It is still hard to believe that Volodymyr Zelensky, the man leading his country through Europe’s gravest threat since 1945, was as recently as four years ago a comic actor – known for romantic comedies, a role as the voice of Paddington Bear in Ukrainian, and most recently Servant of the People, a political satire in which he played a schoolteacher unexpectedly elected president. (He also won the Ukrainian version of Strictly Come Dancing in 2006.) He set up his political party, also called Servant of the People, with staff of the show’s production company and only a year later, in 2019, was himself unexpectedly elected Ukraine’s president. Even then the unusual meta-narrative struck international observers as an eccentric parable of our turbulent times.
Until Russia’s pre-invasion military build-up, Zelensky’s record as president had been mixed. I spent the night of his election at the Ukrainian embassy in Warsaw, following the counting of ballots from the more than one million Ukrainian citizens living in Poland, a product of the country’s growing integration with the EU. Among the young, pro-European Ukrainians I spoke to opinion was divided between those who did not think the then 41-year-old entertainer sufficiently serious and those who saw in his clean-up-politics message a refreshing change. While Zelensky went on to preside over economic improvements and Ukraine’s continuing tilt towards the West, when I visited Kyiv in January this year the sense was that he had proved too close to some of the country’s oligarchs and too prone to populist, quick-fix policies.
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