UKRAINE TODAY – PRESIDENT ZELENSKY

In 2022, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky became the unlikely hero of the second decade of the twenty-first century. He led and inspired his country—and the entire free world—in the fight against the Russian invasion that began in February 2022, in which Russian President Vladimir Putin became regarded as a war criminal. The war in Ukraine became the first recorded in real time and broadcast on TV and across social media. Journalist Andrew L Urban is the author of Zelensky – The Unlikely Ukrainian Hero Who Defied Putin and United The World. Pete Shmigel is a writer and former political advisor with a background in Ukrainian affairs who spoke widely on returning from Ukraine after working there for two months in early 2022. On Tuesday 12 July 2022, Andrew L Urban and Pete Shmigel addressed The Sydney Institute to give an update on the war in Ukraine.

UKRAINE TODAY – PRESIDENT ZELENSKY

Andrew L Urban

Good evening, thanks for inviting me. As co-author with Chris McLeod, I’d like to talk about our book Zelensky – The Unlikely Ukrainian Hero Who Defied Putin and United The World.

It was late morning on Saturday 4 March 2022. The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation had begun some ten days before. My publisher, Michael Wilkinson, rang to ask if I was interested in writing a book about the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. What, I had replied, a book about the most famous man of the moment … the hottest topic in the news … the inspirational leader dubbed Churchill in a T shirt…that Zelensky? Yes, I said, I probably am interested.

Wilkinson’s American partners, Regnery Publishing, wanted to have the very first book about Zelensky on the bookshelves; we had an international meeting on Zoom with the Regnery executives and off we went. We hung up and I opened a new document in my computer headed “Zelensky”. Sure enough, it was published just over two months after the invasion began. It was quick. I work quickly. That’s not a boast but my natural modus operandi as a journalist. And this book is a work of journalism.

I was asked to deliver a manuscript on Zelensky, but there were no guidelines: it was up to me what I made of it. Then Chris McLeod, a Melbourne based journalist, was brought on board. We worked together very smoothly and organically. Chris is a bloodhound on research.

The title Zelensky – The Unlikely Hero was so obvious and natural that we authors and US publishers came up with it independently and almost simultaneously. We followed the invasion – and Zelensky’s urgent calls for weapons and support – in real time, on TV, on social media and in the press. We watched the videos broadcast to the European, British and Australian parliaments and to the US Congress. No other world leader had previously addressed so many parliaments in so few days in such a compelling manner on such an urgent topic. In today’s fully interconnected world, I was able to sit at my Sydney desk and monitor the world events that were of interest to me for this project.

Being a Hungarian with an ingrained sense of what I call survivor humour – very similar to the Jewish genre – one of the first searches I did was to see what black jokes had been prompted by the invasion…. Sure enough, there was already a string of them. There was one that, in a nutshell, captured the mood in Ukraine.

President Putin and his driver were on their way to Kyiv in a car when all of a sudden they hit a pig near a farmhouse, killing it instantly. Putin told his driver to go up to the farmhouse and explain to the owners what had happened. About one hour later Putin sees his driver staggering back to the car with a bottle of Horilka (Ukrainian vodka) in one hand, a cigar in the other and his clothes all ripped and torn. “What happened to you?” asked Putin. “Well, the farmer gave me the Horilka, his wife gave me a box of cigars and their 19-year-old and 21-year- old daughters made mad passionate love to me simultaneously.” “My God, what did you tell them?” asks Putin. The driver replies, “I’m president Putin’s driver, and I just killed the pig.”

When the Russian tanks rolled into Hungary to crush our revolution, the puppet Communist government had taken back control of the radio. As the tanks shelled our freedom fighters, the radio broadcast reassuring messages that the Russians were here as our friends, and had come to root out the unpatriotic troublemakers and foreign agitators. It was soon countered with survival humour – thank god they are our friends, imagine what they’d be like if they were our enemies.

Some people rankle at this sort of black, survival humour. But I agree with Stephen Fry’s observation that the very raison d’etre of humour, its saving grace perhaps, is that you can laugh at something and at the same time take it seriously.

The only editorialising we indulge in this book is on the subject of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Zelensky was 16 at the time. The Budapest Memorandum can be summarised as follows: The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, welcomed the accession of Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear weapon state, taking into account the commitment of Ukraine to eliminate all nuclear weapons from its territory within a specified period of time. It noted the changes in the world-wide security situation, including the end of the Cold War, which had brought about conditions for deep reductions in nuclear forces. The United States of America, the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland reaffirmed their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe to respect the Independence and Sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.

Professor David Flint wrote the other day in The Spectator in his overview of this book:

From a Ukrainian point of view, the memorandum as drafted is next to worthless. How did Ukraine ever agree? Was it corruption, incompetence or both? And why did the US and UK allow a free, new country to sign this?

As the authors point out, by failing to invoke the memorandum, both the US and UK not only violated the agreement, they legitimised Russia’s abandonment of it. Professor Flint is right.

In our research we found only one instance – in the earliest days of the invasion – of Zelensky referring to the Memorandum in his call for assistance. And it was not as forthright a demand to adhere to it as it might have been. Perhaps he was all too aware of the weakness of the memorandum, which has no legal teeth.

It is symbolic of the uselessness of the UN that the Russian Federation is still part of the UN Security Council – with veto rights still in place. If the UN was worth its salt, it would rescind or suspend at least the veto rights…China may take note. But that’s another story…

By now, most people with any interest in Zelensky know that he grew up in Kryvy Rih, an industrial town south of Kyiv. An only child, his father, Oleksandr Zelensky, was a professor and the head of the Department of Cybernetics and Computing Hardware at the Kryvyi Rih State University of Economics and Technology; his mother, Rymma Zelenska, was an engineer.

He is from a Jewish family and his grandfather Semyon Ivanovych was the only one of four brothers to survive the Holocaust; the others were all killed by Nazis. But he is not a devout practising Jew and he doesn’t talk about it. His wife Olena first found out about her husband’s candidacy for the presidency on social media. She told Vogue she said to him: “Why didn’t you tell me?” His response: “I forgot.” He was still a comedian after all…

His party is named after his satirical TV show, Servant of the People, in which he became ultra famous when his character, a teacher, delivered an angry rant about political corruption. Watching that episode during my research, it occurred to me that it could become a trendy new way of starting a campaign for political office. A fictional character delivers their election platform on a TV show, which  captures the imagination of the public … and the actor becomes a candidate. We can no longer say that can’t happen.

His TV show was highly successful, even in Russia; at one stage it was the third most watched series after Game of Thrones and Chernobyl. Of course, he has since been labelled Churchill in a T-shirt and the leader who wants the West’s help with anti-tank ammo, not a ride to safety. My favourite quote from Zelensky is the one where he was questioned as to why he was running for president since he has had no political experience. Zelensky replied, “You don’t need political experience, you just need to be a decent person.”

I should point out that our book is not intended to be a hagiography of President Zelensky. The book is intended to put Zelensky, and his place in the current events, into context and to reflect on his managing the conflict as a politician, meeting the challenge of being thrust into a crisis and potential greatness, at least in the eyes of some. After a triumphant election with over 70 per cent of the vote in 2019, his popularity had fallen to just over 30 per cent before the invasion.

Finally, I’d like to put myself in context. I was born in Budapest, well before the memorandum was signed, and escaped with my mother at the tail end of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, when Russian tanks were sent to crush the freedom fighters. I am deeply sympathetic to Ukrainians. My father had fled to England years earlier after graduating from Budapest University and obtained his PhD (in German poetry & language) from London University. He worked at the BBC and shortly after my arrival in London, he published The 19 Days, described as a broadcaster’s account of the Hungarian revolution. He became known as a cold war warrior and went on to become an acclaimed scholar of comparative communism and spent a stint as an adviser to Margaret Thatcher.