Volodymyr

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 buildup, Zelensky’s record as president had been mixed. 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, opinion was divided between those who did not think the then 41-year-old entertainer sufficiently serious and those who saw in his clean-uppolitics message a refreshing change. While Zelensky went on to preside over economic improvements and Ukraine’s continuing tilt towards the West, In Kyiv January 2022 the sense was that he had proved too close to some of the country’s oligarchs and too prone to populist, quick-fix policies.

But as Winston Churchill showed, indifferent peacetime politicians can make superb wartime ones. In retrospect there was always something more to Zelensky, who was born to Jewish parents in the Russian-speaking city of Kryvyi Rih (his great-grandfather died in the Holocaust). One person who had a long meeting with him shortly before the outbreak of the war recalls: “I will never forget his intensity. He didn’t break your stare. There was sangfroid there.” That impression has turned a mediocre president into a symbol of a country with a backbone of steel. To grasp the scale of the transformation of the Ukrainian president – confronted with an all-out attack by the murderous regime that happens to possess the world’s largest nuclear arsenal – try imagining a Hugh Grant or a Stephen Colbert changing into a Churchill or a Charles de Gaulle.