How comic Volodymyr Zelensky became Ukraine’s ‘Man of the People’

On Feb. 25, 2022, just a day after Russian soldiers stormed the border of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky took a huge risk. Determined to disprove Russian disinformation that he’d fled the country, the Ukrainian leader left the safety of his compound and recorded a cellphone video in the middle of Kyiv.

“All of us are here protecting the independence of our country,” he said in the message that went viral on Twitter. “And it will continue to be this way.”

One of his aides “experienced a dreadful feeling of exposure to the Russian bombers in the sky,” writes Simon Shuster in his new book, “The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader Out of Volodymyr Zelensky” (William Morrow), out now. It was as though “we were standing there naked,” he told the author. But Zelensky was unflinching and defiant.

Everything about Zelensky’s fearlessness was, at least on the surface, improbable. Before becoming a politician — he won the presidency in a 2019 landslide — Zelensky was a professional actor, standup comic, and producer for movies and TV.

And yet, over the course of that first year at war, something changed. In front of a worldwide audience, Zelensky transformed “into a wartime president unique to our age of instant information,” writes Shuster, who was afforded unprecedented access to Zelensky. But it was about something more than just rising to the occasion.

“It was the showmanship he honed over more than 20 years as an actor on the stage and a producer in the movie business that made Zelensky so effective in fighting this war,” writes Shuster.

This wasn’t just a war about military battles. It required Ukraine not only to hold the world’s attention “but to win the sympathy of people and their governments across the globe,” writes Shuster.

Rarely has life imitated art quite as accurately as it did with Zelensky. In 2015, Zelensky starred in a satirical series called “Servant of the People” — it aired on Ukrainian TV and YouTube — in which he plays a schoolteacher who lives with his parents and is thrust into the limelight when a student shares a video of him ranting about corruption in politics.

“They come to power and steal and steal and steal, and nobody gives a s–t,” his character bellows. “If I could get in there, I’d show them!” And that’s exactly what happens. After a crowdsourced campaign, the schoolteacher is elected president of Ukraine, where he has to contend with unscrupulous oligarchs and other crooks.

The show “would become his gateway into politics,” writes Shuster. “It invited the public to confuse Zelensky with the character he played, an eminently humble, likable, and good-hearted leader.”

When he decided to run for office — nominated by a political party named after the sitcom — his success relied, much like it had on TV, on his ability “to seem relatable, normal, like one of the guys,” writes Shuster.

Even after winning the presidency with 73% of the vote, he didn’t believe he needed to change his persona. “I don’t want to become politically correct,” Zelensky told Shuster. “That’s not my thing.” His life as a showman, Shuster writes, “had taught him what he needed to play the role of president.”

Part of that was just the projection of confidence, even when Zelensky was learning about how to be a war leader in real-time. After the Russian invasion, conventional wisdom had it that Zelensky would leave the country. Not only did Zelensky stay, he presented the brave face of a lifetime politician who was no stranger to international conflict despite being relatively new to the job. His first wartime remark, made to Oleksiy Danilov, his National Security and Defense Council secretary, was (roughly translated from Russian), “Let’s kick some ass.”

His confidence was a mix of showmanship and sweet naivete. During a phone call to his mother — who lived in southeastern Ukraine, right in the path of the Russian invaders — he assured her that everything would be fine. “You’re the president’s mom,” Zelensky said, according to an aide who witnessed it. “Nothing can happen to you.”

His bravery often put him in “greater danger than seemed necessary for his cause,” the author recounts. “Sometimes, while following him around, I wished he felt more of the fear.”

But his real weapon, the one that Putin’s blustering threats couldn’t compete with, was his ability to perform for the camera. “He’s an actor, and he understands that he has a role to play, and he will play the role,” journalist and Ukraine expert Anne Applebaum said on NPR.

His role wasn’t to mastermind a battle plan but to change the way the outside world perceived the war.  “You have to be winning, because people love winners,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kuleba explained to Shuster. “You need a clear character associated with the story to be visible to them all the time, and that’s President Zelensky in our case. And you need a good story to tell. It’s bad guys attacking good guys, and good guys winning. That’s what people love.”

For much of 2022, Zelensky averaged roughly one speech per day, from the World Bank to the European Parliament to the Venice Film Festival. And he always found a way to connect Ukraine’s conflict with the unique history of his audience. “When he spoke to the U.S. Congress in March 2022, he referenced Pearl Harbor and 9/11,” writes Shuster. “The German parliament heard him invoke the history of the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall.” His German speech was so powerful, that even his translator had to pause and choke back tears.

He wasn’t invited to the Academy Awards in 2022 — despite Sean Penn’s best efforts — but he was welcomed at the Grammy Awards that April. Nonetheless, his public relations efforts paid off. A steady supply of weapons began arriving from the West. Foreign envoys — including President Biden in February 2023 – felt safe enough to visit Zelensky in his capital, if only because the trips “played well for their constituents back home,” writes Shuster. “It turned into a political rite of passage for his European allies to stand beside him for a photo.”

In December of 2022, the now 44-year-old leader flew to Washington for a speech before Congress, and explained how Ukraine had already defeated Russia “in the battle of minds. The Russian tyranny has lost control over us, and it will never influence our minds again.”

In a line that could’ve come from one of his comedy performances, Zelensky referenced the $40 billion in aid from the US earlier that year. “Is it enough?” Zelensky asked. “Honestly, not really.”

Shuster, who watched from the balcony, tallied 13 standing ovations before he gave up counting. A senator told him later that “he could not remember a time in his three decades on Capitol Hill when a foreign leader received such an admiring reception,” Shuster writes.

While his skills as a showman have certainly come in handy, Shuster frames Zelensky primarily as a man who wants to make a difference.

During one of his early press conferences, a reporter asked Zelensky how he was holding up. “My life today is beautiful,” he said. “I feel that I’m needed.” That, he added, was the main purpose in life. “Not just to be a blank space that breathes, walks, and eats,” Zelensky said. “But to live…to feel that your life matters to others.”