Fearless. Earnest. Russian target No. 1. The man in the green T-shirt. As Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine unfolds real-time on screens worldwide, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has captured the global imagination like no one else. Just three years ago, Zelenskyy was still a television star whose main qualification for Ukraine’s presidency seemed to be having played one on TV. Rarely has a politician so visibly surprised so many. The man Ukrainians call “Ze” has come to symbolize his nation’s fierce resistance to what many experts initially thought was a Russian military juggernaut. Following his lead, tens of thousands of ordinary Ukrainians have joined the all-volunteer Territorial Defense Force. Farmers have used their tractors to “reclaim” military hardware. Every day, protests occur in towns and cities under temporary occupation. And across the country, elderly villagers try to stop tanks with their bare hands. Yet this full-on Ukrainian mobilization, and Zelenskyy’s potential to rally it, should have been no surprise. The reason for its success is not that Zelenskyy’s special leadership traits set him apart from his country. Instead, what is making him extraordinary in war comes from his very ordinariness as a Ukrainian.
To understand how, the first thing to know is that Ukraine has a long history of civic resistance. Ukrainians have repeatedly taken to the streets en masse to struggle for their rights. Zelenskyy is well suited to meet this moment because, most fundamentally, he reflects what social scientists call Ukraine’s civic national identity. Unlike ethnic national identity, which limits national belonging to a specific ethnic group, civic identity is for everyone. Civic identity is where they all come together, setting aside their differences for the sake of the country as a whole. The aspirational civic causes of democracy, fighting corruption, and above all national sovereignty resonate especially deeply. This is the Ukraine in which Zelenskyy grew up. So when Zelenskyy stands up to Vladimir Putin’s tanks and munitions, some of them emblazoned with the “Z” that has become a pro-Russian war symbol, he sends an important signal of resistance on behalf of the whole civic Ukrainian nation – a nation full of Zelenskyys defined by citizenship rather than any ethnic litmus test. This is the Zelenskyy effect. And it is why Zelenskyy is such a big threat to Putin. He personifies the vacuity of Putin’s narrative on Ukraine and his existence spells eventual doom for any Kremlin effort to force it into submission. Even if Russia kills Zelenskyy and overruns Ukraine with military force now, it would become a time bomb in Russia itself. Whatever happens next, Ukraine’s “Ze” is defeating Russia’s “Z.”
