Against this backdrop of a European war in its fifth year, the man at the centre of Ukraine’s resistance began as nobody’s idea of a statesman. Volodymyr Zelenskyy was born to a Russian-speaking Jewish family in Kryvyi Rih, read law at Kryvyi Rih’s Institute of Economics, and then left the profession entirely for comedy and entertainment, co-creating the production company Kvartal 95.
What unfolded next has the shape of a script. Kvartal 95’s catalogue included the television series Servant of the People, aired between 2015 and 2019 to immense popularity, in which Zelenskyy played a fictional president, a high-school history teacher carried into office by a viral video. A political party of the same name followed in March 2018. Within a year the fiction folded into fact: he won a 30% plurality in the first round on 31 March 2019, then took 73 percent of the runoff vote on 21 April against incumbent Petro Poroshenko’s 25 percent, the biggest landslide in Ukrainian presidential elections. He was inaugurated on 20 May 2019.
On 24 February 2022 the wider picture changed. In the early hours, shortly before the full-scale invasion began, Zelenskyy taped an address to Ukrainians and Russians alike, declared martial law, severed diplomatic relations with Moscow and announced general mobilization. The following day his intelligence services, he said, had marked him as Moscow’s top target, and he answered that he would stay in Kyiv, his family remaining in the country. “They want to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state,” he said. That sentence, and the refusal behind it, fixed his image across the continent.
The record since mixes the front line with the lecture circuit. He visited soldiers near the front during the Kharkiv counteroffensive of September 2022; when Russia ordered conscription that autumn, he urged Russians not to submit to “criminal mobilisation”. His first years in office had already shown the weight of the American relationship, including a $400-million military aid package mandated by Congress and reportedly held up in 2019, an affair that shaped his early diplomacy.
What is at stake for Europe in his leadership is the same novelty the election revealed: a president who promised a state that “works honestly from the first day”, mastered television before politics and now speaks for a nation at war. The comedian’s arc has become the region’s frame of reference, and the war, ongoing since February 2022, has not yet written its final scene.
Sources
- Zelenskyy fires Ukraine’s army chief and offers Fedorov ‘prominent position’ | Ukraine | The Guardian
- Volodymyr Zelenskyy replaces head of Ukrainian military – ABC listen
