He had heard about the warning from his allies in the West. He knew that Wednesday had been mentioned as the possible start of a Russian bombing raid on his country. But instead of calling the population in, Volodymyr Zelensky called the Ukrainians out.
No invasion day. National Unity Day!
The introduction of a quickly improvised holiday is typical of former television comedian Zelensky’s policy. Since 2019, he is no longer the fictional president from the TV series Servant of the People, but the one and only president of Ukraine. Fiction has been reality for three years now. And now the inexperienced driver must lead a country of 44 million people through the worst security crisis since the Cold War.
As the Russian army draws closer and the West shouts louder and louder that war is coming, Zelensky remains calm. Airy even. He told US President Biden to come by this week. Kiev is “safe,” Zelensky told Biden.
Zelensky has so far managed to prevent panic at home, but uniting a population takes more of a leader. Anyone who visits the Olympic Stadium in Kiev on Wednesday morning will get the impression that Zelensky is on the right track. Hundreds of Ukrainians are waving a huge blue-yellow bicolor. “We want to show Russia that we are not afraid,” Olga Bidnyk (32) says, holding a flag with both hands. “And we want to show that we stand behind our army as a united people.” Exactly the message that Zelensky wants to spread.
But Bidnyk and the other flag-wavers in the stadium are summoned officials from the Ministry of Youth and Sports. Waving a flag is military service. There are hardly any spontaneous festivities on Wednesday. The festivity is limited to a handful of looking around loners with flags on the independence square and digital billboards with the text ‘Happy Unity Day’. It is mainly Zelensky himself who tries to make something of it by touring the country by plane.
Humorous campaign
His unorthodox style of politics worked better three years ago. Thanks to a humorous campaign full of PR stunts, he achieved the biggest election victory in Ukrainian history. Zelensky defeated then-President Petro Poroshenko with 73 percent of the vote. The law graduate from Ukraine’s most polluted industrial city only wanted to debate Poroshenko once, on his own terms: in the Olympic Stadium with tens of thousands of people shouting in the stands, with a drug test beforehand for the two participants. He spent the rest of the campaign poking fun at the political establishment in cahoots with oligarchs who run the economy — in a scene from the TV series Servant of the People the future president shoots the Ukrainian parliament to pieces with two machine guns.
Zelensky managed to unite Ukrainians against the old guard, but not behind himself. That has not changed since the election. His popularity has declined. If there were elections today, Zelensky would receive 25 percent of the vote, against 22 for Poroshenko, a poll by the sociological institute Kiis showed on Wednesday.
On the global stage, Zelensky is trapped in a humble role in which he must show gratitude to Western government leaders who come to Ukraine’s aid, even if that aid does not always live up to expectations. He does, however, subtly let experienced government leaders know that he had expected them sooner. He told Rutte, for example: ‘This is the first visit by a Dutch government leader in seventeen years.’ He also expresses his frustration at the alarm that the West continues to sound about an invasion threat. “The best friend of our enemies is panic in our country,” Zelensky said. His critics think it’s inappropriate to criticize crucial allies at this point, but it fits Zelensky’s emotional nature.
Influence oligarchs
At home, he struggles to achieve his only two goals: to find a peaceful solution to the war in eastern Ukraine and to end the influence of oligarchs.
To his disappointment, Putin is not open to any peace solutions other than the stalled Minsk peace process. At his first meeting with Putin, mediated by Merkel and Macron, the atmosphere was icy. He didn’t get much further in eastern Ukraine than a controversial prisoner swap. A solution seems impossible after Putin handed out Russian passports in separatist territory and claims he now has “Russian citizens” to protect. Zelensky hit back with a nice-sounding but ineffective announcement to issue passports to “people suffering under authoritarian and corrupt regimes, primarily Russians.”
His domestic fight against oligarchs is increasingly criticized. Under Zelensky, criminal cases have been opened against a pro-Russian oligarch and against his political rival Poroshenko, owner of a candy empire. Ihor Kolomoiski, an oligarch who supported Zelenski’s election campaign and who is suspected of money laundering in the US, is not being prosecuted.
But Zelensky’s biggest obstacle to getting people going on Wednesday is population fatigue after eight years of war. “Nowadays, we have some patriotic holiday every month,” says the operator of a souvenir kiosk with Ukrainian flags near Kiev’s Independence Square. He says his flag sales have not benefited from Unity Day. “Yeah, well, at least no bomb dropped today.”