky’s election reveals a public that had stopped listening to its political class and elected the person who said what it was thinking, which is the oldest kind of mandate and the hardest to govern on; that he has delivered more in five months than the class delivered in a decade and is now spending his mandate on a settlement his voters did not vote for; and that the patron whose backing he needed to settle from strength spent the summer treating his country as a lesson in American politics. I would write on his report card what I wrote on a great many: strong start, unclear whether the class is still with him, and the material gets harder from here. The material is Putin, and the substitute is alone at the front of the room, and the principal is on the phone with the school board about something else entirely. I taught that class once. I did not enjoy it. I hope he is better at it than I was.

Gastonia, North Carolina Correspondent

In April I edited a wire story about a comedian winning the presidency of Ukraine, and I cut it to six inches and put it on page nine, because that is where a reader in Gaston County expected to find Ukraine, and nobody complained. This week I have edited more stories with the word Ukraine in them than in the previous twenty years of my career combined, and not one of them was about Ukraine. That is the first thing I want to say about the question, which asks what Zelensky’s election reveals and how it affects his country’s war, because the honest answer from a copy desk is that the American press has no idea, has not asked, and has spent ten days using the man’s name as a prop in a story about someone else. I am going to try to put him back on the page he earned, and then I am going to say what I think about the story that pushed him off it.

The story he earned is a good one and it is not complicated. A country at war, the poorest in Europe, governed since independence by men who owned its banks and its television stations and its parliament, elected a television comedian president with seventy-three percent of the vote, in every region but one, and then gave his party, which had not existed a year earlier, a majority in parliament, which no party had ever held. He had no program except the one his character had on television, which was to be honest in a government that had never been. In five months his parliament has lifted the immunity that made it a sanctuary for the indicted, opened a land market the oligarchs had blocked for a decade, and seated an anti-corruption court the old courts had been designed to prevent. He has brought home twenty-four sailors and a filmmaker from Russian prisons in the first real exchange with Moscow in years, and on October 1 he agreed to a German formula for elections and special status in the occupied east that has his own nationalists in the street calling it surrender. That is a six-month record that would be the lead story in any country not currently being used as evidence in an American argument. It reveals a public that fired its entire ruling class in one vote, and a new man who is moving faster toward a settlement than his voters are ready for, because an outsider who promised an end finds out quickly what an end costs.

Now the story that pushed him off the page, and I will do what a copy editor does, which is check the nouns. The document the whole country has been arguing about is called a transcript in nearly every headline I have edited this week. It is not one. It is a memorandum of a telephone conversation, assembled from notes by people who listened, and it says so in a box on the first page that almost nobody has read. The President, in it, asks the Ukrainian president for a favor after the Ukrainian president mentions buying missiles, and the favor is two investigations, one about 2016 and one about the former vice president and his son. The aid, roughly three hundred and ninety-one million dollars, was held for two months and released two days after Congress learned of a whistleblower’s complaint. The President calls the call perfect. The Speaker has opened an inquiry without a floor vote. Zelensky, beside the President at the UN, said no one pushed him. Those are the nouns, and I have spent ten days making sure they were spelled right, and I can tell you that both sides have been getting them wrong in ways that help their case.

Here is what I think, since I am all over the map and this is a map with two roads that both lead somewhere I do not want to go. The questions the President asked are questions a reader in Gaston County thinks are fair, and they are: a vice president’s son on a Ukrainian gas board at fifty thousand dollars a month is a story any newsroom would chase if the family’s name were different, and most newsrooms did not chase it when it mattered, and the readers noticed. The method is a method a reader in Gaston County also recognizes, which is the boss holding your check while he asks you for something, and the people defending it as perfect would be editorializing about it on the front page if the boss were from the other party. Both of those are true. The national press can only print one of them at a time, and the one it prints depends on the owner, and the readers have figured that out, which is why page nine is where they expect to find the truth and page one is where they expect to find the fight.

What does any of this do to the war? Here is the part the American coverage has entirely missed, and it is the part the question actually asked. Zelensky’s leverage against Putin is American backing, and he has just learned, in public, that the backing was held for two months while his patron asked him for something he could not deliver without becoming a participant in American politics, and that he is now a participant anyway, as the voice on the memorandum. A man in that position negotiates sooner rather than later, and the October 1 concession, whatever else it is, is the behavior of a leader who has decided not to count on Washington for the duration. The American argument about the call is going to run for a year. The Ukrainian settlement is going to be shaped in the next three months, by a man who now knows exactly how reliable his most important friend is, and no story I have edited this week has connected those two facts, because connecting them would require the writer to care about Ukraine, and the writer cares about Washington.

So my assessment is that Zelensky’s election reveals a public that delivered the most complete verdict against a political class any democracy has produced in this decade, that his first five months have been more productive than his predecessors’ decade, and that he is moving toward a settlement with Moscow from a position weakened by the very patron whose backing was supposed to strengthen it. The American argument is about a memorandum that everyone calls a transcript, a request that half the country thinks was fair and half thinks was impeachable, and a hold on the money that is the one fact neither side wants to dwell on because it complicates both stories. I will keep editing it. I will keep correcting the word transcript. And I will keep putting the actual Ukraine story on page nine, because that is where the readers expect it, and because the readers, as usual, are right about where the truth gets printed.

Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent

Three hundred and ninety-one million dollars is the number everyone has been arguing about for ten days, and I keep books, so I want to start by saying what it actually is before anyone decides what it means. It is the security assistance Congress appropriated for Ukraine for this fiscal year, about two hundred and fifty million through the Pentagon for training and equipment and about a hundred and forty through the State Department for weapons purchases, including the anti-tank missiles that the previous administration would not sell and this one did. It was appropriated by a Congress in which both parties voted for it. It was certified in May by the Pentagon as cleared for release, with a finding that Ukraine had met the anti-corruption conditions the law attached. It was held, by direction of the White House, from July until September 11, which was two days after Congress was told a whistleblower had filed a complaint, and the fiscal year it was appropriated for ended on September 30, which means that if the hold had run three more weeks, the money would have lapsed and gone back to the Treasury. I have kept books for organizations where a payment was held while the person holding it asked for something, and I know what the auditor calls that, and the auditor does not care what the person holding it says his reasons were. The auditor looks at the dates.

That said, the question asked about Ukraine and I want to answer it, because the Ukrainians have been talked about for ten days as if they were a line in someone else’s ledger and they are a country of forty-two million at war. In April they elected a comedian president with seventy-three percent of the vote, every region but one, and in July they gave his brand-new party the first parliamentary majority in their history. They did it because the men who had run the country since 1991 had treated it as their own ledger, moving the banks and the gas and the television stations among themselves while the country stayed the poorest in Europe and lost thirteen thousand people in a war the old president could not end. That is what the vote reveals about dissatisfaction with elites, and I will put it in bookkeeping terms: the public audited the whole class, found that every account was related-party, and fired the firm. In five months the new man has lifted parliamentary immunity, opened the land market, seated the anti-corruption court, and brought home twenty-four sailors and a filmmaker from Russian prisons. That is a better first five months than most new managements I have kept books for, and the one entry still open is the bank his sponsor wants back, and I would watch that entry, because it is the one that tells you whether the new management is new.

Now the war, from a woman with a son in the Guard, which is the only way I know how to look at it. Zelensky agreed on October 1 to the Steinmeier formula, which puts elections and special status in the occupied east in the order Moscow wants, and the people in the streets of Kyiv this week calling it capitulation are the families of the dead. A summit with Putin, Macron, and Merkel is being arranged. The new man is moving toward a settlement faster than his own voters are ready for, and I understand why: a country that has lost thirteen thousand people and whose principal patron just held its weapons money for two months while asking for a favor is a country whose leader has been shown, in the plainest way possible, how long he can count on his friends. He is settling while he still has something to settle with. I do not blame him. I would do the same if I were keeping his books.

So the American part, which I will take straight because that is what people here expect. The questions the President asked were questions I would want asked about any official’s family, and I will not pretend otherwise: a vice president’s son on a Ukrainian gas company’s board for fifty thousand dollars a month in a field he knew nothing about is a related-party transaction in any ledger on earth, and the people who spent two years investigating this president’s foreign entanglements have been strangely incurious about that one. But the way the questions were asked is the thing an auditor flags, and I will flag it. You do not hold a counterparty’s payment while you ask him for something, and if you do, you do not get to tell the auditor there was no connection, because the connection is in the dates, and the dates are the only thing the auditor trusts. The President says the call was perfect. The House says it is impeachable. I say the call was improper and the hold was worse and the inquiry is political and all three of those are true at once, and the Senate will acquit, and the country will have spent a year on it.

And here is who pays, which is the entry I always look for. The Ukrainian soldiers in the east, whose anti-tank missiles were on hold while the summer fighting went on. The new Ukrainian president, who has learned that his patron’s support is personal and conditional and who is now negotiating with Putin on the strength of that lesson. The American taxpayer, who will fund a year of hearings that end in an acquittal everyone can already count. And the people of Wyoming, whose sons and daughters in the Guard are the ones who get sent when a settlement in Eastern Europe fails because the country that was supposed to guarantee it was busy arguing with itself. That last one is the entry nobody in Washington puts on the page, and it is the one I would most like someone to read. So my assessment is that Zelensky’s election reveals a public that audited its ruling class and fired it, that his new management has posted a better first five months than anyone expected with one entry still open, that he is settling with Moscow early because his patron taught him this summer how long patronage lasts, and that the American argument about the call is going to run for a year and change nothing except what the Ukrainians think of us. The questions were fair. Holding the money was not. The inquiry is political. The money moved after the complaint. Those are the facts, and they do not fit on either side’s sign, and I keep books, so I will write them down anyway.