No laughing MATTER
As Russian threat mounts, a comic-actor president shows signs he’s out of his depth
Long before he was elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy landed a jab against his present-day nemesis, Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
It was 2014. Russia had illegally annexed Crimea, a southern Ukrainian peninsula on the Black Sea. A separatist insurrection was underway in the eastern region of Donbass. The future politician, then one of Ukraine’s most popular comic actors, was wearing a pink tracksuit and a pink silk scarf, as he portrayed Russian gymnast Alina Kabaeva — the woman rumoured to be Putin’s paramour.
In the TV skit, Zelenskiy’s Kabaeva scolds Putin for neglecting her, for seizing Crimea when what she had asked for was the Soviet-era novel “The Island of Crimea.” She is furious that Putin has invited a stranger, who identifies himself as being from Donbass, into their home.
“It’s him or me!” Zelenskiy-as-Kabaeva says.
Putin hesitates, then apologetically announces to his guest: “The next president of Ukraine will be Alina.”
As political jokes go, Zelenskiy’s was good. Ironic, too, if only because Zelenskiy did indeed become the next president of Ukraine in 2019, winning by a landslide with 73-per-cent support.
But three years on from his landmark victory, Zelenskiy’s situation is no laughing matter.
More than 100,000 Russian troops are massed on Ukraine’s borders. Western officials warn that an invasion could occur at any time. Moscow, meanwhile, demands the West abandon plans of integrating Ukraine into NATO, fearful of offensive forces and weapons finding their way to Russia’s borders.
Many believe that peace will only come when Putin and U.S. President Joe Biden strike a security deal — an analysis that casts Zelenskiy as a bit player in a sketch with a potentially bitter punchline, both for him and for Ukraine.
“The people of Ukraine decided to have a comedian as the president,” former Ukrainian prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a political opponent, said in an interview.
He described Zelenskiy as populist who lacks the general wisdom and specific governing experience to lead the country at such a critical juncture.
“(Populism) is not unhealthy. It’s poison. It’s disastrous — and not just for Ukraine. It’s disastrous for the world. After populists you always need to find an intensive care unit to fix the problem.”
Servant of the people
Zelenskiy himself drew a comparison with the ultimate populist when he took a now-infamous call from Washington on July 5, 2019.
Then-president Donald Trump was on the line with congratulations for Zelenskiy, who had created a political party from scratch and then led it to a majority in parliamentary elections just a few months later.
Trump had “The Apprentice,” the reality TV show that cast him business genius and decider-in-chief. Zelenskiy had “Servant of the People,” a political comedy in which he played a high school teacher elected to lead the country after a video rant about the rotten state of Ukrainian politics goes viral and hits a countrywide nerve.
By the time he was campaigning for actual presidential votes in 2019, the country had spent two seasons watching him in that most audacious of roles, an ethical elected official.
But this phone call with Trump was stranger still.
“I would like to confess to you that I had an opportunity to learn from you. We used quite a few of your skills and knowledge and were able to use it as an example for our elections,” Zelenskiy told Trump.
He used the half-hour call to invite his American counterpart to visit Kyiv, to fish for an invite of his own to the White House and to let it be known than on a recent visit to friends in New York City, he had stayed in the Trump Tower hotel.
“We wanted to drain the swamp here in our country,” Zelenskiy said. “We brought in many new people. Not the old politicians, not the typical politicians, because we wanted to have a new format and a new type of government. You are a great teacher for us.”
Trump demurred, then requested Zelenskiy order a political hit job by launching a probe into the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son Hunter, a request that scorched Zelenskiy and prompted impeachment proceedings against Trump when the call was brought to light in September 2019.
Zelenskiy was elected after building for himself the persona of a political leader as tough as he was funny. He was regarded as an entertainment mogul who had amassed a small fortune from Kvartal 95, the improv troupe that he had founded in his central Ukrainian hometown of Kryvyi Rih. Voters saw him as a manager who had assembled a team of bright minds and would stand on their shoulders to lead his country out of its political and economic messes.
What emerged from the Trump telephone transcript, however, was a display of Zelenskiy’s ability to gush and cloy, his political naiveté and, ultimately, Ukraine’s dependence on its western backers for money, political credibility and weaponry — specifically the Javelin anti-tank missiles needed to continue the war with Russian-backed separatists.
Putin, peace and prisoners
Russia has long had a hand in Ukrainian politics.
Moscow knows its enemies there as well as it knows which politicians, parties, oligarchs and media titans are willing to do its bidding. However, the Kremlin didn’t seem to know quite what to make of Zelenskiy, at least not at first.
On the one hand, he was a native Russian speaker, which might have been reason for hope. On the other hand, one of his first symbolic acts after winning the election was to change the spelling of his name on his Facebook account from the Russian “Vladimir” to the Ukrainian “Volodymyr.”
A spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry wrote that Zelenskiy’s election was “a chance to reset” relations between Kyiv and Moscow. Putin himself was more circumspect, guarding his public assessment until early June.
“I don’t know this person,” Putin said of Zelenskiy. “He is a good specialist in the field in which he worked before, a good actor. But it’s one thing to play someone. It’s another thing to be someone.”
Strangely, for someone seeking to lead a country in a protracted war, Zelenskiy’s campaign platform made no explicit mention of Russia, but rather of an “aggressor state” occupying Ukrainian territory, noted Iryna Solonenko, a senior fellow at Berlin’s Centre for Liberal Modernity, a think tank.
On the campaign trail, he stuck to a vague script about how he would end the war. At his most aggressive, he told reporters that if he were to meet Putin, he would demand Russia’s withdrawal from the conflict, as well as financial compensation.
But Zelenskiy also proposed holding referendums on Ukraine longstanding goals of European Union and NATO membership — two major irritants for Moscow, which looks upon Ukraine as a buffer between Russia and the western world.
“He wanted to end the war as soon as possible,” Solonenko said. “I think he was ready to give a lot of concessions to Russia.”
Zelenskiy and Putin spoke first by telephone in July, then agreed to an initial exchange of prisoners in September 2019. That fall, Zelenskiy agreed to explore the possibility of local elections for the Donbass cities of Donetsk and Luhansk with the prospect they could one day achieve a special status or regional autonomy.
But he soon backed away from such commitments when he saw the public backlash, the charges of “capitulation” and the marches in the street — even for him, a wildly popular president, there were political boundaries that could not be breached.
A few months later, when Zelenskiy and Putin met for the first time face to face in Paris, they agreed to another exchange of prisoners, this time 200.
“Speaking about a thaw, yes, I do believe that it has started,” Putin told reporters, seated at the same table with his Ukrainian counterpart, albeit separated by then-German chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Bad ratings
The arrival of COVID-19 halted any momentum that might have been building in the peace process. It also plunged Ukraine’s already fragile economy into a deep recession. And the light that had bathed Zelenskiy during his first year in power began to fade.
In January, a tape emerged in which Ukraine’s prime minster, Oleksiy Honcharuk, was heard to comment on Zelenskiy’s “very primitive understanding of the economy.”
Honcharuk offered his resignation. Instead, he was called to a meeting with Zelenskiy. He told the Kyiv Post he was braced for a tongue lashing. Instead, he was met with cameras and studio lights and made to sit through a one-take performance, like a scene that might have been conjured from Zelenskiy’s television series.
“I decided to give you a chance,” Zelenskiy told Honcharuk, adding that the public had placed its trust in him. “You have not yet repaid this debt to our society.”
A few weeks later, Zelenskiy changed course and dismissed all but six of his 17-member cabinet.
It exposed a leader driven not by principle or ideology, but by his old entertainment instincts and the need to boost ratings.
By June, Zelenskiy’s approval numbers were at 26 per cent. By the fall, seven out of 10 Ukrainians said their country was going in the wrong direction, with the war, corruption and unemployment ranking as the top three problems.
“You need the show to be watched by people. This is how he sees politics. He dismissed his first government after half a year because he saw his support was dropping and he is still guided by this,” Solonenko said. “When you produce a show on TV and see that people are bored, you need a turn in the plot.”
Zelenskiy’s plot twist came in early 2021, when he decided to tackle what some consider to be Ukraine’s most endemic problem — the power and influence held by the country’s oligarchs.
In February, he signed off on sanctions against Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russian politician in the Ukrainian parliament and a close personal friend of Putin. The sanctions froze Medvedchuk’s assets and shut down three television stations he is believed to have controlled.
Zelenskiy also passed a bill to create a register of oligarchs who
‘‘ He is a good specialist in the field in which he worked before, a good actor. But it’s one thing to play someone. It’s another thing to be someone.
RUSSIAN PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN ON VOLODYMYR ZELENSKIY
would see their ability to wield influence over the media and political realms severely restricted.
Shortly after the law was adopted, former president Petro Poroshenko — who continued to profit from his chocolate empire and was regularly featured among Ukraine’s oligarch list while in office — was charged with treason for his alleged involvement in coal sales that helped finance the Russian backed separatists in Donbass. Poroshenko, whose trial is pending, says the charges are political retribution.
Crossing the Kremlin
Konstantin Skorkin, a Moscowbased Ukrainian journalist, sees a direct line between Zelenskiy’s crackdown on Medvedchuk, the pro-Russian politician and tycoon, and the Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s borders.
“Putin perceived this as a hostile gesture,” said Skorkin, who is affiliated with Carnegie Center Moscow, a think tank.
In March and April of 2021, Russia’s military began moving worrying numbers of troops and equipment west, toward Ukraine’s borders. Officially, Moscow said it was conducting routine training exercises. Others saw Putin making a play for attention from the West and, indeed, the tension was temporarily defused when Biden agreed to meet with Putin in Geneva.
But when the U.S. leader emerged for a post-summit news conference, there was just one brief, inpassing mention of Ukraine. Biden was not once asked about Zelenskiy, nor did the Ukrainian president’s name cross the American president’s lips.
Skorkin said that Putin had latched onto a strategy to use Ukraine as a trigger for all of Russia’s other, unaddressed grievances: the country’s relationship with NATO, with Europe and, more specifically, with U.S. military activities on the continent.
“Ukraine became a pretext for all of these things,” Skorkin said.
The Russian military held its annual training exercises in the fall in its western military district, which borders Ukraine. The exercises officially ended in mid-September, but drawdown was followed almost immediately by another buildup of tanks and troops rolling across the country.
The movements came to the world’s attention only when the Americans began sharing intelligence with European allies of a potential invasion plan that would see Russia attack Ukraine in late January or February — right about now.
The alarms were sounded most strongly in Washington, London, Brussels and other European capitals, but Zelenskiy said little, neither calming his country’s fears nor stoking them.
Only in mid-January, after Biden told White House reporters it was his belief that Putin would end up following through with an invasion of Ukraine, did Zelenskiy respond with a video address to the nation.
“Take a deep breath. Calm down. Don’t run for buckwheat and matches,” he said. “To all the media: Remain mass media, not sources of mass hysteria.”
In term of rallying his nation to face an armed adversary, Yatsenyuk, the former Ukrainian prime minister, said that Zelenskiy’s performance was closer to that of Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister accused of appeasing Nazi Germany’s pre-war aggression, than his successor, Winston Churchill, who embodied the wartime directive to “keep calm and carry on.”
Zelenskiy should have been straight with his country about the risk of an invasion — which Yatsenyuk believed was real — and marshalled Ukraine’s allies to counter Russia’s aggression.
Only then, he said, should Zelenskiy have given the word: “My fellow Ukrainians, please don’t panic.”
“He did it vice versa. He said nothing about the reality. He acts like a comedian, like a movie star, but … it’s a documentary. It’s not a fiction movie,” he said. “This is an existential threat for my country. What is at stake? Ukraine is at stake, as a country and as a nation.”
According to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, a polling firm, about half of Ukrainians believe the threat of a Russian invasion is real, a little more than half think the Zelenskiy government’s diplomatic and defence efforts are insufficient, and just 27 per cent of those surveyed believe that Zelenskiy’s proposal for direct peace talks with Putin will effectively resolve the crisis.
“There are days when he says really great stuff, when he’s reassuring people and you feel like he’s statesmanlike,” said Canadian analyst Michael Bociurkiw, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
“But then you have those unexplainable bad days when he’ll say something to panic people.”
Every day in this crisis feels like an eternity. One moment, a Russian invasion is said to be imminent. The next, the outlines of a peace deal have appeared, then disappeared again as the fog of war takes hold.
“We’re in a very dangerous, vulnerable time. There’s no time to change leadership,” Bociurkiw said. Nor is there a clear opponent, a potential successor waiting in the wings.
“Ukrainians have this saying: ‘We have what we have,” Bociurkiw said. “I think that’s the thinking of a lot of people. They’re kind of fatalistic.”