Colin Freeman

Inside the court of King Zelensky

An Azerbaijani journalist takes a selfie with president Zelensky (photo: Getty)

The first hint that my audience with Volodymyr Zelensky might not be what I’d hoped for came with the emailed invite. A few days before I’d been told I’d made the shortlist for a select presidential news conference marking the anniversary of the war. Not quite an exclusive interview, granted, but given current Zelenskymania, a decent second best. Images of a cosy roundtable in the secret presidential bunker beckoned.

Alas, when the email from his office finally arrived, it was notably bereft of the cloak and dagger one might expect. No orders to leave my phone at home. No secret rendezvous with a blacked-out van. Just an order to report at 3.30pm to 2A Velyka Zhytomyrska Street – which turned out not to be some anonymous bunker, but Kyiv’s best-known hotel, the Intercontinental. Where myself and roughly 500 other star-struck hacks – who’d all likewise got excited at the prospect of a tête à tête – were then crammed into a conference suite.  

Far from giving him a serious grilling, this gathering of august foreign correspondents came across more like a fan club

Clearly, Zelensky no longer feels that Vladimir Putin’s cruise missiles are quite the threat they were. After all, this time last year he was addressing the world via 30-second video selfies shot on street corners, scuttling off before Putin’s drones could track him This time, it was a three-hour news conference – the kind, indeed, that Putin likes giving.

In Zelensky’s case this was perhaps less about presidential vanity, and more about catering to the insatiable global demand for airtime with him. Rather than just a few questions from the usual big beasts from CNN and the Beeb, for example, he made time for reporters from Mexico and Azerbaijan, South Korea and Brazil.

This, presumably, is a strategy to garner as much international support for Ukraine’s cause as possible.

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