On June 22, 12 Canadian universities, including the University of Montreal, connected with Volodymyr Zelensky for an hour-long exchange between the Ukrainian president and students. Through this exercise of soft-power (the power of influence through image, words and speech rather than through material resources), the warlord demonstrated the importance of communication in his crisis management strategy.
Posted at 12:00 p.m.
“Sometimes words can have more impact than weapons,” he said, assuming that in this war, information and communication technologies are very long-range weapons.
Several observers have already noticed the modernity and effectiveness of its communication efforts. Some have even gone so far as to claim that Zelensky has largely won the communications war against Vladimir Putin. What is such a “victory” based on? We can identify three components in his very particular style: the apparent proximity to his audience, the mobilization of emotions and combativeness.
Proximity
Before the students, the Ukrainian president began his speech by recalling a visit to Toronto three years earlier, during which he would have compared his promising Ukrainian reforms to the unexpected victory of the Toronto Raptors.
Far from being innocent, the reference fits well into its strategy of personalizing the discourse.
In his speeches, the Ukrainian president has a habit of adapting his message to his audience by using references specific to the imagination of his recipients.
It is a communication tactic that the French political scientist Pascal Boniface likened to “surgical strikes”, targeted and incisive. This allows him to build a relational bridge, an empathetic link between Ukraine and the rest of the world.
He went further by extending the domain of the countries concerned by the war by asserting that “the fate of all democracies is at stake”, which gives his addressees the feeling of being personally affected by his speech.
The emotions
On several occasions during his speech, the president thanked the students who asked him questions, taking the time to adapt his remarks to each interlocutor. In the preamble of his response to a student from the University of Alberta, he addressed a compliment to him on his attire with traditional Ukrainian motifs, causing laughter and smiles in the audience.
It is not insignificant.
Its communication strategy mobilizes affective-corporal elements of acting to stimulate the sensitive chords of its recipients. The president is a former actor, trained in mastering tone, gestures and a voice posed correctly.
He also sparked laughter when he spoke of his use of humor to manage the crisis: he admitted that while it was not always appropriate to laugh in these circumstances, appreciating a few memes could help him to find a semblance of lightness. A priori trivial, the reference to cultural artefacts of everyday life gives the character an endearing, human, even warm side: despite his worldwide visibility and his status as a warlord, he seems accessible.
In line with his proximity strategy, Volodymyr Zelensky cultivates a style “close to the people”. When a student asked him who are the heroes who inspire him, be they political, literary or other figures, the president singled out the Ukrainians, citing more specifically “the farmer who drives his tractor in the fields”. .
The combativeness
The president mobilized classic elements of motivational speech, with inspiring formulas such as “we are ready to surprise the world” or “we are fighting against the second army in the world, we are fighting for our future, for our freedom and for our earth “.
“We have become the country of boots, planes, tanks and trenches, our way of life is now different, but not our vision, our values; the path to our goals is different, but our goal is not,” he said, referring to the reform ambitions for Ukraine he expressed at that conference in Toronto in 2019.
By speaking to the “we”, Zelensky suggests that he speaks on behalf of his people and with their support. It is then a question of building his ethos, his character: Zelensky shows himself to be well surrounded, supported by solid values and at ease in his role as a warlord.
Words of speakers
Through his worked style, Zelensky seems to master the three essential components of a good rhetorician’s discourse: ethos, pathos and logos. In the triangle of rhetoric drawn by Aristotle, the ethos concerns the speaker, his story and his objectives, the logos concerns the rationality of the discourse, and the pathos concerns the domain of attention to the audience, to its values. , his beliefs, but also to emotions and affect.
The effectiveness of the crisis communication put in place by Zelensky’s team recalls the formula of the Roman orator Cicero: “To prove is a necessity, to please, a gentleness, and to move, a victory. »