Volodimir Zelensky, the leader who arrived by chance

On February 24, 2022, Volodimir Zelenski addressed two messages to the nation.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
24 February 2023 Friday 22:24
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Volodimir Zelensky, the leader who arrived by chance

On February 24, 2022, Volodimir Zelenski addressed two messages to the nation. The first, at six in the morning, an hour and a half after the Russian attack began, was quick: he did not give details, he announced martial law, he said that he had just spoken with the president of the United States, that the Ukrainian army was at hand. the work and asked everyone to calm down and, "if you can, please, stay at home." Six hours later, he appeared on television. He insisted on the same briefly, then went on to speak at length in Russian. “Listen to us”, he requested, “to the citizens of Russia”. The family with whom this special envoy heard the speech, and who was hesitating between leaving the country or staying, showed the country's trademark skepticism, not even following him to the end. To what end was Zelensky addressing the Russians?

For many, the old – but not entirely – comedian was one more president in a country that had already taken the habit of changing them: seven since independence in 1991, five of them elected. His victory at the polls in April 2019 came from a vote of punishment for the entire political class that came to say: now, let the clown enter. And the clown, the president of TV comedy, had to hastily assemble a team; he only knew show business. But it has been precisely this knowledge that has allowed Zelenski to be a war president, something that is not available to everyone.

Images from his early years showed him as a short guy sitting in a big chair, and his face was too reflective of his state of mind, for example, embarrassed by Donald Trump, who was pressuring him to reveal Hunter Biden's dealings in Ukraine, son of the current president. In the country, his politics did not seem clear, the most progressive supporters deplored how individuals close to the oligarchs returned to colonize the environment of power; the Europeans and the International Monetary Fund were impatient with the lack of progress in institutional reforms and in the fight against corruption.

A Russophone Jew born in 1978 in the south (Krivi Rih, Dnipropetrovsk), Zelensky waved the flag of national unity after five years of war in Donbass, at the cost of 13,000 lives. Whether or not he understood the problem in this region well (perhaps he saw the civil war component more than the Russian intervention) would be debatable, but he immediately went to try to negotiate with Vladimir Putin without having real support, since that of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Quartet did not go beyond paper, and although Zelensky claimed that he wanted to restore territorial sovereignty, there was no reason to trust him. And the Crimea was already lost.

However, on the night of February 25, Zelensky became the president of all. In the afternoon, as thousands of Ukrainians fled towards the European borders, Russian media aired that he had left the country. Washington had done him the worst of favors by offering to evacuate him, a gift to Russian propaganda. Reasonable speculation was that he would move to Lviv, some 80 kilometers from Poland, to lead the resistance from there. He did not do it. Sure of the three circles of defense surrounding Kyiv, he went out into the street and recorded himself with his cell phone for 32 seconds to say: "We are all here."

It was the beginning of a phenomenon that even its detractors – as opportunistic, too pragmatic or lacking in ideology – recognize today. Zelensky has addressed not only Ukrainians every night, but also the whole world, country by country, and every international institution, always seeking to touch emotions. Nobody had done it before. Although in his messages abroad he sometimes changed his orientation depending on the circumstances, no one has exposed him for a blunder. It took him ten months to travel out of the Ukraine and the eve of his visit to Washington he showed up in Bakhmut, on the hardest front of the war.

The obvious question is how this transformation was possible and to what extent the figure of Zelenski is the product of team work. There may be some of this, of course, but it may be his own merit. In the great cascading voice communicator remains, they say, the comedian and the turns of the acting years of him. The writer Yuri Andrujóvich –also, in his style, a humorist– said the other day between laughs during a lunch in Barcelona that he reminds him of the character of Vittorio de Sica in El general de la Rovere, by Roberto Rossellini, someone who is half real and half fake, someone who ends up believing his role... From half measures, Zelensky went on to fight the oligarchs: his political godfather, Ihor Kolomoiski, and, just weeks before the Russian invasion, Viktor Medvedchuk, whose daughter has Putin as her godfather of baptism

These anniversary days, many wonder about the future of Zelensky. Clearly, it will depend on how the war ends. But at least this year he has fulfilled his mission to unite Ukrainians like no one could imagine.