Comic-turned-president Zelensky steps into a role he didn’t rehearse for – Times of India

He appeared on Ukrainian television early on Thursday as the threat of war was pressing down. First, President Vol odymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the 44 million citizens of Ukraine. Then he turned to the 144 m illion Russians living next door and beseeched them to prevent an attack. “Listen to the voice of reason,” Zelensky said. “The Ukrainian people want peace. ”
It was an impassioned bid to save his country — and it did not work. Hours later, a full-scale Russian invasion had begun, and Zelensky, a former television actor and comic, had become a wartime leader. An d for the moment, even as the Russian attack is continuing, Ukrainians have rallied around him.
Zelensky came to power as a corruption fighter, confident at the time of his ability to broker a peace to the longsimmering conflict with Russian-backed separatists then confined to the country’s east. He won in a landslide, with 73% of Ukrainians backing him over the in cumbent president, Petro Poroshenko, a wealthy businessman who had taken a hard stance against Moscow.
Zelensky had no prior experience in politics besides playing a president on television. He won on a populist agenda by targeting a wealthy class of oligarchs and promised to be a pragmatic president whose vision for Ukraine was a country that was neither “a corrupt partner of the West” nor “Russia’s little sister. ” His strongest support came from southern and eastern Ukraine,including in the conflict-ridden Donetsk and Luhansk regions, part of which are subsumed by two separatist enclaves whose independence Putin recognized Monday.
His dramatic speech as well as his appearance a t the Munich Security Conference last weekend, where he warned European allies about “appeasement” of Russia, have given Zelensky something that even his allies would not normally ascribe to him: gravitas. He will now face the greatest crisis in his country’s modern history, even as he must face off against President Putin of Russia.
It remains deeply uncertain how long , or even if, Ukrainians can indeed hold out against Russian forces, or whether Zelensky will continue to step up into a role for which he has had no rehearsal. Public opinion could yet turn sharply against him, as it did in mid-February as the threat of war grew. And a more serious danger is lurking: possible assassination.
Maria Zolkina, a Ukrainian political analyst, said Zelensky “didn’t choose to fight, and he is not a president of a wartime. But since yesterday, when it became clear from his intelligence what shape the attack would take, he is acting exactl y how a president should act in the wartime regime. ”