Kyiv, Ukraine – It’s subsequent to unimaginable to think about Volodymyr Zelenskyy clean-shaven, clad in informal garments and cracking jokes proper subsequent to the Kremlin.
“I’m right here, within the coronary heart of Russia – if it nonetheless has a coronary heart,” a radiant Zelenskyy quipped in a satirical “information dispatch” filmed close to the Kremlin’s vermilion partitions.
The 12 months was 2014, Moscow had already annexed Crimea and was backing separatists in Donbas and pro-Kremlin protesters in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east and south.
Zelenskyy was a comic, actor and head of the District 95 troupe. Politics, for him, was fodder for sarcastic routines. “You’ll be able to say, ‘hail Ukraine’ in Moscow, and nothing severe will occur to you,” he mentioned within the video. “Nothing that may’t be dealt with by trendy medication.”
Greater than a decade later, he doesn’t crack jokes for a residing any extra. As a substitute, he’s president of wartime Ukraine – and on Friday is scheduled to fulfill together with his US counterpart Donald Trump in Washington. Three years after Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zelenskyy’s nation wants greater than trendy medication to outlive as Trump alerts a willingness to sacrifice Kyiv’s pursuits for a cope with Putin, whom he has beforehand mentioned he admires.
Final week, Zelenskyy surprised the world by providing to resign in change for safety ensures and NATO membership for Ukraine, amid rising private tensions with Trump, who has dominated out Kyiv’s entry into the alliance.
However shocking folks isn’t new for Zelenskyy.
His political model since his foray into politics has been constructed on the concept he’s no common politician, hungry to remain in energy at any price. And Zelenskyy’s rigorously curated, shape-shifting picture has been central to that narrative.
‘Ukraine of my goals’
For the reason that late Nineteen Nineties, Zelenskyy the actor has tried a dizzying array of masks on stage, in addition to blue and silver screens.
He carried out in entrance of Russian President Vladimir Putin, impersonated Putin’s alleged mistress Alina Kabayeva, wore black latex and excessive heels whereas moaning concerning the style of uncured lard, and performed Napoleon, musketeer d’Argagnan and a wannabe heartthrob in slapstick comedies and TV collection.
And, after all, there was a job of Vasily Holoborodko, a dirt-poor historical past trainer whose obscene rant about corrupt politicians and oligarchs made Zelenskyy a YouTube star with the collection Public Servant, propelling him to presidential energy.
That concerned Zelenskyy’s first picture makeover.
Ukrainians have been disillusioned with Petro Poroshenko, an oligarch-turned-president, who reneged on his pledges to finish the Donbas conflict and quell corruption when he got here to energy in 2014 – and as a substitute acquired mired in corruption scandals of his personal.
In 2018, Zelenskyy registered a political celebration predictably named Public Servant – and topped opinion polls months earlier than formally entering into the election fray. A psychologist defined his choice to develop into a politician as reflective of his “trickster” want to interrupt Ukraine’s political order.
“Zelenskyy is an archetypal trickster, an individual who destroys, despises, doubts issues, breaks the principles,” psychologist Valentyn Kim informed the DSNews.ua web site in June 2022. He “stormed into Ukrainian politics as a destroyer of earlier political accords”.
And throughout the conflict, a trickster is “a simpler determine” than common leaders, he was quoted as saying.
Throughout his election marketing campaign, Zelenskyy’s public relations staff shrewdly streamlined his media protection by shunning information conferences and interviews with international media shops to keep away from destructive protection, as a substitute controlling the information stream by movies and social community posts.
He introduced his candidacy on New 12 months’s Eve, a secular equal of Christmas in many of the former Soviet Union – and congratulated Ukrainians with a “new public servant” – himself.
He began carrying fits and turtlenecks. His pledges sounded youthfully optimistic.
“I’ll inform you concerning the Ukraine of my goals. The Ukraine, the place the one taking pictures is the sound of marriage ceremony fireworks, the Ukraine, the place you possibly can register a enterprise inside an hour, get a passport in quarter-hour and vote in a single second, on-line,” he mentioned in a booklet disseminated by his staff in early 2019.
Within the April 2019 presidential election, he trounced Poroshenko, successful a staggering 73 p.c of the vote – the very best ever vote share in Ukrainian historical past.
He was the anti-establishment golden boy, the peacenik who celebrated his election in a nightclub and who would rewrite Ukraine’s political playbook.
As he took the presidential pledge, Zelenskyy got here throughout as somebody who was “anti-power, somebody who’s destined to do issues in a different way, not the way in which his predecessors did”, Svitlana Chunikhina, vice chairman of the Kyiv-based Affiliation of Political Psychologists informed Al Jazeera.
Rising amid anti-Semitism
In most of his roles as a comic, Zelenskyy spoke Russian – and sometimes added an exaggerated accent, a cliché sometimes related to Ukrainian Jews. It was a creative reference to the Black Sea port of Odesa, the capital of each Ukraine’s Jewish group and satire.
However Zelenskyy is himself Jewish – his great-grandfather and three of his sons have been killed by German Nazis, and the one surviving little one, Semyon, was a adorned World Conflict II hero.
At this time’s Ukraine lionizes Semyon’s sworn enemies – nationalist, anti-communist and anti-Semitic leaders Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych – turning a blind eye to their collaboration with the Nazis and their function within the mass killings of Jews and Poles.
And provided that czarist-era Ukraine was the epicentre of pogroms that pressured tens of millions of Ashkenazi (Western) Jews to the US and Palestine, Zelenskyy’s rise to energy appears much more unbelievable.
Surprisingly, his roots “weren’t a part of the agenda” throughout the 2019 marketing campaign, Kyiv-based analyst Vyacheslav Likhachyov informed Al Jazeera.
Zelenskyy’s “turbo-patriotic opponents had sufficient triggers” corresponding to District 95’s irreverent jokes about anti-Russian protesters who clashed with police loyal to pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych, and a couple of decree from the Constantinople Patriarch Bartholomew on establishing a brand new Ukrainian Orthodox Church unbiased from the Moscow Patriarchate.
Nevertheless, there have been widespread insinuations from Poroshenko loyalists and nationalist teams that Zelenskyy was a puppet of Jewish Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, whose 1+1 tv community aired District 95 exhibits and the Public Servant collection.
Proving the insinuations fallacious took 4 years – Kolomoisky was arrested in 2023 and charged with organising the killing of a lawyer 20 years earlier. The arrest would develop into a part of Zelenskyy’s half-hearted marketing campaign to reign in oligarchs who used their clout and media empires to again politicians.
Zelenskyy’s Jewish roots, nonetheless, by no means stopped pro-Kremlin media from labelling him a “neo-Nazi” whose “fascist junta” employed far-right goons and international “mercenaries” to “suppress” the alleged political tilt of all of Ukraine in the direction of Moscow.
“A brand new actuality”
However it was Zelenskyy’s guarantees to convey new folks to energy and finish the Donbas conflict with Russian proxies that gained him help, and the presidency.
“He was completely honest in attempting to barter peace” with Putin, Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta suppose tank, informed Al Jazeera. It wasn’t, he mentioned, a case of “populist lies”.
The Public Servant celebration swelled its ranks by unexpectedly recruiting a motley crew of B-grade politicians, rookies and anticorruption activists – and gained 227 seats in Ukraine’s 450-seat parliament in July 2019.
“That is certainly a brand new actuality,” Kyiv-based analyst Mikhail Pogrebinsky informed Al Jazeera after that vote.
Public Servant had obtained a monopoly on forming a brand new authorities, appointing regional heads and controlling the judiciary and legislation enforcement system.
Some insiders have been sceptical.
“That is going to be a catastrophe for Ukraine,” a showbusiness government who knew Zelenskyy and his staff informed Al Jazeera on situation of anonymity days earlier than the vote.
“Of their discipline [of comedy] they’re good professionals, however I don’t suppose these folks know what they’re doing in politics.”
From Ukraine’s ‘Mars’ to the presidential palace
Lots of Zelenskyy’s closest allies hailed from his hometown – Kryvyi Rih (“Crooked Horn”, in Ukrainian), a rustbelt and rust-coloured metropolis in central Ukraine with a pre-war inhabitants of 630,000.
Resembling a 120km (75-mile) lengthy inkblot, it’s crammed with mines, smelters and metal vegetation and surrounded by mountains of spent ore and backbreaking, potholed roads.
Locals lovingly examine it to Mars as a result of iron ore mud and industrial air pollution redden the air, birds’ plumage and even snow.
Kryvyi Rih’s residents are often known as robust, easy and down-to-earth.
“It is a metropolis of steely, manly character that by no means lets one down, the character of camaraderie and mutual help,” Volodymir Kazakov, historian and tour information, informed Al Jazeera days earlier than Zelenskyy’s 2019 election.
Zelenskyy grew up in a comparatively affluent household of college professors in part of city whose title he would make well-known together with his comedy group: District 95.
Nonetheless, this reporter noticed damaged vodka bottles and obscene graffiti on the staircase resulting in his dad and mom’ residence door on the twelfth flooring of a Soviet-era concrete beehive. Zelenskyy was born there in 1978, and neighbours referred to as him a pure chief and arbiter.
“He was a brilliant and busy boy,” Tatyana Oreshaka, a housewife in her 50s, informed Al Jazeera, standing metres away from the doorway to the constructing. “If different youngsters had an argument, they’d ask him to be a decide.”
Zelenskyy grew up within the Nineteen Nineties, a chaotic and painful decade, when a transition to the market financial system coincided with the pauperisation of tens of tens of millions of Ukrainians, an epidemic of heroin abuse and the rise of organized crime.
The Kryviy Rih of that decade formed Zelenskyy’s “iron-fisted enterprise acumen” and reliance on childhood mates, Kazakov mentioned.
Thirty members of Zelenskyy’s District 95 group, its associates or contractors grew to become a part of Zelenskyy’s authorities, in response to the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, a civil group.
One in all them is lawyer Andriy Yermak, head of the presidential administration extensively seen as Zelenskyy’s “gray cardinal”.
One other one is Ivan Bakanov, who made a fortune in hydroelectric energy earlier than changing into head of District 95 and the Public Servant celebration.
In 2019, Zelenskyy appointed Bakanov to helm the Safety Service of Ukraine, the primary intelligence company – however fired him three years later after a string of scandals that concerned Russian spies and corruption allegations.
A dozen extra firings and corruption scandals in his celebration since then have additional eroded Zelenskyy’s lustre earlier than the Ukrainian public. Public Servant’s members “in a short time started exhibiting a propensity for corruption”, analyst Fesenko mentioned. “And to that, Zelenskyy didn’t have an answer.”
‘Ukraine’s Churchill’
Most significantly, Zelenskyy’s makes an attempt to pacify Putin failed.
The turning level was 2021, when Zelenskyy misplaced “his naive perception that he may cope with Putin”, Fesenko mentioned.
Zelenskyy resisted Moscow’s strain, as he sanctioned oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, Putin’s ally in Ukraine, and shut down his media empire that trumpeted pro-Kremlin narratives.
In the meantime, Putin declared Ukraine “a synthetic state” and amassed tens of hundreds of troops that invaded on February 24, 2022.
It was time for Zelenskyy’s largest transformation.
Opposite to US President Joe Biden’s recommendation to flee, he stayed in Kyiv – at the same time as Russian forces seized northern suburbs, killing a whole bunch of civilians, and pummelled the abandoned, frozen, frightened metropolis with bombs and missiles.
The one-time jester grew to become a David combating the Russian Goliath.
“Nobody anticipated Zelenskyy to develop into a wartime chief, a Ukrainian Churchill,” Fesenko mentioned. “He made the existential selection on the conflict’s first day – win or die.”
That call was accompanied by a brand new look – inexperienced navy fatigues, a week-old stubble and an air of drained preoccupation.
Zelenskyy relentlessly toured Western capitals giving speeches in his restricted English and urging navy and monetary support.
He nonetheless sometimes cracked jokes that typically have been misplaced in translation.
His approval scores amongst Ukrainians soared, particularly after Russia withdrew from round Kyiv and northern Ukraine, was kicked out of the jap Kharkiv area and left the southern metropolis of Kherson, the most important regional centre its forces had occupied.
Western leaders corresponding to Biden or British then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson noticed their visits to Kyiv as a badge of honour and an opportunity to spice up their very own approval scores.
Zelenskyy started to understand his political and private would possibly.
“Today, he’s energy. He doesn’t stay the function, however feels absolutely snug inside it,” psychologist Chunikhina mentioned. “He’s nonetheless not towards doing issues in a different way, however he doesn’t shut energy like one thing inherently alien.”
However although US President Donald Trump described Zelenskyy as a “dictator” with a 4 p.c approval score final week, the Ukrainian chief stays extensively standard. Amid his spat with Trump, Zelenskyy’s scores have truly jumped, up from 58 to about 65 p.c, in response to a February 21 survey. And his grip over energy, say consultants, is nothing like Putin’s – a minimum of not but. The Russian chief has been in workplace since 1999.
“Zelenskyy is much from the stage of ‘If there’s no Putin – there’s no Russia,’ though one ought to do not forget that the chance of merging with the job is harmful to any politician in any circumstances,” Chunikhina mentioned.
Zelenskyy rising rival: Zaluzhnyi
But to many in Ukraine, Zelenskyy can also be more and more an emblem of the nation’s navy struggles. The 2023 and 2024 navy campaigns didn’t convey a victory. Counteroffensives have failed as US navy support has stalled for months – largely due to Trump’s strain on Republican members of Congress to withhold new funding for Kyiv.
In the meantime, Russia slowly however absolutely retains occupying chunks of Donbas regardless of dropping tens of hundreds of troops in frontal assaults on Ukrainian positions. Moscow’s troops have superior in areas the place, critics argue, Zelenskyy-appointed regional heads ought to have erected impregnable fortifications that price billions of {dollars} on paper.
Many blame Zelenskyy for the February 2024 firing of his prime commander Valerii Zaluzhny, a taciturn, bear-like four-star common who at the moment serves as Ukrainian ambassador to the UK.
Borislav Bereza, a former legislator with the nationalist UKROP celebration, claimed in a webposted video in late December that Zelenskyy’s staff could provoke prison fees towards Zaluzhnyi for allegedly ordering the removing of landmines between annexed Crimea and the southern Kherson area days earlier than the invasion. Most of Kherson was taken over by Russia in early March 2022.
In Zaluzhnyi, Zelenskyy could have discovered his nemesis and important political rival.
Three-quarters of Ukrainians belief him, in response to a number of polls, seeing him as a dependable father determine, a super protector.
Identical to Zelenskyy in 2018, Zaluzhnyi has by no means mentioned a phrase about working for president – however is extensively anticipated to contest the election, at any time when it’s held.
“If Zaluzhnyi takes half within the [presidential] vote, Zelenskyy loses,” Fesenko mentioned.
Many different political heavyweights corresponding to former President Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko are additionally anticipated to compete in a future presidential election.
However observers warn that any new president will face challenges very completely different to those Zelenskyy confronted when he first entered workplace six years in the past.
Tens of millions of Ukrainians have been uprooted, their hometowns and houses destroyed. Ukraine wants billions of {dollars} to construct housing for them and restore infrastructure, whereas a dire demographic disaster could put an finish to any hopes of full restoration.
Zelenskyy’s supply to resign won’t have been solely a tactical ploy.
“The presidential chair lately is an electrical chair,” Kyiv-based analyst Oleh Saakyan mentioned in televised remarks on February 20. “Nobody needs to get there to right away take in all of the destructive stuff.”
