A few weeks before the Russian invasion, the presidency of Zelensky, started three years earlier, seemed to lose momentum. The former actor and comedian struggled to fulfill his promesses elections in a country plagued by poverty and corruption.
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The conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region remained stagnant, despite the fact that Zelensky focused his 2019 presidential campaign on promeneed to resolve it peacefully. His rivals were aware of his weaknesses and doubts began to arise among the population as to whether he was the right person to lead the country.
Everything changed on February 24, 2022. That Thursday, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, announced the beginning of the intervention of the Russian army in Ukraine. The invasion represented a historic moment in a post-Soviet space marked by tensions between Russia and its neighbors, three decades after the collapse of the USSR. It was also a crucial moment in the trajectory of Zelensky, who went from a struggling president to the leader of the Ukrainian military resistance.
On the first day of the invasion, “there was a rumor that Zelensky would flee, as he gave the impression of being a weak president, who would not be able to resist military pressure or embody a leader in times of war”, political scientist Volodimir Fesenko recalls to AFP . But the Ukrainian president did not run away. On the contrary, he appeared in a video in the early hours of the conflict: “We are all here, defending our independence and our country.”
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Since the beginning of the invasion, which has caused thousands of victims and millions of refugees, Zelensky has spoken every night. He often calls for greater efforts from the United States and European countries to send military aid to Ukraine and to adopt more economic sanctions against Russia.
In 2015, a year after tensions began in the country with the Maidan uprising and the Russian annexation of Crimea, Zelensky became famous thanks to the series “Servant of the People”. In the comedy, he played a very naive History teacher who managed to be elected president after an argument with a colleague about corruption that went viral.
A few years later, in 2019, Zelensky decided to run for president, winning with a wide margin (73% of the votes in the second round) thanks to the image “of a common man who wanted to shake up the system”.
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His background as an actor helps him in the communication battle during the nine months of conflict. “He doesn’t use diplomatic or politically correct language. He bluntly asks for what Ukraine needs to survive the war,” Sergiy Leshchenko, a former Ukrainian journalist and politician, told AFP.
At the beginning of December, when announcing Zelensky as personality of the year, the British newspaper Financial Times compared him to Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister who faced the Nazis during World War II.
On his recent visit to Washington, Zelensky received a hero's welcome when he arrived in his traditional military attire to meet President Joe Biden and address Congress. American lawmakers gave him a standing ovation.
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(Source: AFP)
