The Current - Putin, Trump, Zelenskyy: What 3 personalities mean for peace in Ukraine

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Hopes for peace in Ukraine rest with three men: the country’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump. Journalists Simon Shuster and Luke Harding have covered this conflict and its characters in depth. They join Matt Galloway to share their insights into each leader’s personalities and motivations.

How did the internet go from this? You could actually find what you were looking for right away, bound to this. I feel like I'm in hell. Spoiler alert, it was not an accident. I'm Cory Doctorow, host of Who Broke the Internet from CBC's Understood. In this four-part series, I'm going to tell you

why the internet sucks now, whose fault it is, and my plan to fix it. Find Who Broke the Internet on whatever terrible app you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. So I'm going to begin by just adding that we just concluded the rare earth deal with Ukraine. That's been fully ratified and approved by their legislative branches. And so we appreciate that and I'll be speaking with the president in a little while, a little bit later. And we appreciate that. But the deal is all now signed up and ratified. And we have access to a massive amount of very very high quality rare earth."

The Ukrainian Parliament has indeed ratified that controversial minerals deal with the United States. It comes as a three-day ceasefire Russia promised has been breached repeatedly starting hours after that ceasefire began. After three years of grinding war, hopes for an end to the violence hinge in large part on three leaders Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and US President Donald Trump. I'm joined now by two journalists with deep insight into the personalities and motivations of these three leaders.

Simon Schuster is a senior correspondent at Time Magazine and for his book The Showman, he had extraordinary access to the President of Ukraine as Russia's invasion unfolded. Luke Harding is a senior international correspondent for The Guardian and the author of Invasion, the inside story of Russia's bloody war and Ukraine's fight for survival. Good morning to you both. Good morning. Simon, this deal, such as it is, came after that explosive meeting that Zelensky had with Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office. As you understand it, what's in the deal, but who benefits the most from this arrangement?

I think Ukraine has a lot to gain from this arrangement. Certainly if you compare it to the deal that was initially presented to President Zelensky in the middle of February by Secretary Scott Besant, the Secretary of Treasury, who initially came to Kiev and handed Zelensky a deal and basically urged him to sign it. That deal was very onerous. It was something that Zelensky could not accept. It essentially gave the US control of a great deal or most of Ukraine's natural resources in perpetuity and there was a lot of back and forth often very tense meetings even before the blow up in the Oval Office but the deal that they ended up

signing actually removed many of the most onerous terms and I think now it basically gives Trump a reason to continue US support. It gives him an argument to say to the American people, look, we have a deal with the Ukrainians now, we're investing in Ukraine, we're going to be profiting from this relationship, and we're not just pumping money into a black hole. That's a useful political argument for Trump. And hopefully it's enough to restore at least some, if not all of the US support that has been kind of waning or declining under Trump so far. Does it give Zelensky and Ukraine the security guarantees that he and that nation were looking for? No absolutely not and that was a key concession that

President Zelensky made over the course of these negotiations. He fought hard for security guarantees of some kind to be included in the deal, but the Americans dug in and refused to do that. And ultimately Zelensky said, well, you know, we'll take what we can get. The only kinds of security guarantees are essentially that, look, if there are American companies working on the ground to extract minerals or invest in other projects in Ukraine, then the American government and potentially military will be also on board to protect those companies and the country

where they're working. That's kind of a loose security guarantee, but it's the best Zelensky could get. Luke, I want to ask you about these mineral sites. You've been to one of them. But before that, I mean, Donald Trump talked about this deal giving him and the United States some degree of leverage over Russia in peace negotiations. And it would help compensate the United States for the aid that it had been providing. Does it get Trump that, do you think? I don't think so. I mean, I'm just back from Ukraine.

And what I can tell you is that the Russians are bombing and hitting Ukrainian towns and cities every night with drones, with ballistic missiles, killing families, killing kids, also launching attacks right across the front line, 1,000 kilometers long. Really, despite the negotiations we've seen, broken by the Trump administration over the past couple of months, the Russians haven't stopped and, you know, they've sort of played along. They've given the impression they're interested in peace, but the reality is that their strategy, I think, is to take as many concessions as they can from the White House and just carry on. I mean, their strategic

goals to subjugate Ukraine, to overrun Ukraine, to eventually take Kiev, something they tried and failed to do in 2022, are unchanged. And the interesting question for me is at what point does Trump wake up and realize he's being played? Now, the mineral steel, I mean, I agree with Simon. I mean, it's a kind of interesting first step. I mean, I don't think it's hugely significant, to be honest. I mean, you mentioned I went around a minerals mine. It was a sort of field actually with a lot of lithium under it, which in theory can be turned into car batteries. But the manager of this mine who was showing me around was saying, well, look, it's going to be five, eight, ten years before we can extract this stuff. It'll cost in the region of $300 billion.

And this is the thing is that for sure, I mean, it's good for America, it's good for Ukraine, but it's going to be a very long time before profits from these joint ventures are going to happen. And I think in Trump's head, you put a spade in the ground and you get gold out. And that's it. The reality is there's a huge amount of time and effort before anything is going to be produced. Simon, what's interesting about this is Donald Trump has talked about victory or peace or some degree of ending these hostilities with a clock ticking.

He said that he could end the war when he was campaigning to be president. He could end the war on day one of his presidency. Then the belief was he could end this within the first hundred days. Both of those timers have gone off, the war continues. But how was that ticking clock shaped negotiations, do you think? I think it's dramatically weakened the American negotiating position. One of Trump's envoys, General Keith Kellogg, described it as being on Trump time, by which he meant that the US president is in a hurry.

And if you're in a hurry heading into negotiations and your counterpart knows that, you're in a fundamentally weaker position because the other side can just wait you out. And if you're in a hurry to make a deal, that means you're more likely to grant concessions and step away from demands that you've made. And that is consistently what we've seen the Americans do Both in their talks with the Russians and in their talks with the Ukrainians Luke that you talked about the idea of Donald Trump being played. What does Trump time mean for Vladimir Putin? Well, I mean, I mean that that works perfectly well for Vladimir Putin. I mean he's quite happy to drag negotiations out

forever actually and to drag negotiations out forever, actually. And as I said, you know, take whatever concessions he can get. I mean, his view all along with this conflict, and let's remember that the war started in 2014 with the takeover and annexation of Crimea and this kind of covert invasion of the east of the country by Russian forces. He thinks that Russia can outlast the West, that the Western leaders are ephemeral, weak, divided. And you have to ask yourself, with Donald Trump, he occasionally threatens Vladimir Putin. But so far, all of the pressure we've seen since he came back as president has been on the Ukrainians. I mean, he's called Zelensky a dictator. He's boiled him out and humiliated him in the Oval Office.

He's cut off intelligence. The flow of American weapons to Ukraine has more or less stopped. I mean, I saw that on my way out via this airport in Poland, which used to be full of American soldiers, now completely empty and deserted. And so I think Putin wants to go long and he will just stall really forever. What is he willing to sacrifice if he's going to go long? What is not just acceptable victory, but what is he willing to accept in terms of loss, do you think, Luke? Well, I mean, what we know is he's really willing to accept huge Russian casualties. I mean, more Russians have died so far than

Americans in Vietnam, or indeed Soviet soldiers in the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Putin's okay with that. I mean, what he's not prepared to sacrifice, there is sort of maximalist war goals, which means getting rid of Zelensky, getting rid of Zelensky's pro-Western government. And the territory he claims is already annexed, which four regions plus Crimea, including areas he doesn't control. So his demands for land are as big as ever. And I think he thinks actually, he's got America in quite a good place. I mean, will Trump ever criticize Vladimir Putin and do something that hurts

Russia economically or politically? I don't think so. Is that about, I mean, I'm not asking you to put him on the couch, but is that about ego? Is it about legacy? What is that about? Well, I wrote a whole book about this. It's a New York Times bestseller called Collusion, how Russia helps Donald Trump win the White House in 2016. And really, I think there are three things in play. One is ideological, there's quite an overlap between conservatives on the right or far right of the Republican Party and who admire Russia, see it as this white, Orthodox, Christian, anti-gay, anti-feminist civilization. There's also

the strongman theory that Trump likes fellow strongmen. He wants to be Putin. He likes the freedom that autocrats have to get what they want, to make the law what they say it is. And then, of course, the third thing, the most contested thing is Trump's whole kind of backstory with Russia going back to the 1980s when the KGB had him over to Moscow to look at real estate deals. And what we don't know is we don't know what Putin is saying privately to Trump. And in terms of whether Trump is a Russian asset or not, I mean, probably that question is unanswerable, but certainly the way he's behaved, his behavior over the last few weeks

and months has been the behavior of a Russian asset. Simon, you have spent more time with Zelensky than many, many journalists. How do you think he was changed by that very public eruption in the Oval Office? I spoke with a former Trump advisor who, she said these sorts of things happen behind the scenes all the time, but she couldn't quite believe that it had happened in front of the cameras.

How do you think that impacted and affected him? I don't think it changed him dramatically. I mean, his behavior- Really? Being publicly humiliated didn't change him dramatically? I think he was very clear-eyed about Trump and JD Vance and who he was going in there to talk to. You know, I talked to President Zelensky three weeks after the Oval Office blow-up. He said he had no regrets about it and honestly when I saw the footage of that meeting in the Oval Office, to me

it looked like a classic Zelensky, the Zelensky I know and studied for my book. He held his head high and as he put it to me in our interview in March, about three weeks after that incident, he said he was defending the dignity of Ukraine. And if you look at the poll numbers in Ukraine in support of Zelensky, they shot up by more than 10 percentage points after that meeting. So if Vance and Trump wanted to help Zelensky's popularity, they certainly did a good job. So I don't think it changed his position dramatically, but it made him redouble his efforts to win Trump over.

And the meeting we saw in the Vatican, I think, was a real turning point in that, where Zelensky finally got his chance to have the meeting with Trump that he wanted, one-on-one, to look him in the eye, without JD Vance there to interrupt, without the media there to throw questions at them, without all these distractions. So I think he has pursued pretty consistently his strategy in trying to win Trump over despite Trump's consistent sympathies toward Putin and toward the Russians. Zelensky still believes that over time he can convince Trump that Putin cannot be trusted and that Ukraine is the real partner

to the United States, not Russia. How much do you think he's willing to concede as the war goes on? I mean, are there red lines that he will not cross to end this conflict? There are definitely red lines. One of them is acknowledging legally that Russia will forever possess the lands that

it has occupied, any of the lands that it has occupied in Ukraine, including Crimea. Zelensky will never and can never do that politically. But he has shown an incredible willingness to grant concessions, to back away from demands that he was making earlier in the peace process, including, as we mentioned a little earlier, the question of security guarantees. You know, he accepted that the Americans are just not going to go there, and he backed away from those demands

and mostly stopped talking about security guarantees in this peace process. So he's given a lot of ground. I think he's also demonstrated that, look, the Russians are not giving any ground. Indeed, the Russians, even throughout this peace process have continued these horrific bombings against civilians killing women and children and honestly making a fool of Donald Trump because Donald Trump is saying he wants to pursue a peace

process he's working with the Russians and at the same time the Russians are continuing these horrific bombing attacks. He has been at the center of this story I mean right from the very, recording that video where everybody thought he was going to leave and we are here standing on the street corner, to now. What impact do you think his presence is having on how this might end, Simon? I mean, I think his stubbornness is one of the qualities that certainly defines his character and dates back to well before he was president, back to his days as a comedian and a producer and

a filmmaker. He doesn't do well with being pressured. He definitely gets his back up and pushes back when pressured. So I think that has allowed Ukraine to resist diplomatic pressure from the West, from Trump, and also to resist the invasion from the Russians. I think he's been very instrumental in that. The final judgment of history is yet to be made, but I think already a lot of Ukrainians are quite proud of the job he's done in representing their country abroad and being a wartime leader

and diplomat. Hey there, I'm David Common. country abroad and being a wartime leader and diplomat. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you got to know and the conversations your friends will be talking about.

Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Luke, what did you glean about how the Ukrainian people see Zelensky? When you were there on the front lines in Kharkiv, you were in Kiev when it was being under bombardment as well. What did you learn about how people there When you were there on the front lines in Kharkiv, you were in Kiev when it was being

under bombardment as well. What did you learn about how people there, and those on the front lines in particular, see Zelensky this far into the war? Well, yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, listening to Simon, I was in Kiev when the Oval Office kind of blowout happened, and it was definitely true that the people who didn't vote for him back in 2019 when he won a landslide as a comedian turned president, they were saying, look, he's our guy. I mean, one person said to me, he's got balls. And I think people admire his courage, his steeliness, his resolve, his stubbornness, as Simon put it. And there are questions as to how long he will stay, about elections if there's a peace deal, about other political candidates.

But for now, I think most Ukrainians see him as indispensable. And also, I mean, he released this extraordinary video to Mark VE Day, where he's walking down the street, speaking into his iPhone, waving at people as he goes along, basically saying that Ukraine's sacrifice is an important thing and sort of criticising the kind of Russian narrative of the Second World War. And he still has it. He still has that common touch. He still has a sprinkling of stardust. And he gives the impression always that he's not above everyone else, that he's the same as everyone else, sharing the same burdens as everyone else, a kind of citizen rather than a king. And I think that's incredibly important and really explains why he's still, not with everybody, but with most people, is still pretty popular. Do you think, just finally, we're talking about three men who are instrumental in trying

to figure out what happens in how Ukraine and how the world gets out of this situation, do you think it's possible, and I'll start with you Luke, to get to a place where there's not just a ceasefire that is violated almost immediately, but a lasting peace. Is it possible to get there with these three leaders still in charge, given everything that we've talked about and the role of ego and legacy that's playing into all of this? I mean, the answer is no. I mean, I think Zinensky would like a deal. I think ultimately he would probably accept the current frontline de facto with peacekeepers from Britain, France and so on patrolling a sort of 30 kilometer DMZ like in South and North Korea, he would accept that. And Trump, I think, doesn't really care about the detail. The problem is Putin. This is essentially his war. And my feeling is that so long as Putin is there, so long as he's alive and

in the Kremlin, then this war will continue. And I fear that we have, it's certainly not going to finish this year, but I really think we could have a very long period of conflict until finally, a bit like Brezhnev or Stalin, Putin exits the Kremlin horizontally, and then perhaps there will be a pause. But when that happens, if that happens, we just don't know. Simon? Yeah, I totally agree with Luke on this. I think for Zelensky, when I talked to him about six weeks ago, he sees his legacy as the peace deal, as achieving a peace deal that the Ukrainian people can live with, that is not amount to capitulation, and that secures their country

from another invasion, from a repeat of what Russia has done. That's a very difficult task, but he's very single-mindedly focused on this now and sees it as the legacy he wants to leave as a capstone to his presidency. And, you know, Putin is the exact opposite. He sees his legacy building as one of imperial conquest and militarism. So with those two personalities, you know, I don't see how they're reconcilable while Putin is in power. Trump does, however, have a lot of influence. And I think also Zelensky pointed this out, that Putin is scared of Trump. And if Trump really uses the influence he has, the power he has of the US government, he can force Putin into a corner economically and diplomatically.

But we have yet to see any sign that Trump is really willing to do that. That's the big question here. It's really interesting to hear your insights on this. Again, people talk about the possibility of a ceasefire immediately violated, wondering what that would lead to and whether peace is on the horizon. Your insights into these three men at the center of the story are really valuable. Thank you all for being here. Thank you. Thank you.

Simon Schuster is a senior correspondent at Time magazine for his book, The Showman. He had great access to the president of Ukraine as the invasion by Russia unfolded. Luke Harding is a senior international correspondent for The Guardian and the author of Invasion, the inside story of Russia's bloody war and Ukraine's fight for survival.