Zelenskyy leads Ukraine into war and instills hope

WASHINGTON (AP) — A year ago, as Russian forces closed in on the Ukrainian capital, Western leaders feared for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s life and advised him to leave. The United States offered him an escape route.

Instead, he recorded a provocative video of himself standing in a dark street outside the presidential offices with his four closest aides behind him. “We are all here,” Zelenskyy said in a statement expressing his determination to stay in Kyiv and defend Ukraine’s independence.

It was a powerful political drama. From the early days of the war, when few expected the Ukrainian army to resist the Russian onslaught, Zelenskyy inspired Ukrainians to fight. It gave them hope.

Night after night, he addressed the nation with a video posted on social media. Her voice trained in acting can be soothing or powerful, rising with moral outrage as she condemns the latest Russian atrocities and calls for those responsible to be punished.

It speaks of anger and pain for the devastation of the country and the untold death toll. He promises that Ukraine will recover one day. He never tires of thanking everyone up front. Through the horrors of war, he instilled the belief that Ukraine can win.

Zelenskyy was just 41 when he was elected president in 2019, largely on the promise that he would be the kind of anti-corruption leader he portrayed on a popular TV show. During these early years, he struggled to convince Ukrainians that he was up to it, and his approval rating plummeted.

War can make leaders heroes or fools. Moscow’s unrest in Ukraine has done nothing to elevate Russian President Vladimir Putin in the eyes of the world. But it was as a warlord that Zelensky found his place. Many now compare him to Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister who led his country through World War II against attacks by Nazi Germany.

“He’s been extraordinarily good at channeling a kind of larger national spirit,” Fiona Hill, a Russia scholar at the Brookings Institution who has worked in the last three U.S. administrations, said in an interview with The Associated Press. success in his acting training “Sometimes it’s literally when we say it’s the role of a lifetime, there’s an acting element to it.”

Hill noted that Churchill “was not such a great leader in peacetime as he was in wartime, and he was also an actor, he liked amateur theater and knew he was playing a part” .

As a warlord, Zelenskyy began dressing as such almost immediately, swapping his suit jackets for an all-green wardrobe. His boyish face was covered with a black beard. He seemed to age overnight.

Before the invasion, he looked a lot like the nice history teacher from his TV series “Servant of the People”, which tells the story of a man who is elected president against all odds after a student incognito tape-records his tirade. fully fledged. blasphemy against government corruption. The comedy slot, which aired from 2015 until the actual elections in spring 2019, was hugely popular.

Michael Kimmage, who worked on Russian and Ukraine policy at the US State Department under President Barack Obama, noted that part of Zelenskyy’s success in unifying the country dates back to the 2019 election, when he won with 70% of the vote and without the east. – western division of the previous elections.

But for Kimmage, the leader’s “almost Churchillian characteristics” came as a surprise.

“He’s a former actor and comedian, so it’s not natural for him to take on this military role. But it was fine,” he said. “I don’t know where it came from. It’s obviously a huge consequence of the war itself, but it’s not a quality I would have seen in Zelenskyy before the war.”

In addition to uniting the country, Zelenskyy was also very effective in getting the world to support Ukrainians and providing them with a steady stream of money and military aid that kept them fighting. After dozens of speeches by videoconference, Zelenskyy left the country for the first time since the war began in December to meet US President Joe Biden at the White House and address Congress. At the beginning of February, he visits London, Paris and Brussels.

At the Munich security conference last week, Zelenskyy repeatedly pleaded with his allies to stand firm with Ukraine and not waste a minute. Russia is Goliath, he said, and Ukraine is David with the slingshot.

“There is no alternative to speed,” the president said, “because speed is what life depends on.”

His call to send increasingly powerful weapons into the country crushed resistance. He was recently rewarded with long-range missiles, advanced air defense systems and modern battle tanks that will help his government attempt to retake the territory as the war enters its second year.

Despite Zelenskyy’s obvious power, his adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, one of the four men who appear behind him in the video from the start of the war, qualified the praise.

“It puts me in a bit of a difficult position, because on the one hand, of course, I see a president who is in his place. He is very cold. He has a temper of steel, an iron will, a will fantastic to take on responsibilities and so on”.

But, according to Podolyak, the conflict has shown that Ukraine has many people with the same iron will: “That is to say, this country cannot be broken because there are many people who will always be against being broken and will never kneel down. “, who will always be ready to assume responsibilities”.

Hill noted that Zelenskyy is not the only one who enlisted during the war. Unlike Russia, where the operation is top-down, for Ukraine it is an existential struggle.

“Actually, I think all Ukrainians, for the most part, have also taken a step forward,” he said. “Think of all the people who went to the front line, all the people who had to deal with this every day. It’s a national effort.”

Before taking office, Zelenskyy traveled to his hometown, Krivoy Rog, to visit the grave of his grandfather, a Red Army officer who fought the Nazis in World War II. A family friend, Oleksandr Krizhov, a 73-year-old dentist, told the AP he asked the president’s father, a university professor, why he did it.

“It was a promise made to his grandfather: ‘You will not be ashamed of me,'” he said.

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Associated Press reporters Hanna Arhirova in Kyiv, Ukraine; Samya Kullab in Krivoy Rog, Ukraine, and Aamer Madhani and Tracy Brown in Washington contributed to this report.