“I need ammunition, not a taxi”, dryly answers the emissaries of the American president, Joe Biden, the extraordinary president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. They offer to evacuate him. Washington considers his life in danger after the invasion of his country by Russia, launched on February 24, 2022, on the order of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The ex-comedian and television host becomes a resistance warrior.
It is nothing less than a metamorphosis for a man whom the international press did not take, even yesterday, quite seriously, going so far as to compare him, in the electoral fair, to fanciful candidates, like the French Coluche or the Italian Beppe Grillo. Settled for a long time in the former Soviet Union, the French journalists Régis Genté and Stéphane Siohan were able to write the biography of this president riveted to his capital, kyiv, despite the invasion.
Thanks to a video that goes around the world, here he is no longer in a suit jacket with a popularity rating, among his fellow citizens, of 38%, but unshaven and in a khaki T-shirt with the support of 91% of Ukrainians . 1er March, he declares to the media, in particular to CNN and to Reuters, that it is about a war delivered against “the life, the democracy, the freedom”, therefore against the “whole world”.
Genté and Siohan understood that Putin’s desire to deny the cultural originality of Ukraine in order to better annex its territory to Russia is based on a deep linguistic ambiguity. They explain: “The fundamental error of the Russian power is to assimilate the fact of speaking Russian to a Russophilia or even to belonging to the Russian nation. They report that in March 2022 a mob of Russian speakers in southeastern Ukraine shouted at invading Russian soldiers to return home.
Zelensky himself, born in Ukraine in 1978 to Jewish scientific parents, very integrated into the country, had Russian as his mother tongue and only then adopted Ukrainian as his usual language out of patriotism. Before Putin, who describes the Ukrainian leaders as a “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis”, Zelensky, whose great-grandfather and three great-uncles were exterminated according to Hitler’s plan because of their Jewishness, offers, as a denial, a heartbreaking testimony.
Genté and Siohan recall that, since 2014, the Ukrainian far right has never obtained more than 2% in the elections. On the other hand, they point out that the country’s Orthodoxy has recently acquired its religious autonomy by no longer recognizing the primacy of the Moscow patriarchate, a patriarchate too close to the Kremlin. The demonization of the power held in kyiv, this fad that germinated in the mind of Putin, would be only the most baroque and most glaring symptom of the decline of Russia on the world stage, then of its ridiculous imperial nostalgia.