The Showman

His aim, as he saw it, was to keep them engaged, to pry open their eyes and point them toward the picture of the war he wanted them to see. My work was useful to him as a means to that end. He took a pause and cleared his throat, realizing he may have crossed a line in telling me how to do my job. Then he continued to do exactly that. "Forgive me for saying this, but I think the aim of journalism, of the media, is to keep people from getting sick of this," he said, referring to the story of the war. "When they do get sick of it, that brings about fatigue, and fatigue causes a loss of interest. For our country, that leads to the loss of support.

He warned them again and again in his speeches that the loss of freedom in one nation erodes the freedom in all the rest.

In the closet, he kept several changes of clothes from local military outfitters, who gave him an ample supply of the T-shirts and fleeces that turned Zelensky into an unlikely fashion icon. “I had to tell them to stop,” he said. “They all wanted me to wear their T-shirts.” Hanging next to them in his closet he kept a single business suit, pressed and ready, he said, for the day when the war would end in victory for Ukraine.

Wars are fought in the minds of men and women long before the shooting starts, and Zelensky, the showman turned president, operated on that plane.

The president asked his staff to prepare a bed for him in a little room behind his office on the fourth floor. It was a single, about the same size as his bed in the bunker, with a wooden headboard and a TV suspended on the wall above his feet. In the closet, he kept several changes of clothes from local military outfitters, who gave him an ample supply of the T-shirts and fleeces that turned Zelensky into an unlikely fashion icon. "I had to tell them to stop," he said. "They all wanted me to wear their T-shirts." Hanging next to them in his closet he kept a single business suit, pressed and ready, he said, for the day when the war would end in victory for Ukraine.

Now, when he was truly vulnerable, one Russia missile strike away from death, the president carried an air of invincibility, as though the war had made him grow some stubborn armor that no weapon in the world could break. If this was an act, it looked convincing right down to the details, the way he settled into the seat across from me like a sovereign into a hereditary throne. The presence of all these aides, all these bodyguards, no longer made him feel self-conscious. He saw no need to maintain an ironic distance between himself and the symbols of power around him. The role was his now.

President Zelensky visited Bucha a few days after the Russian retreat, and he would long remember it as the most terrifying moment of that tragic year of war, another turning point for him and his country. It showed him, as he later put it, that the devil is not far away, not a feature of our myths and nightmares. "He's here on this earth," Zelensky said.

My life today is beautiful," he said at the end of the press conference, when a reporter asked how he was holding up. "I feel that I'm needed." The previous week, as horrifying and tragic as it had been for him and his country, was also among the most exciting and fulfilling of his life. He would not trade it for any of the comfort and security he knew in his old life as a movie star. "I think the main purpose in life is to be needed, not just to be a blank space that breathes, walks, and eats. But to live, to know that certain things depend on you being alive, and to feel that your life matters to others.

Still, in those early hours of war, when Ukraine's survival as a country was at stake, Zelensky had no time to weigh risks and analyze data, and he did not need much prompting to fire off instructions to his staff, routinely flavored with profanities.

He remembers giving himself a pep talk that would play in his mind throughout the day. "They're watching," he told himself. "You're a symbol. You need to act the way a head of state must act." As the day wore on, his aides could see Zelensky's posture stiffen. His tone became clipped, and he began to issue a stream of orders from the bunker and from his office on the fourth floor. Most of his decisions had no real basis in experience or planning. Zelensky had neither of these things to guide him at the time, but he didn't seem to mind. His assent to the presidency from the world of comedy would not have been possible without a knack for projecting confidence even when he lacked it. Now that skill went into overdrive, and Zelensky became what one of his aides described as a "decision generator.

We’re all inclined to project our own qualities onto other people. But some people are different. There are those with whom it’s just not possible to make a connection.

I think the main purpose in life is to be needed, not just to be a blank space that breathes, walks, and eats. But to live, to know that certain things depend on your being alive, and to feel that your life matters to others.