Volodymyr Zelenskyy: from comedian to war-time leader

Elected to the presidency almost three years ago, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has recast himself on the world stage from an out-of-his-depth political newcomer to a convincing war-time leader.

The 44-year-old self-declared populist, who was elected with a landslide victory in 2019, has rallied the people of Ukraine in the face of a full-scale invasion by Russian forces. He has artfully employed his skills as an actor and performer in his addresses and video selfies to give voice to “Ukrainian anger and defiance of Russian aggression”, said the BBC.

Wartime leader

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A “key moment” in his transformation from “a leader floundering in the polls” to “national figurehead” came in the early hours of Thursday morning, shortly before the Russian invasion began. In a sober media address, he said he had tried to call Russian president Vladimir Putin to avoid a war, but his attempts at dialogue had been met only with “silence” from the Kremlin.

Speaking in Russian, he said that Ukraine and Russia did not need a war, “not a Cold War, not a hot war, not a hybrid war”. But Zelenskyy added that Ukraine would defend itself if it came under attack. “When you attack us, you will see our faces. Not our backs, but our faces.”

It was the first glimpse of the Ukrainian president “proving himself a convincing fit in an unlikely new role: as an inspirational wartime leader”, said The Sunday Times. In subsequent broadcasts he has appeared “grim-faced and visibly exhausted, his suit and tie long since replaced by a khaki T-shirt”, but nevertheless keen to emphasise that he and the Ukrainian people are “facing the enemy together”, said the paper.

As Russian troops closed in on Friday night, he recorded a short video debunking rumours that he had fled the capital, filming himself standing in Kyiv and surrounded by his ministers. “We are all here,” he told Ukrainians, “We are protecting our independence, our state. And it will continue to be this way. Glory to our defenders. Glory to Ukraine!”

On Saturday, he reportedly refused a US offer to evacuate Kyiv, telling American officials that he needed “ammunition, not a ride”.

His decision to stay in the capital is “an act of courage that has already altered the course of history”, said Time magazine.

In doing so, he “roused the U.S. and its allies to impose unprecedented penalties against Russia, crashing the rouble and unplugging much of its economy from the rest of the world”, said the magazine.

The West has been galvanised into action. Germany has increased its military spending by €100 billion, “casting aside a postwar tradition of pacifism that has long frustrated allies”. Switzerland, meanwhile, has broken from its “tradition of neutrality to support sanctions” while the EU has “agreed to put Ukraine on a path to membership, shedding decades of internal resistance”.

Early life and election

The Ukrainian leader was born in the town of Kryvyi Rih in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1978 and studied as a lawyer prior to becoming a comedian.

He rose to fame among Ukrainians after landing a role in the sitcom Servant of the People, in which – ironically – he played a fictional teacher-turned-president. As the show grew more popular, he helped launch a political party of the same name and was selected as its candidate for the 2019 presidential election.

Initially lagging behind in the polls, Zelenskyy slowly gained traction by appealing to voters fed up with entrenched corruption, low living standards and years of political upheaval, the BBC’s Jonah Fisher said prior to the vote.

“He has torn up the rule book for election campaigning, holding no rallies and few interviews and instead using social media to appeal to younger voters,” he added. “He appears to have no strong political views apart from a wish to be new and different.”

At the ballot box he ran against the controversial, fiercely anti-Russian president Petro Poroshenko, who came to power following a violent coup against his predecessor Victor Yanukovich in 2014. Despite Poroshenko warning that Zelenskyy was inexperienced and Ukraine “could be quickly returned to Russia’s orbit of influence” under the comedian’s rule, Zelenskyy stormed to victory in a landslide, taking 73% of the vote. against the incumbent Poroshenko.

Record in power

Having enjoyed the support of oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyy during his presidential campaign, some feared Zelenskyy would be nothing but a “puppet leader, controlled by a man who is under investigation in the US for possible fraud and money-laundering”, said the BBC.

But Zelenskyy has proven to be “more independent than the sceptics thought” in many ways, although “corruption remains deep-rooted in Ukraine” and some Western officials worry that corruption charges brought by Zelenskyy against his predecessor Poroshenko are “politically motivated”.

The “boldness of Zelenskyy’s stand for Ukraine’s sovereignty” is perhaps unexpected from a man “whose biggest political liability for many years was the feeling that he was too apt to seek compromise with Moscow”, said the Associated Press.

During the presidential campaign Zelenskyy said that he would negotiate peace with Russia, which had seized Crimea in 2014 and is propping up separatist movements in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, leading to a conflict in which an estimated 15,000 people have already died.

But his attempts to negotiate with Russia brought only limited success. Zelenskyy managed to broker a prisoner exchange and move towards implementing parts of the Minsk agreements, but his “efforts for reconciliation faltered” under Putin’s “insistence that Ukraine back away from the West”.

As his approval ratings plummeted in Ukraine – dropping as low as 20% in some polls – he began to strike “a more assertive tone in pushing for membership of the European Union and the Nato military alliance”, said the BBC, “a move that was bound to anger the Russian president”.

But in the last week Ukraine, and the world, has seen the former comedian transform from “a provincial politician with delusions of grandeur into a bona fide statesman”, wrote Melinda Haring, from the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, for Foreign Affairs.

Although Zelenskyy’s failure, so far, to reform Ukraine may be “grave” – his party has spent much of 2021 “dragging their feet on much-needed judicial and anticorruption reforms” – he has shown “a stiff upper lip” in the face of Putin’s aggression.

“He has demonstrated enormous physical courage, refusing to sit in a bunker but instead traveling openly with soldiers, and an unwavering patriotism that few expected from a Russian speaker from eastern Ukraine,” wrote Haring. Zelenskyy, “to his great credit, has been unmovable”, she said.