How Volodymyr Zelensky became face of the free world

He’s rapidly found himself the central figure in a spiralling crisis – and his bravery has earned him global respect. Anne McElvoy charts his improbable rise, from comedian to Ukrainian President
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UKRAINE PRESIDENCY/AFP via Getty

This morning, Volodymyr Zelensky was tweeting as usual: “Talked to Prime Minister @BorisJohnson and President @AndrzejDuda about the current security situation. Agreed on further joint steps to counter the aggressor. Anti-war coalition in action!”

The message has the jaunty style of a natural communicator on Twitter and Instagram. Sometimes, notwithstanding the pressures of a burgeoning war all around him, Zelensky adds a pointed joke to the mix. Offered a safe flight out of Ukraine this weekend as the capital Kyiv came under Russian bombardment and Moscow’s troops poured across the borders to attack its independent neighbour, he reportedly replied: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

And as the information wars raged around the successes and setbacks of the combatant sides in the last few days, the president quipped in one of his social media appearances: “There are a load of fakes out there – but I am here!” The dash of mordant humour is still intact, even as the man who might never have been expected to become a central figure in an epochal global story has transformed himself from subversive TV personality-turned-politico to a figure commanding admiration around the world for showing leadership under the pressure of invasion.

Zelensky rose to fame as an actor and stand-up comedian, whose showreel included providing the voice of Paddington Bear when the film was released in Ukrainian. In 2015, he was cast in a show called Servant of the People, in which he played a teacher - Vasyl Petrovych Holoborodko - who becomes president after a video of him criticising corrupt politicians goes viral.

The show became so popular that on New Year’s Eve 2018, live on TV, Zelensky announced he would be running for president. He won the 2019 election by a landslide with 73 per cent of the vote. Since then, he’s been a patchily successful leader - before this crisis his approval rating hovered around 30 per cent - though always a voice for the basic values of freedom and a roar of defiance against Russian annexation.

At 44, with glamorous wife Olena – a former screenwriter turned campaigner for better school meals and gender equality, he also embodies a new style of political leadership in extreme times. It is a far cry from the sonorous tones of traditional opposition politicians in Eastern Europe speaking at passionate length about their beliefs. Zelensky’s style is a social media-friendly, brief and quippy way of signalling Ukraine’s emergency to the world. As one official who watched him address a video call of European leaders noted, “he was very clear that Ukrainians were dying for European ideas”. As Zelensky signed off, he added nonchalantly: “This might be the last time you see me alive.” Hardened Eurocrats reported dabbed watery eyes.

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AFP via Getty Images

As the fight for control of Ukraine intensifies, Zelensky’s forthright personal appeals have ushered in a raft of changes in policy – from Germany’s volte-face to supply arms to Ukraine and the suspension of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that links it to Russian gas suppliers, to a new open door approach to the refugees pouring out of the warzone and even the BP oil giant divesting itself abruptly of lucrative Russian interests. He’s also likely to become a model for a new kind of mass communication by opponents of authoritarian government: social media savvy and as irreverent in talking to those he is begging for support as he is direct in denouncing his enemy.

And in a culture where speeches are often long (Vladimir Putin averages between an hour and an hour-and-a-half for his disquisitions on a skewed version of Russo-Ukrainian history and its justifications for war), Team Zelensky’s pithy style attracts a different fan base. The Нет войне! (“no to war!”) hashtag trends widely across Russia, Ukraine and the former Soviet states as tens of thousands take to the streets in support of Kyiv.

Zelensky’s favourite platforms are YouTube and Instagram, where videos are no more than a minute long and captions matter as much as long explanation. “We don’t have time for lengthy history lectures”, was one post in response to a Putin speech. “I am not going to talk about the past. Let me tell you about the present and the future. The internationally recognised borders of Ukraine will stay as they are.”

It’s a defiant tone he has adhered to, even as the pressure rises militarily on Ukraine and darker days may lie ahead as Russian forces encircle the capital. “We are all still here” is a clever video which shows him on the street at dusk, introducing the members of his government and listing the army, civilian resistance and men and women who are standing ground against the invasion.

Social media warfare is Zelensky’s natural home as a performer with a wry, handsome face – a kind of everyman Ukrainians warm to, regardless of their background. The bloodier kind is all around him. Since the weekend, the Kremlin has hinted at deploying even more extreme weapons, pressuring Kyiv leadership talks in Minsk. Belarus’s hardliner pro-Moscow regime has been supporting the assault and there are further Russian threats of using the country to the south of Ukraine as an extra base for air attacks on civilian areas.

Volodymyr Xelensky
Volodymyr Xelensky

A threat by the Kremlin to place its nuclear forces on high alert forced Zelensky to accept negotiations on the border with Belarus. This, his champions can claim, is a sign that military victory for Russia is not as easy as it hoped.

But it was also a sign of the terrible pressure now on Zelensky’s leadership. As strong as national and international support is for his plucky leadership is, this story is also one of unpredictable events and risks. Entering negotiations with scant outlook of success with Russia in Belarus today makes it look like Zelensky was forced to the table. But failing to do so would aid a narrative that his stubbornness was ultimately responsible for worsening the jeopardy and bloodshed his countrymen face.

It is a conundrum that would test the calculation of a Henry Kissinger – let alone a figure whose path to power was more adventurous accident than planned. He comes from outside the interconnected political and economic Kyiv elite, born in the south-east of the country in an industrial region, the son of a technical professor and an engineer. His grandfather fought for the Red Army in the Second World War and his Jewish family lost relatives in the Holocaust (which makes the “neo-Nazi” attacks on him particularly distasteful).

He stands in many ways for the intertwined neighbouring cultures of Russia and Ukraine which make the present violence so heart-breaking; Zelensky is a native Russian speaker with a career spanning Russian and Ukrainian entertainment, having cut his teeth in screwball Russian comedies.

He won the presidency on a ticket of unifying a country whose politics are often marked by competition between its distinctive West and East, exacerbated by the Ukrainian independence uprisings of the 2000s and the Russian annexation of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014. Voters were keen to vote for him as they liked his presidential TV character but also because they saw him as an outsider and a chance for a fresh start in Kyiv’s politics, compromised by years of intertwined economic and politic dependencies and always at the mercy of Russian interference.

Fiona Hill, the British-born Russia expert and erstwhile deputy national security adviser in the US, revealed in testimony to the Senate hearings investigating Donald Trump’s alleged solicitation of foreign interference in his presidential bid that in her time advising a (largely impervious) Trump on Russia-Ukraine matters, she too was blindsided by a mercurial new figure in the crucible of tangled US-Russia-Ukraine relations. “He came from outside the political realm, so the question we had was whether he would be able to act independently... or whether oligarchs would be able to predate [sic] upon his presidency.”

She was not alone in being watchful of Zelensky’s links. There was concern over his relations with Igor Kolomoisky, an oligarch investigated by the US for embezzlement who was basically the owner of the channel which made Servant of the People. The Biden administration last year placed sanctions on Kolomoisky and he is banned from travel to the US.

Trump also tried to pressure Zelensky into digging up dirt on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, over his eventful business career in Ukraine and erratic personal life. The Ukrainian leader’s response was evasive (the US state department spent much time figuring out whether this was dead-pan play-acting by Zelensky to get through a moment which marked a low point even for the Trump administration – or if he was simply lost for words at the bizarre request).

Zelensky did, however, promise Trump that his choice as public prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, would be “one hundred per cent my person”, which could be read as a vague form of acquiescence - or a shrewd evasion. Either way, Ryaboshapka, a prosecutor who was finally making progress at rooting out Ukraine’s tangled knotweed of financial and banking malfeasance, was fired last year to the irritation of the Biden administration which had linked more financial support with demands for more robust measures in anti-corruption.

Volodymyr Xelensky
Reuters

More broadly, Zelensky seemed to have come off-track early in his presidency. Opponents claimed that a dependency on Kolomoisky remained a roadblock to reform. The erratic nature of his administration brought accusations (ironically, given present events) that he was too likely to do a deal with Russia to end the stand-off in eastern Ukraine which followed the 2014 incursion. When I interviewed Oleksandr Danylyuk, the level-headed former finance and security minister, he was clearly frustrated by Zelensky’s mercurial habit of issuing offbeat edicts.

But when the current crisis became unavoidable, Zelensky transformed into the man of the hour, gathering support at the Munich Security Conference by chiding governments and securocrats for failing to step up more clearly in practical support in weaponry.

Today, there is no doubt where the Ukraine leader stands - as the rallying figure for his country and for what it takes to resist the threat of overwhelming force. He looks like a different figure now to the puckish character he played – and turned into a political career. His darting brown eyes are red-rimmed with creeping exhaustion, he frequently wears military fatigues or simple khaki tops – another small but significant sign of his ability to shape-shift from jest to suit-wearing president to war leader.

Already, Volodymyr Zelensky has changed history: all with the knowing nod and wink of a screen and social media star, turned deadly serious.

Anne McElvoy is Executive Editor with The Economist and host of its interview podcast The Economist Asks providing weekly interviews on the crisis in Ukraine

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