The charm of Volodymyr Zelensky

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is in Britain for a surprise visit. ‘Freedom will win – we know Russia will lose,’ he told a joint session of Parliament in Westminster Hall this afternoon. 

This address is the first he has given in Westminster since a video message in March 2022, when the situation for his country was vastly grimmer than it is now. Last year, when he addressed MPs, Zelensky had just rejected a British attempt to evacuate him and his family from Ukraine. He was under threat of assassination; and his country’s capital faced siege and – as Foreign Office officials still insisted – the brand of Russian destruction like that suffered by the Chechnyan capital Grozny and the cradle of Syrian civilisation, Aleppo.  

Zelensky quoted Winston Churchill and saw parallels in our nation’s wartime defiance of a fascist-ruled continent, and said his country would fight on to the end. When he finished speaking, MPs rose to their feet to applaud, many of them in tears.