Zelensky Is Everywhere
Volodymyr Zelensky may be the most accessible wartime president in human history. Since Russia invaded his country in February, Zelensky has masterfully paired his everyman charisma with his uncommon social-media savvy, making the whole world feel as though they know him—and inspiring millions of people to root for Ukraine’s victory.
And yet actually getting to the man in person is not so easy. The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and staff writer Anne Applebaum learned as much when they traveled to Kyiv in April to interview Zelensky, a journey that involved getting on a train without tickets and navigating the city long after curfew.
Their wide-ranging conversation with Zelensky is a window into how he is living, what shapes his thinking, and what it looks like when an unlikely political figure like Zelensky goes “from Larry David to Winston Churchill” overnight, as Goldberg put it.
Listen here:
What follows is a condensed and lightly edited transcript of Goldberg and Applebaum describing their time in Kyiv, including portions of their conversion with Zelensky.
Jeffrey Goldberg: You couldn’t think of a leadership style more different from that of Vladimir Putin than Zelensky’s. It’s almost too neat. If you’re writing a screenplay, you’d be like: “Oh, these guys, they’re two opposites. Give me a break.”
I’ve been writing and working on Ukraine for many, many years. And I always felt that it was a very minority interest. And to have it suddenly become a mass phenomenon has been really amazing. And I think probably that mass phenomenon is
