What Zelensky has taken from his former TV career

Volodymyr Zelensky is one of the few leaders of modern times whose charisma, determination and sheer cojones can be said, without exaggeration, to have changed the course of history. In the first hours of the Russian invasion the US famously offered to evacuate him from Kyiv to a safer location, to which his response was (in spirit, if not in actual words): ‘I need ammo, not a ride.’ His determination to remain in the heart of his besieged capital seriously confounded Putin’s invasion plans, which were predicated on quickly toppling or murdering him. And Zelensky’s idea to film himself and his top advisers on his iPhone strolling down Kyiv’s Bankova street on the third day of the war as Russian death squads hunted them gave the Ukrainian people the inspired leadership they needed, and the hope of victory.

Appropriately, the first two biographies of this remarkable man have been written by Ukrainians who know Zelensky well.