Volodymyr Zelensky and the Art of the War Story

In 2003 VOLODYMYR Zelensky formed an organization to make the world a better place using humor and creativity.

Kvartal 95 Studio is a production company that created a sitcom about the burden of in-laws. The In-Laws suffered a blow when one of its stars was banned from Ukraine for publicly supporting the Russian annexation of the peninsula.

Zelensky is best known for playing the president of Ukraine in Servant of the People. He now produces nonfiction video dispatches from the front lines of the war. They are field reporting, pleas for weapons, and arias. The videos have helped win moral and military support. The case for liberal democracy is made in the manifesto. The punch-drunk world needs a primer. Zelensky has been calling the world to its senses, clarifying the reason for being in the modern world.

The videos were written in collaboration with Dmytro Lytvyn, a controversial Ukrainian pundit. The crew still uses dense wordplay and irony, along with bellicosity and rage, despite no longer using sight gags about big people on small bicycles.

The first part of the series is a Lucasian monomyth about the defiance of evil by the forces of good. Zelensky has an approval rating in his homeland of 90 percent and in the US of 70 percent. Kremlin propagandists have stopped distributing propaganda about the Nazis. Instead, at the end of April, they stooped to making fake videos of Zelensky with cocaine on his desk in order to make him look bad. When a sitcom pilot fails to win viewers from the top-rated one, the new show is quietly canceled.

Zelensky's first video of the war appeared on February 23, the eve of the invasion. He addresses the citizens of Russia in Russian. The word citizens and not people reminds people that they are members of a modern nation and not infantry in a holy war. Zelensky zeroes in on a talking point that vexes him. You are told that we dislike Russian culture. How can you dislike culture? Zelensky dexterously explained the absurdity of a culture war in that moment of incomprehension.

A culture does not have a budget, government or army. It doesn't have a CEO, bible, or headquarters.

Slow it down. A culture is a patchwork of dialects, customs, habits, music, arts, mores and ways of living. In Russia, culture might include forest folklore, vigorous strolling, and the band Little Big. You could find Chagall, Turgenev, Anatoly Karpov, and the Bolshoi. How can a culture be hated?

I had never thought of it that way. A culture does not have a budget, government or army. It doesn't have a CEO, bible, or headquarters. How can a nation's culture be hated if it can't be identified? The warning of the far right in Russia, France, and the US is that someone, somewhere, hates your culture and thus deserves to die. Zelensky has dissolved this hollow alarmism with such dispatch.

Zelensky says in a video that Europe must wake up. He wore the olive-drab that became his trademark when he wore a funereal black suit and necktie a week earlier. He addresses all people who know the word Chernobyl.