Almost three months after the start of theRussian invasion of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky continues to confirm his stature as a warlord. “We will continue to fight, we have no other choice (…) I am convinced that the “dictator” will lose”, hammered the Ukrainian president by videoconference at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival. If the man now seems to have agreed the international community, some doubted his ability to lead the resistance when Putin’s troops invaded Ukrainian territory. “Critics said he would be the first to flee in the event of war. But Zelensky surprised everyone: he stayed and showed his courage when he knew he was not safe and that his life was in danger”, says Serhi Roedenko, who wrote the first biography on the Ukrainian head of state, in a interview at Morgen.
The first years of Zelensky at the head of the country had not however convinced the Ukrainian journalist. Mr. Roedenko notably regretted the appointments which he sometimes considered arbitrary, believing that the Ukrainian president had “surrounded himself with relatives”. But the outbreak of war in Ukraine has “completely changed” the former actor, according to him. “For three months, he has been a completely different person,” he continued with our colleagues from Morgen. “(…) Before the war, he was always seen as an actor. (…) It was always a bit overplayed, insincere.”
But since missile fire has rained down on his country, the Ukrainian president has appeared “as someone who has renounced all the artifices of theatrical life and who, tired and unshaven, speaks to his compatriots with real emotion” , said the biographer.
He even went so far as to mention “three Zelenskys”: the comedian “with often insulting bland jokes, the president-elect in 2019 “who was not very successful in his early days” and the warlord. If the two first facets of the head of state did not necessarily please the biographer, the new posture of the president has undoubtedly restored his image in his eyes.