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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. David Remnick kicks us off today. You know David Remnick as editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour here on WNYC. What you may not know is that way back in 1988, he started a four-year tenure as a Washington Post Moscow correspondent, an experience that formed the basis of his 1993 book on the former Soviet Union, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire.

In 1994, Lenin's Tomb received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk award for excellence in journalism, The New Yorker reminds us. While David doesn't usually write that often for the magazine while he's editing the magazine, he picks his spots and with his Russia expertise, he's been writing a lot in the last few weeks about Russia and Ukraine. Let's get David Remnick's take.

David, it's always great when you come on the live radio side of the station. Welcome back to the show.

David Remnick: It's great to talk to you.

Brian Lehrer: First, I'm curious to hear your take on the situation on the ground from New Yorker correspondents or other media reports because I'm starting to feel maybe a disconnect between almost the entire world rooting for the Ukrainians against the monstrous invasion and the Ukrainian army, plus some Ukrainian civilians taking up arms, over performing and holding off the tanks outside of Kyiv so far. We now have reports of 2,000 Ukrainians or more killed already and a million refugees and that 40-mile long column of Russian tanks on the way to the capital. What is Russia actually perpetrating here, as far as you can tell?

David Remnick: Russia is perpetrating a full-scale invasion of a sovereign state and with the erratic but full-scale power of its military. I think in the initial days of the invasion, Ukraine, through the force of its army, through the inspiring personality of its president and Ukrainian people, as well as assistance from abroad, but not fighting assistance from abroad, were able to, if not hold off, but to slow down the Russian incursion.

We will never know how many-- we're not going to get real history and absolutely concrete facts about things like casualties until some time passes, and we have to realize that we're also in an information war of deception. Clearly, this invasion did not go as Putin had hoped or planned, but its firepower is such that it's wreaking real destruction on Ukrainian cities. Kherson has fallen. Kharkiv is under terrible bombardment. Kyiv is surrounded and it looks terrible.

Brian Lehrer: Some of the apologists for Putin try to justify this invasion by saying Ukraine isn't really a democracy as if that even makes an invasion of another country acceptable, even if it's true, but you just refer to the heroic president. You note in one of your articles that President Zelenskyy was elected with 70% of the vote. Does the evidence you see indicate that the election was real or that Zelenskyy is actually that popular a leader?

David Remnick: Yes, yes. That election was not disputed heavily by anything other than the worst kind of Russian propaganda. There's a history to this, needless to say, and some of the facts are these. Ukrainians in 1991 before the collapse of the Soviet Union had a referendum on independence and they voted in excess of 90% in favor of independence. That includes voters who are Russian language speakers, who live in the east, who live in Crimea, not as in great percentage, but 58%, 60% as opposed to western Ukraine which was close to unanimous.

Ukrainians voted for independence in 1991 and that was the straw that broke the camel's back really and ended the Soviet Union. That is an essential piece of history. Ukrainians don't want to be part of Russia. I don't know what Vladimir Putin's version of romance and embrace is, but he seems to be intent on pounding Ukraine into submission so that his brother country will somehow love him more and be in his sphere of influence. I'm only speaking sarcastic. This is an act of terrible brutality that's being exacted.

Brian Lehrer: David Remnick with us, New Yorker editor and New Yorker Radio Hour host and former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. The world has been learning-- staying on Zelenskyy that he's Jewish after Putin's preposterous statement that he's invading to denazify Ukraine.

My own grandmother came to this country from one of the cities that Putin has bombed already, a city now called Ivano-Frankivsk. Back when she was living there, it was called something else, but that was between the world wars when Jews were leaving that area as fast as they could because there had been pogroms and the Nazis were poised to be the next antisemitic oppressors. I was surprised to see there's a Jewish president of Ukraine. Do you know if there's much of a Jewish population anymore?

David Remnick: Well, the Jewish population was vastly diminished because the Nazis occupied much of Ukraine during the Second World War, including the city in south-central Ukraine, where Volodymyr Zelenskyy is from. He's from a steel town in the southeast of Russia and thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazis in that town.

Look, is there antisemitism existing in Ukraine? Yes. Is there in Russia? Yes. Is there in the United States? Yes. It's a point of absolute falsehood and propaganda that is being perpetrated by Putin and others, that somehow neo-Nazis are some dominant faction or strong faction in Ukrainian politics. That's just absolute nonsense.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I looked it up this morning after reading a little more about Zelenskyy. The population of Ukraine is about 40 million people, the population of Russia is about 140 million. I'm seeing hundreds of thousands of Jews have emigrated from Ukraine in recent decades. That's the number that have left in recent decades, hundreds of thousands, many to Israel, many to New York, some to other places. The Times of Israel says many thousands of Jews are now among the million Ukrainians who have been displaced by this new war. Just for the record, that's what Putin calls denazification. I've been--

David Remnick: Yes, invasion is an equal opportunity act of violence.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. I've been starting to think, David, a lot about how this war might end. The scenario people seem to be talking the most about is a pretty ugly one, where Putin does overrun Kyiv, installs a puppet government, and then there's an insurgency by the Ukrainian people that goes on for years, maybe like after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

I'm curious if you, with your background on the region and the politics of Putin's brain, think there might be some other way, some kind of negotiated settlement that could let both sides declare victory in some acceptable way to them. Maybe it's okay for Zelenskyy to give up the regions of eastern Ukraine that have pro-Russia separatist movements and that might be more ethnically Russian, let them become independent. Other--

David Remnick: Hang on, Brian. When you say more ethnically Russian--

Brian Lehrer: I'm not proposing it. I'm just wondering about scenarios where this could end with the least death.

David Remnick: Point taken. Let's remember that Russia stole Crimea. That was a piece of settled history, obviously, in dispute many years ago, a piece of settled history for half a century. A piece settled half a century. Eastern Ukraine, yes has Russian speakers. There are Spanish speakers, millions of them, in this country. That doesn't make them part of Russia.

This was an act of independence and division that took place over 30 years ago, which may be an eye blink in history, I'm willing to admit, but is a piece of settled history. The problem with envisioning a future, what makes it so dark, is that there is no politics the way we understand it in Russia. In other words, Vladimir Putin does everything he can to control the information space of Russia. It is very hard for an American to imagine what it's like to watch television, all channels, all official channels, and see the level of propaganda and imagine what that does to the mindset of a country.

The flip comparison is if you imagine every channel was Fox News. To me, that's banal and flipped, but it comes closer to the unanimity and the propaganda that you see, but it doesn't begin to approach what you see in Russia.

Just this week, Putin has shut down Echo of Moscow radio station, independent outlet, TV Rain, last independent outlet for television. It's slowing down, best it can, taking a page out of the Chinese regime's Book of the internet and Instagram and Facebook, which is a very important avenue of information. It is control that information space enormously.

What's more, Putin is not surrounded by politics. There are no opposition parties. The opposition leaders at surface get imprisoned or they emigrate or they're oppressed, or they're murdered. Boris Nemtsov was murdered seven years ago. He was somebody who might have challenged Putin in a world of real politics. Alexei Navalny is in jail after the poisoning attempt that we all know about.

This is a guy who's been willing to use nerve agents to try to kill his opponents, Novichok, he's been willing to use radioactive substances to kill his opponents abroad. When he starts ranting about nuclear weapons and the power of his nuclear arsenal, when he sends his army into Ukraine, we ought to pay attention and take it seriously and not dream.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. There are very few of our listeners who would disagree with any of that.

David Remnick: I wish I had better news.

Brian Lehrer: What are scenarios for how this war can end other than with a widespread slaughter of Ukrainian civilians, which seems to be underway also as a matter of terrorizing the population, and years of an insurgency, is there some kind of negotiated settlement that may be imperfect, but that may be better, or does even asking that question enable Putin too much?

David Remnick: It's a necessary question. It's an absolutely necessary question. I think Joe Biden and other world leaders should be praised for the swiftness and the cohesion of the economic sanctions that have been leveled. In the early days of this, people were saying, "Well, it's just symbolic. It won't kick in for a long time." In fact, the effect of these sanctions throughout Russia have been severe and rapid. For example, the ruble has cratered as a currency. It's completely cratered. The Russian stock market has crashed.

People are leaving Moscow, particularly middle-class people who otherwise would have been involved in demonstrations and independent media and all the things that might have created some semblance of a politics. They are leaving because they fear arrest. That creates a political problem, too, but Russia is in danger of becoming a deeply isolated, if not a pariah state.

You have to begin to wonder how and when a leader like Putin will say, "Okay, I cannot crater my entire country because of my obsession with neutering the so-called friendly neighbor, Slavic country of Ukraine." It so much depends on this one man's fury and decision-making, that's the very difficult thing. Is there politics around him that somehow puts him out of power? I don't see the sign of that yet.

Brian Lehrer: You're saying the sanctions might work. I guess the premise of my earlier question was based on the historical reality, I think it's reality, that sanctions almost never work and they make the countries that are imposing the economic sanctions on a despot who deserves them, makes the countries imposing the sanctions feel like they're doing something, but sanctions almost never work.

David Remnick: I've heard that too being said recently, but these sanctions are quite different. Remember, what is the Putin regime? The Putin regime is a construction of people who are loyal to Putin and depend on him for their power and their fortunes, depend on him for their power and their fortunes. Suddenly, they're seeing their fortunes leached away in a way we've never seen before, Brian.

I can't emphasize enough, the scale of these and the coordination of these sanctions is unprecedented, and the effect is being felt, and ordinary Russians will feel it. It's not just a matter of flotillas of yachts as we've heard headed for the Seychelles and Safe Harbor. It's not just a matter of oligarchs no longer being able to ski in peace on the slopes of Switzerland or Italy. It's not just a matter of the leading and well-compensated propagandas on official Russian media complaining, as I've heard on various Russian shows, about, "Oh my god, I'm not going to have access to my villa in Italy." I swear to God, it's going to affect all Russians, all Russians.

I don't know how long that will take and what effect and what shape it will take on the politics of the moment. This week, it is not unlikely that Putin will declare some form of a state of emergency in Russia. Russian self-conception in their ordinary day-to-day lives are being deeply affected.

Brian Lehrer: We leave it there with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker Radio Hour, former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the former and collapse of the former Soviet Union and, of course, host of The New Yorker Radio Hour here on WNYC. You want to just tell people, David, what's coming up on The Radio Hour this weekend?

David Remnick: Yes, I'll be talking with our correspondents on the ground, who I have nothing but endless admiration for. At least two of our correspondents on the ground, Masha Gessen, of course, and Joshua Yaffa. I'll also be talking with a former advisor of President Zelensky, a man named Igor Novikov. We'll try to dig in deep on what really is the biggest crisis certainly in Europe since the fall of communism in 1989, 1991.

Brian Lehrer: We've also invited Masha, if she can, to join us here on one of our shows next week. We look forward to hearing her with you, of course, on Saturday morning on the New York Radio Hour. David, thanks for your insightful perspective.

David Remnick: It's always good to talk to you, Brian.

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