What Zelensky has taken from his former TV career

Volodymyr Zelensky is one of the few leaders of modern times whose charisma, determination and sheer cojones can be said, without exaggeration, to have changed the course of history. In the first hours of the Russian invasion the US famously offered to evacuate him from Kyiv to a safer location, to which his response was (in spirit, if not in actual words): ‘I need ammo, not a ride.’ His determination to remain in the heart of his besieged capital seriously confounded Putin’s invasion plans, which were predicated on quickly toppling or murdering him. And Zelensky’s idea to film himself and his top advisers on his iPhone strolling down Kyiv’s Bankova street on the third day of the war as Russian death squads hunted them gave the Ukrainian people the inspired leadership they needed, and the hope of victory.

Appropriately, the first two biographies of this remarkable man have been written by Ukrainians who know Zelensky well. Iuliia Mendel was his young, multilingual press secretary from 2019-21 and Serhiy Rudenko is a veteran Kyiv political journalist.

Mendel’s account, written after the start of the war, is more insidery but less critical. Rudenko’s is actually a hasty rehash of a book that came out as Zelensky Without Greasepaint in January last year – though you wouldn’t know it from the publisher’s credits. It was originally highly critical of Zelensky’s failings, but has now been leavened with references to his wartime heroism, even comparing him with Yuri Gagarin. That jars, but in a revealing way. Even to his critics, Zelensky the wartime leader has experienced an apotheosis that has kept his personal popularity at more than 90 per cent throughout the conflict.

Ukrainians have known and loved him as a comic actor (and winner of their version of Strictly Come Dancing in 2006) for years before he became a politician and soon thereafter president; so, for both Mendel and Rudenko, the sheer postmodern strangeness of his career is perhaps less striking than it is to outsiders.