The Zelensky Effect

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You cannot understand the historic events of 2022 without understanding Volodymyr Zelensky. But the Zelensky effect is less about the man himself than about the civic nation he embodies: what makes Zelensky most extraordinary in war is his very ordinariness as a Ukrainian.

With Russian shells raining on Kyiv and tanks closing in, American forces prepared to evacuate Ukraine’s leader. Just three years earlier, his apparent main qualification had been playing a president on TV. But Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly retorted, ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’ Ukrainian forces won the battle for Kyiv, ensuring their country’s independence even as a longer war began for the southeast.

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SPEAKER

Dr Olga Onuch (DPhil, Oxford), is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Manchester. In 2021 she was visiting CERES at the University of Toronto as a senior research associate. From 2014 to 2020 she was an associate member of Nuffield College (Oxford). Since 2017 she has been an affiliate of, and previously in 2014, a fellow of, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. In 2017 she was a visiting fellow at the Davis Center (Harvard). A major theme of Onuch’s second book The Zelensky Effect is how ordinary citizens come to develop a sense of civic duty fostering a civic-centered state attachment as opposed to an ethnonational one. Onuch is also the author of Revolutionary Moments (2010) and Mapping Mass Mobilization (2014).