Zlensky's 'Sacrifice'

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Zolensky has used his own force of personality and moral force to shame the west into going much further then perhaps western leaders initially thought t they would in terms of confronting russia. He records these remarkable videos from his office, which is just this extraordinary document given the fact that we know that is out to capture or kill him. And he's really used these video blogs as a way of demonstrating his own bravery and perseverance. But what does that really mean for the war writ large? The whole reason we're in this situation at all is that zalensky is playing a game that none of us fully understood until it was properly revealed to us.

Joshua Yaffa is a correspondent for The New Yorker, the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, and has been reporting from Ukraine for the last several weeks. His most recent article is "What the Russian Invasion Has Done to Ukraine."

“I’m not at all a conflict reporter. I don't like it, though who would like being in these situations? But this is the story, right? If you cover this part of the world, if the war in 2014 felt like the tectonic plates of history were shifting, now they're just erupting, crashing. This is the asteroid-impact event for this part of the world with effects that will last similarly long going forward.”

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