How a team of comedy writers helped turn a TV star into a statesman
President Zelensky’s closest aides date from his showbiz past. James Hanning reports
It would have been tempting a year ago for Western diplomats to roll their eyes. With Russian planes preparing to launch an attack, Ukraine’s former comedian president was indulging in brave but probably futile rhetoric. “If we come under attack, if we face an attempt to take away our country, our freedom, our lives and [the] lives of our children, we will defend ourselves,” said Volodymyr Zelensky. “When you attack us, you’ll see our faces. Not our backs, but our faces.”
To some – possibly even to Vladimir Putin – he might have carried as much menace as an irate noise campaigner, shaking his fist at passing planes. How wrong they were. Yet before the bombing started, Zelensky would have been few people’s choice as the person to galvanise support against Moscow. His poll ratings were appalling, and he had managed to antagonise Moscow. Maybe the satirical role he had played earlier, in his popular TV show, when a well-meaning teacher’s soft-headed rant led him to becoming president, should have remained a fantasy.
Today, though, Zelensky is political gold; everyone wants a part of him. But he hasn’t done it alone. Team Zelensky is a close unit of carefully curated advisers, each with specific expertise. When he came to the UK earlier this month, he had an entourage with him. So who is by his side?
The core of his support is the old coterie with whom he grew up with, personally and professionally. Fundamental to that core is his wife Olena, 45. “Of course, she is my love,” he told Vogue magazine last year. “But Olena really is my best friend. She is also a patriot and she deeply loves Ukraine.” Having formed a comedy troupe, they married in 2003 and have a daughter Oleksandra, 18, and a son Kyrylo, 10. Politically, the year of their wedding was significant for also being the year they, with some school friends, founded Studio Kvartal 95, named after a neighbourhood of their home town, and now a successful TV production company, producing sharp-edged comedy and music shows.
The gang that was assembled around Kvartal 95 lives on – as do the techniques the team learned. “He knows how important it is to keep the world’s attention on Ukraine,” says Andrew Wilson, author of The Ukrainians: The Story of How a People Became a Nation. “He’s done that extraordinarily well for 12 months.”
The skills Zelensky learned in TV play a central role. In one of the videos put out shortly after the Russian invasion began, notes Wilson, there was the use of the key word “tut” [meaning “here”]. “It says ‘I’m here… we haven’t run away’,” says Wilson, “it’s repeated constantly. They knew just how to shape and present that, comparing him with Putin with his ludicrous big table. Zelensky does just the opposite, suggesting: ‘I’m in the bunker with you’. He also understands that you need to keep feeding the news cycle, and keep pushing the audience’s buttons with carefully crafted speeches that don’t go particularly deep.”
Zelensky has a team of writers but his most influential speechwriter is Dmytro Lytvyn, a feverish Tweeter and tweaker of Putin’s tail, who has been described as a literary and artistic assistant. At the very least, says a former colleague, “he collects the President’s ideas each day. He works as a mind or sense collector”. But often, Zelensky takes a major hand in the writing process. “He co-writes the speeches in the same way they used to write sketches at Kvartal 95, in a genuinely collaborative way, ideas going back and forth,” says Wilson.
Part of his team is Daria Zarivna, a former actor and TV producer, who has said that on the night before Russia invaded, Zelensky shaped his plea to the Russian public by practising in front of the team. “He needs to talk it through,” she noted. “When he starts to talk, one idea comes after another.”
By far the most trusted and closest of Zelensky’s advisers is Andriy Yermak, 52, a film producer and lawyer who has run the President’s office for the past three years. He founded an international property and commercial law firm in 1997, and in the late 2000s began advising Kvartal 95 on copyright. He and Zelensky soon became friends, and they are now considered inseparable.
The pair constitute a formidable double act, with Zelensky as the redoubtable figurehead for an
They write his speeches together, in the same way they used to write sketches for the shows
embattled nation, and Yermak, who speaks good English, as a master of the possible. He has, for example, been involved in negotiating prisoner releases with Moscow.
“He is effectively vice president,” says Serhii Rudenko, whose biography of Zelensky was published last year. “I don’t know where Zelensky ends and Yermak begins. He is his confidant and biggest support; they are a real political duet.” Yermak was sitting in the front row during Joe Biden’s recent speech in Kyiv, though constitutionally he had no right to be there.
He was also by Zelensky’s side when the President first went to the frontline in March last year. Colleagues talk of how thin-skinned Zelensky was in his early days as a politician, how his laikozavisimost (a craving for “likes”, in Ukrainian) meant he needed to be kept away from Facebook. If the skin is a bit thicker now, the shoulders are also broader, literally. Rudenko detects under the khaki T-shirt a more toned body than previously.
A more recent addition to the team is Mykhailo Podolyak, Zelensky’s official spokesman and a former writer with a record of staunch anti-russian journalism. In June last year, he gave an interview to US radio station NPR where he reiterated the message that they need “weapons, weapons, weapons”. He also tweeted a “wish list” of what Ukraine needs that went viral. It included a thousand howitzers, a thousand drones and 500 tanks.
He appears to have been brought into an important position as a signal that Zelensky is capable of looking beyond his Kvartal 95 cronies. “He is a much more steady character,” says Kataryna Wolczuk, professor of politics at Birmingham University.
The Kvartal 95 group has on occasion brought Zelensky embarrassment. Last year, he had to dismiss a childhood friend, Ivan Bakanov, as head of Ukraine’s security service. “He did one of the most difficult jobs, and it was found there had been a degree of security service collaboration with the Russians,” says Wolczuk. “He was in charge when it happened. He was trusted but had no experience in public administration and was simply not qualified to sort out that kind of security problem. To regain trust, he had to go.”
The nation’s current priority is obvious, but those who seek to look to the future – after victory, of course, they insist – point out that corruption is alive and well in Ukraine. “He will remain the president of victory, but all the government structures are unchanged, and it could break the career of Zelensky,” warns Rudenko.