Eric and Eliot welcome Illia Ponomarenko, a Ukrainian journalist, formerly with the Kyiv Post and Kyiv Independent (of which he was a founder), and the author of I Will Show You it Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv (New York:  Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024). They discuss how he came to write the book, the buildup to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Russia's over the top rhetoric and bad assumptions about the nature of Ukraine and the likely course of the war, the criminal nature of Putin's regime, the Russian failure at the battle of Kyiv and whether that means Russia has lost the war, the delay in U.S. assistance, his own experience in the U.S. and why it made him optimistic that the U.S. would do the right thing, the impact of U.S. and western assistance on the war, the Belarus and Istanbul negotiations in March 2022 that some have alleged might have ended the war (spoiler alert: the Russians were not negotiating in good faith), the current battlefield situation, and how this war ends. You can follow Illia on Twitter (X) @IAPonomarenko and you can support his work at http://buymeacoffee.com/saintanger.   I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv: https://a.co/d/3QxgSKd Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.