Short, sweet, and largely symbolic’ might be a reasonable summary of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Downing Street visit on the eve of the US-Russia summit in Alaska.
There will be those who take issue with Zelensky’s swanning around foreign parts at such a time. There will also be those – some, if not many of them, in Russia – who hope that the coming days will, one way or another, spell the end of Zelensky’s power.
For all the missteps and failings on the part of his government in Kyiv, Zelensky is likely to be the person who has to try to shepherd Ukraine from war into peace, and he needs to be supported as perhaps the only one who can.
In retrospect, the catastrophic Oval Office press conference, at which Zelensky was humiliated by the US president and his team, can be seen as a turning point of a kind, rallying European officialdom and opinion behind him just as popular enthusiasm for Ukraine’s cause was starting to fade.
Surprisingly, perhaps, what the Trump administration appears not to have done is ever to have broached replacing Zelensky. There were certainly names in the frame, in late Biden and early Trump weeks. They included Petro Poroshenko, Zelensky’s predecessor as president and the man he soundly defeated at the ballot box; Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s former commander in chief, now ambassador to London; former Zelensky security adviser Oleksii Arestovych; and the people-friendly mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko. Ukraine’s former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, has also recently made a return to Western media prominence.
But there are good reasons why the bouts of speculation have now died down, both in Ukraine and abroad. In personal authority and political charisma, Zelensky puts all of these potential rivals in the shade.
By any standards, he has shown himself time and again to be an individual of great personal courage, and an exemplary champion of his country. Boris Johnson was not wrong about this, and it would appear that Donald Trump has come around to recognising it, too – which is perhaps why he became a lot less dismissive of Zelensky after their fence-mending meeting at the Vatican following the death of Pope Francis. I would even venture that Trump sees in Zelensky something of the same quality he professed to admire in Vladimir Putin before his first term – that of being a leader who is unafraid to stand up for the interests of his country.
Zelensky has also proved himself a convincing manager of people. This ability shone through during the presidential campaign he fought and won, as a rank outsider, in 2019. But he could have triumphed simply by virtue of his profile as the acclaimed star of his Servant of the People television satire. What he demonstrated in the months thereafter was that he could actually form a team and use the political system to produce results, and that his undoubted communication skills were transferable to the political domain – and also, alas, to war.
The promise of his first two years makes it all the more tragic that he found himself in the role of a war leader, rather than the architect of a new Ukraine and a pioneer for the durable peace with Russia that had been a significant plank of his election campaign. As someone from a Ukrainian Jewish family, whose first language was Russian and who had spent some of his early career performing on Russian TV, Zelensky had a profile that was almost as much of a unifying gift to Ukraine at the time as was Angela Merkel’s appearance as a centre-right politician from the East in German politics.
It was in these early months, I would argue, that most of the West made a crucial mistake: the US, the EU and the UK simply failed to take Zelensky seriously as a political leader. They dismissed him as a small-time comedian (ignoring his law degree and his highly successful career as a writer and producer), and apparently gambled that he would fail, so smoothing the way for their reliable client, Poroshenko, to return to office, after a defeat they had totally failed to anticipate.
That year of lost Western support weakened Zelensky’s position, both at home vis-a-vis the nationalist right, and vis-a-vis Russia. His peace project – which might have averted all that led up to the Russian invasion on 24 February 2022 – faltered and failed. That Johnson, and then the US and the EU, soon sprang to Ukraine’s aid, welcoming refugees and supplying ever more weapons, has enabled Ukraine to continue fighting to this day.
And Zelensky has played the tireless war leader, wearing his fatigues, broadcasting nightly to his people, travelling the war zones and the world to defend Ukraine’s cause. Even those who eventually tired of Zelensky’s ubiquity cannot deny that he has set a formidable example of how to fulfil such a role.
As for the charge that he should have held elections this spring – as some of his critics complain, and the Kremlin uses as an argument to deny his legitimacy – this holds no water. Ukraine is under martial law regulations, a circumstance that rules out elections. They can wait. As for the decree, passed early in the war, that bans talks with Putin – it was passed at Zelensky’s initiative, and he can choose to disregard it. Recent ructions over anti-corruption institutions may be a harbinger of latent domestic dissent, but some judicious politicking on Zelensky’s part showed who was in charge.
None of this is to say that Zelensky is the ideal leader, in peace or in war. Hagiography has to be avoided, and elevating Zelensky from national leader to standard-bearer for all of Europe and the West, as the Biden administration and some Europeans have done, may come to be seen as a cardinal mistake.
But Zelensky has never, so far as I can recall, shirked responsibility for his decisions, unlike so many in his business. The next days and weeks may determine whether, in the future, his name is emblazoned on streets, squares and statues, or whether it becomes a byword for loss.
As of now, and perhaps nearing the war’s end, Ukrainians should look back with pride that they elected Zelensky as their president in a free and fair election that now seems many, many years ago.
