Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky

Yermak penned the op-ed from a bunker in Kyiv alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Get a daily selection of our top stories based on your reading ...

"Again, make no mistake: Mr. Putin aims to advance this ideology by going for blood beyond Ukraine. He must be stopped," Yermak added. "But we firmly believe that Russia won't stop at just Ukraine, which would potentially drag NATO into this conflict anyway." But we need the West to back us up in order to keep defending our families and our land," Yermak said. "We need more — and, please, stop telling us military aid is on the way. "We need to show Russia — in painful terms — the mistake it has made." So let them be a plea for support for a free Ukraine."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian turned statesman, has helped rally the world around his nation's cause in the face of Vladimir Putin's ...

Last year, President Joe Biden changed the posture of the Obama administration, which had been to not arm the Ukrainians, and approved the release of $125 million in military aid and a new round of Javelin sales. Indirectly, Zelensky brought about Trump’s impeachment and earned the release of the aid to his nation without appearing to do so in a way that would infuriate Trump. Zelensky had done what he needed to do to alienate neither Republicans nor Democrats. He stuck to this line throughout the impeachment saga, saying at various times “there was no pressure or blackmail from the U.S.” and “it’s not about quid pro quo.” While these statements were incredibly misleading, they also did not directly address specifics of the situation about whether Trump had blackmailed him. And after the early details of the quid pro quo campaign were exposed, Zelensky went out of his way to continue to appease Trump and protect his own country. Finally, in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress increased security aid to Ukraine from $250 million to $300 million, again on a bipartisan basis. We spoke about many things and I—so I think, and you read it, that nobody push it, pushed me.” Trump translated that as “no pressure” and said straight to Zelensky’s face, “I appreciate the answer.” The call, though, was perfect, in that Zelensky did everything he could to try to curry favor with the U.S. president—without giving into corrupt demands that could doom his country down the road. Revelations surrounding a whistleblower complaint in September 2019 were the clear impetus for the scandal, as it played out in the U.S., as well as the ultimate release of the $400 million in aid. Prior to the war, though, many doubted that he would be able to mount any defense of his country in the face of Russian aggression, let alone a full-out attack. Aside from the corrupt nature of Trump’s demand, there were strategic reasons that Zelensky could not acquiesce during that call. Giuliani also pushed Zelensky to announce an investigation into convoluted conspiracy theories that it was actually Ukraine that had meddled in the 2016 election, as a way to distract from Russia’s actual campaign to boost Trump. The original criticism of Zelensky—largely surrounding failures to crack down on corruption domestically—was surely fair.

Zelensky, a onetime comedian and film star who also appeared on "Dancing With the Stars," has won widespread respect for refusing to flee Kyiv.

For security reasons, he has not disclosed the location of his family – his wife and two children – though they are believed to be near him. And while he has become a hero of sorts to the Ukrainian public in the days since the Russian invasion began, his popularity as president had appeared to be waning. Before he was elected, he said in an interview with Vice News that he wanted to end the conflict in the eastern Donbas region, “because we don’t want our people to perish anymore.” The conflict in Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists have been battling with the Ukrainian government, played a key role in the Russian invasion. Days before invading, Putin formally recognized the independence of two separatist areas in the region, where he has baselessly claimed that a “genocide” against Russian speakers was taking place. He hosted a comedy show, “Liga Smeha” (“League of Laughter”), and won Ukraine’s “Dancing With the Stars” in 2006. Instead he has walked the streets of Kyiv and urged Ukrainians to resist, while crafting a successful communications strategy that has won the hearts and minds of European leaders and voters.

Ukrainian officials blamed Russian shelling for the blaze but the Kremlin pointed at Ukraine, whose president accused Russia of resorting to "nuclear terror ...

During earlier televised comments, Russian President Vladimir Putin said operations in Ukraine were going according to plan despite international criticism over the targeting of highly populated residential areas. Ukrainian authorities said Russian shelling sparked the blaze. he war in Ukraine entered a new phase Friday when Russian troops seized Europe's largest nuclear power plant after a fire in a nearby training building was extinguished.

A Ukrainian security and defense chief said on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces had thwarted an assassination plot against President Volodymyr Zelensky with help ...

Axios first reported the story. A Ukrainian security and defense chief said on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces had thwarted an assassination plot against President Volodymyr Zelensky with help from members of Russia's security services. A Telegram post published Tuesday by Ukraine's Center for Strategic Communications cited Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, as saying that an elite group of Chechen special forces — known as the Kadyrovites — was dispatched by Russia to "eliminate our president" but was "destroyed directly."

The Ukrainian president has a past as an actor and comedian. He's using it to wage a public relations war.

Whatever you might think of him when he’s not the face of a country that is attempting to repel an invading force, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has used every tool at his disposal to reduce a political story to a personal one. Zelenskyy is using all of his skills as a performer and a filmmaker to cajole you into caring about the situation in Ukraine, because he knows you might not otherwise. A filmmaker figures out how to get you invested in the story he wants to tell, and Zelenskyy has certainly done that. Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.” This move is also a more subtle form of the masculine posturing Putin engages in regularly, one Zelenskyy is uniquely well-positioned to exploit, having been at least somewhat well-known in Russia when he was working as an actor. One of the offshoots of Zelensky’s sudden prominence on the world stage is that there are a lot of tweets about how everybody who’s attracted to men is either horny for Zelenskyy or suspects everyone they know is horny for Zelenskyy. This reaction goes with the territory of a scary, enormous story with global import that our brains need to find any way to circumvent. But propaganda is one of the best routes available to a country in the midst of a devastating invasion by a larger, more powerful military. That’s before you even get to the fact that the simple optics of Zelenskyy’s being present in the streets of Kyiv carry tremendous weight when we’re used to world leaders being separated from the conflicts they are part of. It is worth noting that the most consistent complaint from the Ukrainian media about Zelenskyy has been the same one most press corps have about most world leaders in the social media era: He doesn’t talk to them enough. To be clear, this is a country in the midst of an invasion fighting back in the realm of public opinion. Donald Trump, after all, was very, very good at being on TV, with an innate understanding of how to use the medium to his advantage, but that had next to no connection to whatever skills he had as a president. But even just in the US, every president of the mass media era has had to reckon with the fact that they are not only the president but also play him on TV.