The Christmas wreaths are hanging from the windows of the Corinthia hotel in Whitehall. But there is nothing festive about the news from Ukraine. Scanning the newspaper as I wait for Dmytro Kuleba, I read that Russia has just hit the city of Dnipro with a ballistic missile.
Until a couple of months ago, Kuleba was Ukraine’s foreign minister. I first met him in Kyiv in 2023. There were sandbags and fortifications surrounding his ministry, but he was strikingly relaxed and funny — a living refutation of old clichés about a backward country run by post-Soviet apparatchiks.
In September, Kuleba, who had been foreign minister for four years, resigned from the government. He has not commented publicly on his departure. But the general assumption is that he was pushed out — as strains and tensions mount in the inner circle of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, under the pressure of a faltering war effort.
Kuleba, who is in London to give a lecture, appears five minutes late for our breakfast meeting at the Northall restaurant. He is a young-looking 43, slightly greying at the temples, and wearing a jacket over a polo shirt. He apologises for the delay and explains that he was arranging for the delivery of a parcel to his home in Kyiv. He used to have staff to look after all that. So, I ask, how is he finding life out of power?
He replies that on the day he left office he received a text message from an old friend. It said: “Dmytro, when you are part of the system that takes care of you and offers you social status, you begin to believe that life outside the system does not exist. But when you actually find yourself outside of the system, you realise that this is the only place where life exists.”
“That’s how I feel,” says Kuleba. “I went to the countryside, I spoke to the people. I drank homemade vodka with them, reconnected with real life.”
It is 10am in London — too early for vodka, homemade or otherwise. So we pause to study the breakfast menu. Our waitress approaches our corner table — a little nervously, I think. It turns out that she is from Ukraine and is called Daria.
“How long have you been in Britain?” I ask her. “Two years,” she replies. Like millions of other Ukrainians, she was forced to leave home when the war broke out. “Well, welcome to London,” I say. And then I add, slightly awkwardly: “I hope you can go back to Ukraine at some point, if you want to . . . ”
“I hope so,” she replies. “My father, right now, is in defence . . . ” The sentence tails off and Kuleba picks up the conversation, chatting to Daria in Ukrainian.
We switch to English to order. I am tempted by the full English breakfast. But, in deference to my arteries and my waistline, I go for the vegetarian breakfast: eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes and a vegetarian sausage. Kuleba orders the Maltese eggs on the grounds that he has no idea what they are and wants to find out. He adds a side order of black pudding, explaining, “I’m a big fan of what we call blood sausage in Ukraine . . . What is the name of that dish in Scotland?” Haggis, I suggest. “Yes, haggis. I love haggis . . . I love blood, I love all the kinds of meat mixed together with spices.” We both order coffees — espresso for him, filter coffee for me.
The order placed, we turn to the inevitable subject. I put it to Kuleba that there is now a widespread perception that Ukraine is losing the war. He agrees that things look bad. “Do we today have the means and tools to turn the tables and change the trajectory of how things are happening? No, we don’t. And if it continues like this, we will lose the war.”
I’m taken aback by his bluntness. There is a pause — before he slightly softens his verdict. “It’s true that things look bad on the battlefield. But things looked even worse in the first months of 2022. What I hate in my conversations with European and American experts — and ‘hate’ is a word I usually don’t use — is that everyone is asking what Ukraine is ready to do, what Ukraine is ready to accept. And I say, guys, first find the answer to the question [of] what Putin is ready to accept. Because this is the place where the war comes from.”
So I ask him to answer his own question. What is Putin ready to accept? “His goal is clear. He has to dismantle the Ukrainian state one way or another . . . His logic is, why should I take part of it if I can eventually take it all?”
Kuleba’s family background equipped him perfectly for the task of explaining his country’s struggle to the world. His father was a diplomat, his mother was a teacher of Ukrainian. As a young man, he rose swiftly through the ranks of the diplomatic service and became a deputy prime minister in 2019 and then the country’s foreign minister in March 2020, almost two years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The west’s caution about military aid to Ukraine has been a constant source of frustration for the Zelenskyy government. I ask why Kuleba thinks that Ukraine’s western allies have been so reluctant to supply some of the advanced weaponry that the country is asking for. “The question why the west is not doing something is usually the most difficult one,” he muses — before going on to supply an answer.
“We Ukrainians are lucky that Joe Biden was the president of the United States in 2022 because if it was someone else, things would have gone much worse for us. Joe Biden has a place for Ukraine in his heart. But his mind was shaped in the cold war logic . . . You do not talk about Nato membership for Ukraine with him. Do not talk about nukes to him. Because these are the things that trigger him.” Preoccupied by the dangers of a nuclear war — fears that Putin is still playing on — the Biden administration has slow-walked the provision of offensive weapons to Ukraine.
If Biden was a mixed blessing for Ukraine, what about Donald Trump? Is Kuleba anxious? “I’m not anxious at all, because it’s not something that I can change.”
The food has arrived. My vegetarian sausage is surprisingly delicious. True to his word, Kuleba swiftly polishes off the black pudding. But he makes slower progress with the Maltese eggs, which turn out to be scrambled and mixed in with tomato, garlic, onions and bell peppers.
As a diplomat of decades’ standing, Kuleba is used to looking carefully at what people say — and at the potential gap between words and action. “First, separate what Trump says and what people around him say,” he advises. “Musk, Trump’s son — they can say whatever they want. But if you look at what Trump has been saying, he is basically making only two points. First, I will fix it. And second, Zelenskyy is the greatest salesman in the world.”
Then he says something that surprises me: “Both Zelenskyy and Putin will have the same strategy. They see Trump as an opportunity.”
I am a bit puzzled. It is easy to see the opportunity for Putin. After all, Trump seems minded to cut off military aid to Ukraine. But what could be the upside for Zelenskyy?
I order a refill of coffee as Kuleba sketches out a scenario. Both the Russian and Ukrainian leaders are “communicating the readiness to talk because they do not want to be the one who turns down Trump. The first one who does that loses the game, right? If Trump gets, let’s say, pissed off with Putin . . . does something change in retaliation? Maybe [to] strengthen Ukraine?”
It is an appealing thought, but it seems like a long shot to me. Trump has often expressed his admiration for Putin and clearly sees him as a peer. He has been pretty cold towards Zelenskyy.
The question of whether a peace settlement can be achieved — and who is to blame for blocking the path to a deal — has been fiercely debated since the very beginning of the war. It is sometimes alleged that Russia and Ukraine were poised to make a deal just a few months after Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, but that Kyiv’s western allies persuaded Ukraine to turn the deal down.
Kuleba was intimately involved in the talks with the Russians, so I ask him about it. He sighs in exasperation. “There was no peace settlement to be had in 2022 . . . I’ve heard this argument everywhere, in Africa, in Asia and even in America. They say, ‘But you were close to peace, and the bloody west did not allow you to do it, because the west wants you to fight until the last Ukrainian.’”
This commonly held view is a complete inversion of reality, according to Kuleba. “Knowing our western partners, who I cherish and appreciate very much,” he smiles, “if there was the slightest chance in 2022 to end the war, they would have pushed down on our shoulders and said, do it.”
The Russian peace proposals were, in his view, completely unserious. “They even had one provision that all Ukrainian heavy armour had to be placed in warehouses and these warehouses should remain under the control of the Russian forces . . . So the plan was clear. Neutralise Ukraine, stay where they are in Ukraine, demilitarise Ukraine. And then make the final shot.”
I glance around the dining room, which is gradually filling up as the late breakfast crowd merges with the early lunch crowd. The Northall restaurant in the Corinthia is a familiar venue for me. It is close to 10 Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. Over the years, I’ve had meals and meetings here with diplomats, politicians and senior military officers. The threats from Russia and China are common topics of conversation. But from the comfortably padded seats of the Northall, the danger always seems fairly distant.
So I ask Kuleba if people in Britain or the EU should feel directly threatened by Russia. His reply is quiet but emphatic: “Since the large-scale invasion began, I started saying privately in conversations with my fellow foreign ministers that if you do not help us to defeat Russia in Ukraine, you will be next. And they were saying, Dmytro, we love you, but it’s a stretch. We are in Nato and Putin will not dare to attack Nato.”
But Kuleba thinks that Nato is no longer the cast-iron guarantee that it once was. “The trust of European allies in Nato is not based on Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. In reality it is based on one sentence — ‘the United States will defend every inch of the territory of our allies.’ And this sentence belongs to Biden. What if you have a president who says he’s not going to defend every inch of your territory? . . . If Trump says anything like that, the Nato shield is gone and Putin will feel free to do whatever he wants.”
Taking a sip of coffee and toying with my grilled tomato, I ask my guest to spell it out and he obliges: “Imagine that Putin dared to attack . . . I love Estonia and Lithuania, Latvia, they’re very good friends, but [the Russians] will occupy good parts of their territory within 24 hours . . . So let’s imagine that in months or so, Nato forces heroically expel the Russian army from the Baltic countries . . . After months of heavy fighting, these Baltic countries will look the way Bakhmut and the whole Donbas looks today. They will be gone. They will literally be razed to the ground. Is this the reality that the west is ready to accept?”
If Europeans are slow to understand the reality of the Russian threat, what about the rest of the world? One of Kuleba’s unenviable tasks as foreign minister was to travel around the “global south”, trying to make the case for his country.
I ask if he encountered a lot of open sympathy for Russia. He says that by and large, that was not the case. “They all understand what’s happening, and they were all on the side of Ukraine. But then every leader asks himself, ‘What is going to happen to me if I openly oppose Russia?’ African leaders were particularly concerned about that. Some of them literally were afraid that Russia will stage a coup or kill them if they openly support us . . . And then there was always another elephant in the room — China. Because Africa is Chinese territory with very few exceptions.”
How about the country in which we are sitting? Kuleba is forthright: “Forgive me, but British foreign policy before the Russian invasion was a mess. Britain was losing itself on all tracks, and I saw it happening in many, in many areas . . . I know you don’t like Boris Johnson a lot in this country, but I think he instinctively sensed that helping Ukraine is not only the right thing to do, but also the opportunity for Britain to remind everyone that it is a great country . . . The reason why Britain succeeded in this strategy is because it was not afraid to lead the conversation with the Americans.”
It’s getting closer to midday, our breakfast is finished and our coffee cups are empty. So I ask my guest to take a step back. The war has been a tragedy for Ukraine, but has it also established the country’s international identity? He nods in agreement: “If we didn’t have this war, we would have spent maybe 100 more years to make the world recognise us and make the west recognise us as part of it. But as a human being, I wish it never happened. I would have rather spent that 100 years moving like a tortoise to that goal.”
Every Ukrainian, from the waitress to the former foreign minister, carries with them the sadness of the war. I ask Kuleba about the friends he has lost: “I do have a couple of people whom I’ve known and whose numbers I have to find the strength to delete from my phone book,” he says quietly.
But, he adds, it is the younger generation who are worst affected. Kuleba is divorced and has two children. He says his 18-year-old son, who is a student, has “many, many friends who passed away. He’s extremely traumatised.”
The terrible toll that the war is taking on Ukraine is cited by many people in the west, who are pressing for a swift end to the conflict. But Kuleba believes they are deluded. “This war will continue as long as Putin believes that Ukraine has no right to exist. And everyone who believes otherwise is either a fool or on the Russian payroll.”
Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs commentator
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