This article was written earlier, but only published on this site on April 15, 2022.
In the face of an oncoming Russian invasion, with tension having built for weeks, it would not have been surprising for Ukraine’s President to flee Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital and lead his country from a place of relative safety. Acting with bravery and selflessness, Volodymyr Zelenskyy did nothing of the sort. Ditching the suit and tie for a khaki sweater, he took to the streets of Kyiv to command – and contribute to – military operations on the ground. From comedian to commander-in-chief, I looked at Zelenskyy’s roots, comedy career and politics to discover the man behind his and his country’s brave and defiant response to Russia’s invasion.
At 03:00 on Thursday 24 February, Vladimir Putin authorised the invasion – special military operation – of Ukraine. President Zelenskyy, despite significant efforts to deescalate domestic fears in the preceding weeks, declared martial law (the temporary imposition of direct military control of normal civil functions) almost exactly as Putin gave the order to invade. By the end of the first day of bitter and unpredictable fighting, he announced 137 dead and 316 wounded, and by the morning of the second, he ordered the full mobilisation of the Ukrainian military for 90 days. All Ukrainian males aged 18 to 60 are since banned from leaving the country. The President has been clear from the start: Ukraine are going to stay and fight. As he put it himself, ‘when [the Russians] attacks[s], [they] will see their faces, not their backs.’
In the early hours of Saturday 26th, the United States government requested that Zelenskyy be evacuated to a safer, more distant location. He adamantly refused, saying “the fight is here [in Kyiv]; I need ammunition, not a ride.” Despite “the enemy mark[ing] [him] as the number one target, [his] family as target number two” he has remained put in Ukraine’s capital. These defiant acts have characterised his response to the crisis so far, using social media to communicate his messages to his citizens.
Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (Ukrainian: Володимир Олександрович Зеленський) was born in January 1978 to Jewish parents in a Russian-speaking region of Soviet Ukraine. Several members of his father’s family were killed in the Holocaust. Zelenskyy speaks Russian, Ukrainian and English, having passed the Test of English as a Foreign Language at 16.
It should be noted, here, that one of Putin’s pretexts for entering Ukraine was a ‘denazification’. Given Zelenskyy’s cultural and familial background, this claim is, quite clearly, unthinkably ridiculous.
He planned to move to Israel to study, but his father forbade it, so he later studied for a law degree at Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics despite never pursuing a legal career. In fact, his work almost couldn’t have been further removed from law (or, indeed, politics).
In 1995 Zelenskyy joined his local KVN – comedy competition – team and later the Ukrainian team later won KVN’s Major League in 1997. Also in 1997, Zelenskyy led the Kvartal 95 team which later became the comedy outfit of the same name. From then his outfit performed in several post-Soviet countries, producing TV shows for Ukrainian TV channels from 2003. In the late 2000s the future President starred in several feature films including ‘Love in the Big City’ and its two sequels and ‘Office Romance’, ‘Our Time’ and others. He was a producer of Ukrainian TV channel Inter from 2010 to 2012. In 2006, Zelenskyy won Ukrainian version of Dancing with the Stars, a video of which was recently circulated online.
Zelenskyy had already had a distinguished comedy and acting career when in 2014, aged 36, when he publicly criticised the proposed ban by the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture on Russian artists from Ukraine. This would be the beginning of a new political career as, in 2015 he starred in TV series Servant of the People which later named his centrist political party that now holds a majority in the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament. Servant of the People is a political satire in which a secondary school history teacher is unexpectedly elected as President of Ukraine following a viral video of him complaining about corruption in government.
This concept was alarmingly prescient as, following the establishment of the political movement in late 2017, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected on a platform for change with over 73% of the vote on a second ballot. Here it is clear to see the difference in political landscape between the UK and Ukraine: any “comedians” who run for office get no more than a handful of votes and have traditionally been stuck in the fringe sections of the ballot. Perhaps the 2021 London mayoral election was a sign that in today’s increasing use of “e-government” and social media in politics, less mainstream candidates have more of a platform from which to achieve political success.
This use of e-government has been central to Zelenskyy’s managing of the Russian invasion. He holds regular news conferences and films video messages of and tweets about his activities. This recently included an appeal both in Ukrainian and Russian for Russian citizens to protest Putin’s military action. Zelenskyy is proof of the significant modern power that we all have access to over the internet. It is particularly striking given the current context of the war and the way in which he has managed to get the Ukrainian people to rally around him. As the West watches the crisis unfold, Ukraine’s response has been valiant and united under President Zelenskyy’s leadership. Russia is being held off.
As President Zelenskyy remains in Kyiv, all hope that the Ukrainian people’s efforts pay off, and that their sovereignty is safeguarded from the existential threat of Vladimir Putin’s horrendous war machine.
