Editorial: Volodymyr Zelenskyy sure knows his audience. His subtexts could be a savvy blueprint for peace.

Not in a generation, maybe several generations, have we seen a political leader as adept as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy at matching his soaring emotional rhetoric to his audience.

When he talked to the British parliament to argue for the no-fly zone his nation desperately wants, he quoted Winston Churchill. When he spoke to the Canadian parliament, he referred to the prime minister as “Justin,” and asked his listeners to imagine their feelings if Toronto or Vancouver were attacked.

When he spoke to the joint session of the Congress on Wednesday, he came armed with a skillfully produced and emotionally powerful video, referenced Pearl Harbor and quoted Martin Luther King Jr. Both sides of the aisle gushed.

And when Zelenskyy spoke to Germany’s Bundestag Thursday, he centered his remarks around Ronald Reagan’s famous demand of Mikhail Gorbachev that he remove the Berlin Wall.

“I turn to you, dear Chancellor Scholz,” Zelenskyy said, referencing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and suggesting that the phrase “never again,” typically a reference to the Holocaust, was being subsumed by current hypocrisy and inaction. In so doing, he also made headlines in Israel.

“Tear down this wall,” Zelenskyy said Thursday. “Give Germany the leadership that Germany deserves, so that your descendants will be proud of you.”

But as admirable as all that may seem, Zelenskyy also clearly knows that there is another audience member watching from the metaphorical balcony: Vladimir Putin.

And he’s gambling that he’s a charmless man stuck in an increasingly unpopular war at home, outperformed on the world stage by Zelenskyy (and that’s the understatement of the 21st century) and looking for a way out.

There was a subtext to all three of those speeches and it involved Zelenskyy shrewdly distancing himself from NATO.

In the speech to Congress, Zelenskyy made mention of an intriguing new idea that surprised both the media and elected officials: the creation of something he called “U-24,” or “United for Peace,” seemingly a nimble third alliance that might co-exist with NATO and the oppositional axis of China and Russia (and their allies) with “U-24″ keeping the peace, coming immediately to the aid of countries under attack and even acting as a clearinghouse for humanitarian aid following disasters other than warfare.

Zelenskkyy described this aspiration as “a union of responsible states with the strength and conscience to stop conflicts. Immediately. Provide all necessary assistance within 24 hours. If necessary, with weapons. If necessary, with sanctions, humanitarian support, political support, money. Everything we need to keep the peace.”

He added that his new multinational organization could assist “those who are experiencing natural disasters, man-made disasters, who have become victims of a humanitarian crisis or an epidemic.” He even included improving the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines to needy nations.

On the face of it, that’s not a bad idea if you want to protect smaller independent countries outside of NATO from powerful aggressors like Putin. Few would see the United Nations as a nimble organization nor capable of throwing off the preferences of major superpowers.

It’s worth remembering that in the early years of what was then the growing European Economic Community, an argument for membership was that a powerful middle ground must emerge to counterbalance the supranational but oppositional power of the Soviets and the United States. In the 1970s, a unified, multinational third body was seen in Europe as a potential safety valve that might keep the world better protected from nuclear war.

Generally speaking, the reaction to “U-24″ from those in the foreign policy establishment to whom we spoke Thursday was that the idea was idealistic, for sure, but also impractical and expensive. Certainly, no one is about to start forming some complicated new international alliance while Russian missiles are killing Ukrainian citizens on a daily basis. It’s not a solution to the immediate crisis, as Zelenskyy surely is well aware.

Perhaps U-24 was a piece of inspired improvisation by the Ukrainian leader and his speechwriters, designed primarily as a way of appealing to the American people and casting the Ukranians as global advocates for peace.

But this was an effective way of Zelenskyy signaling to Putin that he was casting around for an alternative to his nation’s NATO membership, a concession that the Russian leader already has said is a precondition to any end to the shelling of the Ukrainian people.

Maybe the Zelenskyy subtext goes even deeper than that. For example, the BBC’s John Simpson, choosing to be optimistic about the emergence of a back-door way for Putin to save face at home and declare victory even as he loses, argued that Zelenskyy was, in fact, asking NATO for something (a no-fly zone) that he well knew it could not and arguably should not deliver. That would allow Zelenskyy to save face at home by declaring the alliance not worth joining anyway (hence U-24) and subtly telling Putin that he will get something that will in turn let him save face, too. All with an aim of stopping the ongoing murder of the Ukranian people and allowing Ukraine to remain an independent nation, albeit one willing to offer the concessions that are required in all successful negotiations, whether for peace or a condominium in Chicago.

Perhaps that’s too far down the subtextual rabbit hole.

Still, Zelenskyy is delivering a succession of stunning international performances, all on video link, usually with that signature T-shirt. Putin is being reduced to rhetorical rubble and we could not be more impressed with the Ukrainian leader, nor more anxious that the killing of innocents soon will cease.

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