Dr. Surzhko-Harned asked Former Ambassador Yovanovitch several questions about the nature of the war in Ukraine. Dr. Surzhko-Harned started by asking Ambassador Yovanovitch why she thought that nobody believed U.S. intelligence that Russia would launch a large-scale military escalation in Ukraine. Yovanovitch said that it was likely because “it was hard to take in and accept it. I, too, was reluctant to accept it. But I was in the Washington area with friends who were working this issue, and while they were very proper, they didn’t share anything classified with me, it was clear that they believed what was being put out publicly, and they believed the intelligence.” Dr. Surzhko-Harned then turned to the current conflict in Ukraine, and asked the Former Ambassador what her sense of President Vlodomyr Zelensky was; she said that “This war has made him into one of the greatest wartime leaders that the world has seen, and certainly the greatest leader that we are seeing contemporaneously. He manages
using his communication skills, which are off the charts, and his courage- just his raw courage. He is not only communicating, he is leading by demonstration. He stayed in Kyiv as there were hundreds of assassination
groups looking for him, and he knew that, and he stayed and his family stayed.” She said that this was all the more
incredible because, as she stated in an interview with the Beacon before the event, on February 23, Zelensky was a “Failing president, or at least a struggling president. His mandate, his popularity rating were down to the low 30s, he was worried about his reelection, there was incredible backbiting, vicious politics, he had arrested his predecessor, so he was struggling. And on February 24, he turned out to be the Winston Churchill of our time.” In a continuation of her response to Dr. Surzhko-Harned’s question, she further said that she would “add one little caveat to this, and it is
that he is a wartime president. What does that mean for peacetime, and once there is an end to the fighting, once there is a negotiated settlement, Ukraine is still going to be in ruins. So there are going to be billions of dollars that flow in one way or the other to rebuild. How is this going to be managed in a way that is transparent, and not according to the old ways? Because the Ukrainian people are not fighting right now to go back to the old ways. They are fighting to rebuild the country that is a new country that is governed by Western values.”