1Who the Bleep…?
I don’t care what nationality a person is—what’s important is who he is on the inside.
—Zelenskyy speaking to a group of Russian journalists on March 27, 2022 (most of them operating outside Russia at that point)
Who am I? is a question we all think about occasionally. And for many of us, it’s a puzzle we struggle to piece together our entire lives. Is our identity the country we come from? The religion we follow? The language we speak? Essentially, we are asking what makes us … us.
How to define myself—the Soviet “Asya Bronfman,” the Americanized “Jessie Kanzer,” and everything in between—has always plagued me. But never more than during the war Russia launched in Ukraine, with many people from my part of the world suddenly asking themselves the same thing.
“I am Russian,” I used to say, because that’s how I thought of myself, I guess—or, rather, how I thought it would be easy for others to think of me—until Vladimir Putin turned Russian into an icky word. Russian began to mean aggressor, savage, bully, as if overnight. Except, of course, there were plenty of Russian people who didn’t align with that definition in the least—an identity that had been hijacked by Putin and Co., gradually and then all of a sudden.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, however, was here to help us view identity differently.
Perhaps for every Vladimir we are given a Volodymyr.
Volodymyr
When Zelenskyy first ran for president of Ukraine in 2019, he was heavily criticized by his opponents for being a comic without political experience. This was predictable—he had been known as a comedian, actor, producer, and even as an entertainment magnate, until then. It was a strange about-face, to say the least. Ze was certainly astute in the comedic work he created, and he easily highlighted the absurdity of his nation’s political quagmire … but was that translatable to a presidency?
Once he was elected—in a landslide—he was especially mocked by Russian media for not fitting the quasi-macho politician mold that was their norm. “He is weak,” said Russian commentator Sergey Parkhomenko. “He has no religion, he has no nationality.”
Alas, this commentator had misread Zelenskyy’s lack of ego-domination for weakness, his lack of religiosity for a lack of faith, and his linguistic flexibility (he grew up speaking Russian, and then learned both Ukrainian and English) for a lack of nationality. Not to mention that in leading his nation, Zelenskyy’s focus was not on his own identity.
Ze believed that power should always lie in the hands of civilized people, rather than in the hands of tyrants—that a politician should carry out the will of these people, rather than the other way around. And he believed that who he was should never overshadow his job of representing his citizens. Perhaps most significantly he showed us all that being Ukrainian did not depend on what language you spoke, on your ethnicity, or on your religion—or lack thereof, and that we can all aim to be a little bit Ukrainian—at least when it comes to mental fortitude.
In several of his wartime interviews, Zelenskyy reminded folks that Ukraine is home to one hundred different ethnicities, pointing out that now, they were all united as a single force for good.
Blue and Yellow
“Who else had the courage to persuade the largest global companies to forget about accounting and recall morality?” Zelenskyy asked his people in an April 2022 address, “And to teach all political leaders—whatever they are—to be at least a little Ukrainian … At least a little brave.” And suddenly many of us around the world began displaying blue and yellow flags, whatever and whomever we were.
Ze expanded Ukrainian to mean more than just the ethnicity that’s native to the land; his entire country gave new meaning to the word. In fact, there were plenty of ethnically Russian inhabitants of Ukraine who followed their president’s lead and stood up for freedom—like Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of the city of Melitopol, who was kidnapped by Russian troops when he refused to cooperate with their takeover. (He was later released in a prisoner exchange.)
As we saw in the war—as Zelenskyy himself explained—to be Ukrainian meant to be a free people who came together and stood up for one another, a people who oversaw their own country and didn’t bend down to autocracy. If you lived in Ukraine, if you believed in freedom and democracy, you were Ukrainian—whether your family originated in Russia, or were Jewish like Zelenskyy’s, or whether you had Korean roots like Vitaliy Kim, the governor of Ukraine’s Mykolaiv, in whose capital city some of my own relatives still reside.
Being Ukrainian became an ideal, a set of beliefs.
What a forward way of thinking, I realized—to get to choose your own identity based on the way you want to live your life, rather than having it be predetermined by your ethnicity, your religion, or the language you speak; there were thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians whose mother tongue was Russian.
Zelenskyy showed us that our identities are more than just the geopolitical stuff which happened before our birth or which lies outside our control. He showed us that we can choose better than what surrounds us.
“Even in the darkest of circumstances, there are people who carry light,” Zelenskyy said on May 14, 2022, the Day of Remembrance of Ukrainians who saved Jews in World War II. And he demonstrated that it’s this light that matters most—the very light he helped ignite and keep lit in Ukraine during its greatest struggle.
“We are defending the ability of a person to live in the modern world,” Ze said in an interview with 60 Minutes in April 2022. “We are defending the right to live.”
“These are human values,” he explained, “so that Russia doesn’t choose what we should do and how I’m exercising my rights. That right was given to me by God and my parents.”
Questions
Copyright © 2023 by Jessie Asya Kanzer