He knows his head has a price. Every time he speaks, he dictates a kind of will. He also knows that Vladimir Putin wants him imprisoned or killed. Or first imprisoned and then dead. Of all the millions of people that Russia's boss who wants to become Soviet again is willing to assassinate, the body Putin demands the most is that of Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky.
He is haunted by death because he knows that this is the language of his enemy. And the world, which should do more than be horrified, is horrified, yes, of course, it would be missing more, and it also wonders if Zelensky, a comic actor, type of television and haha ha, became overnight the hero who overflows courage, or if there was already something like that in his time of funny. It's a banal question. And so is the answer. A kind of banality of evil that would delight Hanna Arendt.
What does it matter when you became a hero, if bombs destroy your country and people are shot dead, with their hands tied behind their backs, or succumb in giant mass graves, between mud and snow? In the 21st century, Russia kills as it knows, as in the 40s of the last century. And people die just like they did then. And the bereavers of the war cry and scream in the same way, kneeling in the mud, as in the 1940s. Everything is the same, except that cell phones and drones are filming you: that is technological progress.
What can Zelensky expect? Nothing. A few days ago, he released another short, testamentary, terrible message: “I no longer believe the world.” An epitaph phrase that will be remembered if Putin gets his head. Or what will remain in history, along with others as effective and effective as the previous one. If Zelensky knows anything, it's handling communication. When the United States offered to help him evacuate Kiev, under Russian siege, Zelensky replied, “We need weapons, not a car ride.” And the short video that showed him in the streets of Kiev, at high night, flanked by some members of his government, with a defiant pose, not only denied the Russian campaign that spoke of his escape, but also testified, he said without saying: “Here we are”.
Who is Zelensky? He was born on January 25, 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city in the southeast of what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and today is simply Ukraine. His father, of Jewish origin, headed the academic department of cybernetics and computer hardware at the Kryvyi Rog Institute of Economics, a pioneer of computer science; his mother was an engineer. Semyon, Zelensky's grandfather, was a colonel in the Red Army in the 57th Motorized Rifle Division of the Guard during the Second War. Zelensky's great-grandfather and three of his great uncles were killed in the Nazi camps. So Putin knew very well what he was saying and what he wanted to provoke when he accused Zelensky of being a Nazi.
The Ukrainian president always spoke little about his childhood. He grew up in an “ordinary Soviet Jewish family, not very religious because religion was suppressed in the USSR” and in which Russian was always spoken. When he was 16, he passed the English as a Foreign Language exam and received a scholarship to study in Israel, but his father wouldn't let him travel. He then studied at the Kryvyi Rog Economic Institute, and at the Kiev National Economic University, where he graduated in law in 2000. He never exercised. One day, at the age of seventeen, she went up to a stage and never came down from it again.
He married a schoolmate, Olena Kiyashko, in 2003. They have two children: Oleksandra, who was born in July 2004 and Kirilo, who was born in 2013. Olena said that the two grew up in an open, Russian-speaking environment, with no relatives who spoke Ukrainian, except those who spoke Surzhyk, a dialect that combines the two languages. In April 2019, as the storm loomed over Ukraine, Olena confided to the BBC that the couple could speak Ukrainian fluently, “as long as Volodomir is not influenced by stress and psychological pressure.” I mean, never.
The setting for Zelensky at the age of seventeen was the KVN, which forged his roots as an actor. KVN was a very complex Russian television phenomenon. The acronym stands for “Kloub Veselykh i Nakhodtchivykh”, something like “The Club of the Merry Ingeniosos”, a national competition of comedies, comedians and monologists, with a sport feature: a league and an annual champion. Zelensky joined the home team and then the Ukrainian team, who fought and won the national tournament in 1997. He then created and directed the Kvartal 95 team with which he competed in the national KVN between 1998 and 2003. It was from the stage that Zelensky visited several of the post-Soviet countries, the USSR had disappeared as such in 1991. Also in 2003 Kvartal 95 produced television programs for the Ukrainian channel 1+1 and then for the Inter channel.
Kvartal 95 created a television series in which Zelensky played the role of president of Ukraine: it was called the People's Servant and aired between 2015 and 2019. It was a huge success, so much so that a political party was born under the name of the series, which included a large part of the employees of Kvartal 95.
In case anyone forgot, Ukraine was one of the three decisive countries for the collapse of the USSR, thanks to the Treaty of Belavezha signed on December 8, 1991 by the President of the Soviet Socialist Republics of Russia, Boris Yeltsin of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk and Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich.
On December 31 of that year, the red flag of the hammer and sickle was last lowered from the Kremlin. For Putin, then head of the powerful KGB, that represented a tragedy. He then said: “The fall of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. For the Russian people, this represented a real drama. Tens of millions of our citizens and compatriots found themselves outside their Russian territory. The epidemic of destruction spread even in Russia. Citizens' savings were annihilated and old ideals destroyed.” Perhaps part of that tacit debt will pay off today, with its blood, Ukraine.
As the star of the program Servant del Pueblo, Zelensky played for elevation. In fiction, he was a history teacher at a high school who suddenly won the presidential election after a video showed him in full ranting against the corruption of the Ukrainian government. In March 2019, he decided that life would copy art and confessed to the German magazine Der Spiegel that he was going to dedicate himself to politics to replace then-President Petró Poroshenki in the government. He won the elections in the first round and in the second round, on April 21, 2019, exactly three years ago, with seventy-three percent of the votes.
His ideology was simple and set up a school: he denounced political elites and promised to fight corruption, abolish parliamentary immunity, create a procedure to remove the Head of State in case of serious misconduct and regular consultation with Ukrainians through referendums. Already in the campaign, he was criticized for accepting much of the funding by the millionaire Igor Kolomioisky, who announced that he was willing to advise the President as soon as Zelensky won the second round of elections.
He always had the support of the West: Emmanuel Macron, president of France, received him on April 12, before his electoral triumph, Donald Trump, then at the head of the White House congratulated him on his victory and Polish President Andrzej Duda was the first of the European leaders, or pro-European, to greet him afterwards of his victory.
Did Zelensky not know what he was exposed to? It's hard to think not. Presiding over Ukraine with Putin facing and in conflict over the territories of Donetsk and Lugansk did not bode either peace, nor peace. Nor did they grant peace and quiet to fulfill, once in power, the promises of the campaign. It always happens. A proposal by Zelensky to punish illicit enrichment with greater penal sanctions was rejected by the parliament, the Rada. The new president tried to make peace with Russia, but Russia did not want peace with Ukraine.
Beginning in 2014 and after the Russian annexation of Crimea, Ukraine, the seat of the powerful Sevastopol naval base, the two pro-Russian regions of eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Lugansk, had declared themselves Independent People's Republics of Ukraine. What followed was a civil war that already caused the death of fourteen thousand fighters on both sides.
In that war Donald Trump stuck his trunk. Ukraine lost as an ally to the United States, which cut off aid of $400 million to strengthen Zelensky's army. Trump, who also seems to have a strange weakness for Putin, asked the Ukrainian president, in exchange for his assistance, to help him legitimize his accusations against Joe Biden, his rival in the 2020 elections. It was perhaps the first time that Zelensky began not to believe in the world.
It all started when Zelensky's government began to hear strong, well-deserved criticism of his management. He had not been able to end corruption, despite his promises of democratization he had banned three television channels that were hostile to him, or which he considered hostile to him and had set up a vertical government structure that was far from the basic principle of law. Nothing you don't know.
The war turned the common ruler into a hero. He returned the guy from TV, monologue and comedy steps to pull the strings of the epic narrative of that war, facilitated by Russian barbarism and Putin's own mediocrity. Zelensky became a legend. At the start of the Russian invasion, when Putin's news services announced Zelensky's intention to bomb the Donbas region, the president declared: “Bomb the Donbas? The stadium where my friends and I cheered for our team at the 2012 European Cup? The bar where we then drown the penalties of defeat? Bomb Lugansk, where my best friend's mother lives?”
It was enough. That simple gesture humanized the Ukrainians and left Putin and his troops as murderers. That island defended by scarce troops and threatened by Russian naval forces who received as an answer: “Go get the c..., Russian ship”. The sample of Russian rogue shows on Ukrainian television and that traveled the world; the message to the United States Congress in which he asked that they remember Peral Harbor and the 9/11 attacks; his speech to the British Parliament, in which he remembered (and perhaps came close to resembling) Winston Churchill and his solitary struggle in 1940 against Nazi barbarism show a man in unequal struggle against a major world nuclear power.
He knows, and he let the world know, that they're going through his head. And whenever it appears on the screen it seems to say I'm still here.
Maybe he's not a hero. Not much less. He's a guy who does what he's supposed to do, expects death to respect him and doesn't believe in the world anymore. That alone makes him a hero of this time.
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