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. In 2015 Zelensky wrote and starred in Servant of the People, a hit TV series about a provincial schoolteacher whose expletive-filled rant against the corruption of the political class went viral on YouTube and led to his unlikely election as president. The fictional President Vasyl Holoborodko appoints his childhood chums to the great offices of state, to fine comic effect.

And that is exactly what Zelensky himself did in 2019, launching a whirlwind four-month electoral campaign – under the witty slogan ‘I’m not joking’ – that toppled the incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko, with a landslide 73 per cent of the vote. And when Zelensky did appoint his mates to run the country, it was not only a remarkable instance of life imitating art but also the first known take-over of a major European state by the executives of a television production company. He had quickly to recruit ‘the unemployed, wedding photographers, showmen and restaurateurs, most with very average educational backgrounds and limited knowledge’ as members of parliament, writes Rudenko – ‘people who, without Zelensky, would never have found themselves involved in Ukrainian politics’.

Zelensky’s own life resembles that of a nerdy underdog in an American sitcom. Born in the tough industrial city of Kriviy Roh in central Ukraine, he was the weedy, diminutive Jewish kid who won friends through being funny and ended up marrying the prettiest girl in class. But, as Mendel points out, the cheeky chappy of his TV persona belied a deep drive and relentless perfectionism:

“The man in the music video in the role of a romantic hero did not bear much resemblance to the President Zelenskyy [sic] I knew, who placed exacting professional demands on himself and on his team. The same perfectionism that he had shown in his past TV production work, asking his team to shoot scenes over and over again, was now evident in how he oversaw our office’s output of news, photos and videos addressing persistent controversies that appeared in politics and vexed our young democracy.

When I met him in July, Zelensky was indeed visibly tough, decisive and even peremptory. What Putin did not understand when he chose to launch his invasion in February was that behind the comic Mr Nice Guy exterior Zelensky was actually a trained lawyer who had ruthlessly built his Kvartal 95 entertainment company into Ukraine’s biggest TV production house and earned himself tens of millions in the process. The Ukrainian oligarchs who encouraged him to run and supported him on their TV channels – notably his business partner Ihor Kolomoisky – also assumed that he would be a malleable puppet in their hands.

They were very wrong. In an unexpected echo of Putin’s career, Zelensky soon turned on his benefactors and launched a criminal investigation of Kolomoisky, backed by the US Department of Justice. ‘Oligarchs were like an invasive species, spreading their weblike influence into every area of life and suffocating everything,’ writes Mendel, describing in detail Zelensky’s crusade to rid Ukraine of their influence. But her rose-tinted view prevents her from mentioning an important detail. Zelensky chose Andriy Bohdan, Kolomoisky’s former lawyer, as his first chief of staff.

Rudenko’s biography, largely written as it was before the war, discusses Zelensky’s acting career and Kvartal 95’s business affairs in more detail than the general reader might wish to know. It is also, in the style of Russian and Ukrainian political biographies, full of unsourced, unconfirmed and sometimes doubtful gossip. But the important thing in understanding Zelensky and the conflict with Russia is how crucial the Kvartal 95 team’s expertise in communications and presentation was to become as a weapon of war.

In the first days of the invasion, even Ukraine’s closest allies were reluctant to believe that Kyiv’s forces could hold their own against the Russians, and even more reluctant to provide lethal weaponry. Zelensky changed that with a relentless and brilliant communications campaign composed of both inspiration and emotional blackmail. He ‘spoke to almost every world leader and gave addresses to parliaments on nearly every continent on the planet, displaying a moral clarity that had not been seen in 80 years, since the second world war,’ writes Mendel. That targeted messaging really was Zelensky’s own, confirmed by many advisers to whom I spoke in Kyiv. ‘We ask for a response. For the response from the world. For the response to terror,’ were Zelensky’s words to the US Congress, in a wily reference to 9/11. ‘We shall not give up and shall not lose,’ he told the British parliament, echoing Churchill. And he warned Germany’s parliament to step up, ‘so you will not be ashamed of yourselves after this war’ – a heavy hint at previous wars they might feel shame for.

One small quibble: Mendel’s translator insists, in common with several western newspapers, on spelling her subject’s name ‘Zelenskyy’. While this is one legitimate transliteration of a common Russian ending, it’s rare, and phonetically incorrect, as it is actually pronounced as a single vowel. Nobody writes Dostoyevskyy or Trotskyy. Enough, please, with Zelenskyy.

The full story of this political career obviously cannot yet be written. But these two biographies provide important reminders of where Zelensky comes from, both personally and politically. It’s important to remember that he was elected on a promise to end the conflict with Russia. In October 2019 he almost succeeded in brokering local referendums in the rebel republics of the Donbas that would have resolved their status, but was thwarted by a small but vocal ultranationalist minority. For most of his time as president he was attacked for being too pro-Russian. As a native Russian speaker himself, Zelensky attempted to defuse Ukraine’s long-running culture wars over language by describing Russian speakers as ‘patriots’ and ‘heroic defenders of Ukraine’. But one thing is abundantly clear from these important and detailed accounts: Zelensky is easily the equal of the most impressive wartime leaders the West has ever had.