Volodymyr Zelensky
"I am here. We are not putting down arms. We will be defending our country, because our weapon is truth, and our truth is that this is our land, our country, our children. And we will defend all of this."
So I spent the vast majority of this fucked-up nightmare hell week planning to write about the Ghost of Kiev becoming the first fighter ace of the 21st century (and doing it in the MiG-29 Foxbat, which, in my books, is one of the most badass-looking fighter planes of all time), but sadly the more we learn about that it's starting to look like that story is more propaganda than reality, and instead of having some insane fighter ace blowing the asses off of enemy bombers it turned out he was just a dude that was really good at Digital Combat Simulator. Then I thought, fuck it, I'll just write about the Ukrainian people, who are out there lobbing Molotovs at BMPs, running in front of tanks to block them from advancing, and manning hand-dug trenches with a makeshift civilian army comprised largely of pissed off computer programmers with assault rifles.
Then, finally, I decided, no – I am going to write about the guy who is inspiring those people to do that shit. The man who is serving as the primary beacon of Resistance against Russian aggression in the world despite being completely outgunned and outnumbered, remaining defiant in the face of airstrikes, artillery and Chechen assassins, bolstering the morale of his citizens to stand and fight for their land and their country.
It's pretty nuts that the Ukrainian people elected their version of Sasha Baron Cohen as their President and he ended up turning into their version of Winston Churchill. And what better indicator of how weird the world is right now that the dude who voiced the Ukrainian dub of Paddington Bear is out there threatening Vladimir Putin, the only G8 world leader who has probably actually killed another human with his bare hands?
And, sure, in the days and weeks following the publication of this article many parts of these stories may change, and many new heroes and heroes will surface, and certainly Zelensky's story will progress in ways we cannot possibly foresee right now. Hell, maybe the Ghost of Kiev is real, and the reports of him scoring his 20th kill aren't complete bullshit. Maybe some noble 21st century Stanislav Petrov will prevent the nuclear annihilation of Earth, or maybe it'll turn out that the Ukrainian Reaper is truly some hardass real-life Slavic Simo Hayha who is out there single-handedly defending Kyiv (sorry, I am going to seriously struggle to not keep calling it Kiev, but I have 40 years of conditioning working against me here) by haphazardly flailing his blue-and-yellow ballsack around like the business arm of an industrial construction crane. But, for right now, the guy at the center of all this is President Zelensky, and I just wanted to take a minute this week to appreciate how the Ukrainian people elected this guy:
And somehow ended up with this:
Because, I mean, that shit is like the Ukraine War version of that damn Travolta meme where they put those driving clips from Grease and Pulp Fiction next to each other and use it as a metaphor for how the last two years took our already-miserable lives and somehow turned our nine-to-five soul-sucking day jobs into the sort of nostalgic experiences that makes us sincerely long for the days when the biggest stressors in our weekday was that nobody could never remember the goddamn passcode to get in to the break room at the office.
Born in the Ukraine in 1978 to a family of Russian Jews, Zelensky's dad was a Professor of Cybernetics and his Mother was an engineer. His grandfather served with the Soviet Red Army fighting Nazis during World War II, where he marched through to Berlin and helped avenge the fact that his father and three of his brothers were murdered in Nazi Death Camps. So, naturally, coming from a badass line of war heroes, engineers and possible Skynet programmers, Zelensky got his law degree, learned to speak three languages, and graduated from the prestigious Kiev National Economic University.
Then he fucked off his law profession and became a professional comedian.
In 1995 Zelensky founded a comedy company called Kvartal 95, did a bunch of sketch shows, an eventually went on to win a national Russian comedy contest called KVN in 1997. He turned his comedy career into television and film, where he stared in a bunch of rom-coms, goofy TV shows, and what I generally understand to be roughly the Ukrainian version of the American Pie films – which, of course, I am picturing as just being exactly like American Pie except everyone's wearing those fur caps with the flaps over the ears and has a working knowledge of how to field-strip an AK-47. In 2006 he was the Season One winner of Dancing with the Stars Ukraine, proving that this dude knows his way around a salsa or two, and then in the 2010s he voiced Paddington in the Ukrainian dubs of both Paddington films – which I also haven't seen, but the trailers looked pretty fucking adorable, in so much as I am allowed to suggest that anything might be "adorable" while writing text for this website.
Still, you have to admit -- there's not much in her to suggest that ten years later this guy was going to be taking video selfies in a flak jacket going full Sean Connery First Knight "Never Give Up, Never Surrender" to inspire armed resistance against Russian armored vehicles while dodging artillery shells and KGB sniper fire.
In 2015 Zelensky launched the TV show Servant of the People, where he played a school teacher who accidentally got elected President of the Ukraine, and then has to kind of stumble his way through the political system. It was a comedy, and most of the cover art of it has a very Mister Bean vibe to it, though some of the publicity photos I saw for it include Zelensky waving a couple Uzis around the Ukrainian parliament, presumably as part of his character's new "anti-Corruption" platform, so who knows what was going on there. Foreign comedy is pretty much universally weird, and if you've ever tried to watch any foreign-language comedy I can pretty much guarantee that there was at least one moment during the film that left you thinking something along the lines of, "Shit, is this the kind of thing that they think is funny over there?" I don't speak Ukrainian, I don't know any Ukrainian people, and I've never seen the show, so I'm not going to really comment on it further other than to say that shit is banned in Russia these days.
Except it's worth mentioning that this dude was a fucking comedian who played the President on television for three years and did it so successfully that in 2019 he was elected the actual goddamn President of the Ukraine.
Zelensky defeated a billionaire business tycoon, earned an incredible 73% of the vote, and was elected as the first Jewish President of the Ukraine in 2019, which, I mean, I really want to stress this -- this isn't like electing Martin Sheen during the height of the West Wing success, or electing Dennis Haysbert after the first season of 24. This guy was a lifetime comedian, and his show was a comedy. And now he's out there negotiating military deals with NATO and calling Vladimir Putin a motherfucker in front of the United Nations General Assembly. And people are rallying around him all around the world as a beacon of light and hope and defiant resistance in the face of overwhelming hostile resistance – a leader of freedom fighters opposing a violent takeover of their native land with fistfuls of flaming molotovs and rocket-propelled grenades.
Before this whole "Land War in Europe" thing went down, the shit Zelensky was best known for most in the U.S. was the whole Trump Impeachment phone call, which I don't really want to talk about a whole lot right here because I think it'll detract from the things I actually do want to talk about. Essentially, Zelensky was given a choice – dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, or we'll probably revoke the $200 million in military aid that Congress appropriated to send to you. Zelensky said no, which, even though he could have used some of those anti-tank weapons right about now, was still probably the safe call – his objective was to get a NATO invite from the US government, and he couldn't afford to take sides right before the election.
Well, between that stuff, then Covid, and now Putin, the actually political career of Vlodymyr Zelensky wasn't exactly action-packed. It took him a while to get up to speed, and he tried to introduce legislation to bring peace to the Donbas region and end corruption in the Ukraine, but his polling numbers were pretty middling. Some folks liked him, some thought he needed to do more to battle corruption, and, presumably, all the corrupt people were kind of hoping he'd do less to stop corruption. He was… fine. He did his job.
That all changed a week ago.
On February 24, 2022, the Russian Federation launched a full-scale invasion of the Ukraine, marking the first time we've had a real land war in Europe since the Yugoslav Wars of the 90s. Enemy tanks, aircraft, armored vehicles, and trucks began flooding into the country from three directions, supported by artillery fire and airstrikes, aimed at encircling, surrounding, and occupying the population centers at Kyiv, Karkiv, and the Crimea. 44 year old comedian Volodymyr Zelensky suddenly became a wartime leader, despite having no combat experience beyond filming that bit with the Uzis. The Russians – and probably most of the Western powers – figured he'd cave. This would be too much. The Ukraine couldn't hold, they were facing too much opposition, and, fuck, most of them probably would rather be part of Russia anyways and would just surrender the first time a T-80 pointed its coax at them.
That is not what happened.
When the war started, Zelensky had the opportunity to evacuate. As a VIP, he could have easily been swept out of the country in the early hours of the fighting, and he could be sitting up in a Barcalounger eating Pierogies and drinking high-end vodka in Warsaw right now while a line of European foreign ministers promise him that they're "fully committed" to helping Ukraine and are willing to take acts as extreme and defiant as not selling Putin any model year 2023 Mercedes and not letting Russia play their national anthem when they compete in the World Cup later this year. And, in fact, that's exactly what Russian media posted that he was doing – the story broke within hours of the attack that the Comedy President had shit his pants, taken the first private jet out of the Ukraine, scurried to the safety of his fuzzy European slippers, and abandoned his people to their fate.
And a lot of people believed it. Until, later that day, Zelensky posted a video of himself standing outside Parliament in the middle of a goddamn artillery storm. Then he went out and authorized the Ukrainian Tax Office to release a statement saying that if you capture enemy tanks and weapons in battle you don’t need to declare it as assets on your 2022 Tax Return.
It's true that the US had tried to evacuate him. It's also true that he told them, "The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride." So now, with enemy troops hunting him, a wall of tanks just 20 miles from his palace doors, Russian bombers streaking overhead, the impressive Russian botnet demonizing him as a Nazi (even though his entire family was literally killed by Nazis) and the rest of the world leaving him to face the daunting Russian War Machine alone, fucking Volodymyr Zelensky is out there making Instagram videos urging his people to fight the invaders with everything they have.
And they are. The people of Ukraine have rallied in huge numbers, fighting with everything they have, and, against all odds, they've managed to hold the goddamn Russian Army back for over a week.
I'm not sure how this is going to end for Zelensky – it's too early to tell right now. There was a story just today that he survived three assassination attempts on his life – two by the elite Wagner Group, a PMC of mostly former GRU special forces guys, and one by Chechen Special Forces – all of which were thwarted before they could reach the Ukrainian President. But here, in this moment, this guy's a damn war hero. He's an inspiration to the West, watching him stand defiantly against foreign aggression to defend his home soil against an invading army that outnumbers him massively, and while the rest of the West has responded to his pleas for military aid by canceling iPhone shipments or seizing superyachts or whatever other useless shit they're doing, he's out there dodging assassins, negotiating for humanitarian corridors to safely evacuate his people, and inspiring defiant resistance from a bombed-out bunker in a capital city that is becoming increasingly besieged.
And you have to think that the only thing more embarrassing to Putin than failing to overrun a country he probably thought he'd capture in 48 hours is the fact that the world is becoming increasingly more aware that he no longer has the biggest balls of any world leader in the former Soviet Bloc.
"When you attack us you will see our faces - not our backs, but our faces."
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