On a few interim reports – Anna Reid in TLS:

‘The scene is from the closing episode of the first series of Servant of the People, the TV show in which Ukraine’s actual leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, famously starred as a history teacher elevated to the presidency after the oligarchs who pull the strings behind the scenes amuse themselves by standing back and letting the voters’ choice win. Ivan the Terrible is one of a series of historical figures who appear at critical moments to give the president advice – sometimes good, sometimes bad. The show was first broadcast in 2015, the year after Russia took its first bites out of Ukraine, occupying Crimea and, semi-indirectly, eastern Donbas. In February of this year, Russia attacked again, in much greater force, and currently occupies about 20 per cent of the country (though, at the time of writing, less every day.) Zelensky – since 2019 the president for real – finds himself locked in a life-and-death struggle with Ivan’s equally Ukraine-obsessed successor, Vladimir Putin. How he got there and how he is doing in the role are the subjects of these quick-fire biographies.’

(…)

‘Zelensky finally started making money. In 2006 he won the local version of Strictly – toreador jacket for Ravel’s Boléro, fuchsia Elvis suit for Blue Suede Shoes – and took his young family on holiday abroad for the first time. In 2008 his production company had another success with “The In-Laws” – a beady social comedy in which two elderly couples (one rural, one urban) compete for the attention of their only grandchild – and in the same year Inter’s owner bought 50 per cent of Kvartal’s shares for a reported $12 million. By the time Zelensky needed to declare his assets to run for the presidency, they included flats in Kyiv, Yalta and London. They also included – as the Ukrainian journalist and television presenter Serhii Rudenko points out in Zelensky: A biography – an undeclared Tuscan seaside villa, bought for €3.8 million.’

(…)

‘More critically, for a long time he had appeared to be politically agnostic, if not pro-Russian. During the Orange Revolution in 2004 (which reversed a Kremlin-rigged election), he did not take a public stand. In 2011 he performed at the Kremlin-backed, grotesquely corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych’s sixty-first birthday party, and through the passionate mass-protest winter of 2013-14 he made jokes about police brutality, but again did not clearly speak out. (This was in contrast to other celebrities, who regularly appeared on the protest camp’s main stage.) In April 2014, remarkably, Kvartal toured Donbas while Russian-backed thugs were taking over the region’s police stations and town halls, and even performed in the town of Horlivka on the same day as a member of the local council was abducted and killed. From the summer of that year, however, Zelensky started performing for soldiers at the front, and the experience politicized him. “I have always regarded myself as a Ukrainian national”, Derix quotes him telling a journalist, “but never have I felt like a Ukrainian deep inside. I always wanted to be a citizen of the world, able to live and work anywhere. Now the citizens of Ukraine have become truly Ukrainians.” His new seriousness came through the following years with the first series of Servant of the People. Despite being conceived while fierce battles were going on in Donbas, it hardly mentions Russia. Instead, its message is that Ukraine itself needs moral regeneration – not just at the top, but in the behaviour and values of every individual, rich or poor. As Onuch and Hale detail, its funniest and most painful episodes are the ones that show graft permeating the whole of society. In one, the teacher-turned-president Vasyl Holoborodko tries to work out why, despite vast government spending, the roads are still riddled with potholes. A cascade of phone calls, from the smooth Minister of Infrastructure down to a female road worker in a headscarf and fluorescent jerkin, shows each person in the chain adding 10 per cent to the costs.’

(…)

‘The defining moment of Zelensky’s presidency, of course, is now, and he is playing the war-leader role superbly. Critically, in the February invasion’s first nerve-racking weeks he stayed in Kyiv, even when it seemed as though the city was about to fall. Had he left, as the diplomatic corps expected him to, the map might look very different. He was also instrumental in rallying western support, initially in a series of video addresses to parliaments. (The House of Commons got a paraphrase of “We shall fight on the beaches”, while Congress heard his version of “I have a dream” – of weapons systems.) His Jewish heritage has been the best possible rebuke to Putin’s nonsensical call for Ukraine’s “denazification”. Largely thanks to his courage and charisma, the West’s aid to Ukraine has so far been generous and its sanctions against Russia have been tough, despite Putin’s nuclear threats and closure of the gas taps. Domestically the president’s support is sky-high, as is that for the war itself. Almost nine in ten Ukrainians say they want to liberate all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, and almost as many say they expect to actually do so.
At the time of writing, with the Russian army on the retreat, this looks less like fantasy than it did. The big question regarding Zelensky is what kind of leader he will make after the war ends – or, as Ukrainians say, when victory is won. Judging by his record before February, the honest answer is: patchy. Best on his missteps are Derix, a Dutch journalist who previously reported from Kyiv, and Rudenko, whose book was first published in Ukrainian last year under the title Zelensky Without Makeup. Worrying from the start was the new president’s reliance on old friends and colleagues. Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s press secretary from 2019 to 2021, admits in her positively slanted memoir The Fight of Our Lives: My time with Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s battle for democracy, and what it means for the world that “more than thirty people who used to have some kind of position in Kvartal 95 … later became members of parliament, representatives of the President’s Office, or heads of departments, including the Security Service of Ukraine”. (This last went to Kvartal’s in-house lawyer and accountant.)’

(…)

‘By 2021 Zelensky had lost control of parliament. In the first year of his presidency he had used his majority to push through a raft of reforms, among them more powers for local government and the end of immunity from prosecution for MPs. Now he started using the National Security and Defence Council to issue corruption-busting measures by decree. The council’s shutdown of three Kremlin propaganda channels was long overdue, as was the arrest of a long-time Putin confidant and fixer, the politician Viktor Medvedchuk. Harder to justify, and criticized abroad, was a barrage of criminal charges against Petro Poroshenko, the confectionary magnate whom Zelensky had ousted from the presidency in 2019. Autumn brought a depressing sense of déja vu when a mystery gunman shot at the president’s business partner-turned-aide Serhiy Shefir (the case has not been solved), and the Pandora Papers revealed that Zelensky co-owned a network of shell companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus and Belize. What Onuch and Hale call “patronalism” seemed to be alive and well, and the president’s popularity ratings slumped to a disillusioned 25-30 per cent.’

(…)

‘For western financial aid to keep coming, it must not be stolen – which, with Ukraine sitting between Zambia and Gabon in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, is far from a given.’

(…)

‘The best bits of Mendel’s short The Fight of Our Lives are the personal ones; in particular her brave decision, in her final year of graduate school, to expose widespread bribe-taking in Ukraine’s universities. (Her supervisor refused to read her doctoral dissertation until it was larded with the requisite brown envelope: “I watched as my esteemed professor … thumbed through the pages. My face turned red with shame, but I’ll never forget what he said when he found what he was looking for: ‘Now I see it. Your work is good’”.)’

Read the review here.

Putting managed to unite Ukraine and save Putin, and to a certain degree, saved Zelensky as well.

As to corruption in general, this is one of the best quotes I’ve ever seen: ‘Now I see it, your work is good.’

The better variant of: you scratch my back and I scratch yours.

Now I see it, your back is gorgeous.