It was a remarkable moment in the war in Europe: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine gave a 90-minute-long Zoom interview on Sunday to four prominent journalists from Russia.
Hours later, the Kremlin responded. A government statement notified the Russian news media “of the necessity to refrain from publishing this interview”.
Journalists based outside Russia published it anyway. Those still inside Russia did not. The episode laid bare the extraordinary, and partly successful, efforts at censorship being undertaken in Russia by President Vladimir V. Putin’s government as his bloody invasion of Ukraine enters its second month, along with Zelensky’s attempts to circumvent that censorship and reach the public directly.
In the interview, Zelensky offered a graphic description of what he claimed was the Kremlin’s disregard for both Ukrainian and Russian lives, to the point, he said, that the Russian army was slow to pick up the bodies of its fallen soldiers.
“First they refused, then something else, then they proposed some sorts of bags to us,” Zelensky said, describing Ukraine’s efforts to hand over the bodies of Russian soldiers. “Listen, even when a dog or a cat dies, people don’t do this.”
Zelensky generally speaks Ukrainian in public but he is a native Russian speaker.