Besieged Ukrainian President Shows Russia An Alternative To A Hiding Vladimir Putin

While Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, stays in his besieged capital, calmly addressing the nation, meeting troops, and shrugging off offers of rescue, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin has hidden away, making occasional, highly orchestrated appearances in palatial government buildings.

The increasingly strained, tsar-like imagery used to bolster the Russian President’s regime is a stark contrast to Zelensky’s undeniable bravado. Ukraine’s President—known to be hunted by Russian forces—dons a helmet and flack jacket to mingle with Kyiv’s defenders, and yet Putin hasn’t deigned to meet Russian soldiers or bothered to visit any of the 200,000 troops he deployed to attack Ukraine. 

Like the famous aesthete and former World War II-era dictator, Benito Mussolini, Putin long understood the value of a carefully crafted persona. Putin spent thirty years actively managing his public image, building and conforming to a new Russian ideal. He was everywhere, doing everything. In 2007, Putin grabbed a sniper rifle, stalking before photographers, topless. He has been photographed playing hockey, practicing judo, piloting mini-subs and even romping with puppies. 

A younger Putin relied upon photo opportunities to portray his direct engagement in military affairs. Donning a flight helmet, he flew into Chechnya while the Second Chechen War was underway. After the Project 949A submarine APL Kursk exploded and sank, he visited and commiserated with families who lost loved ones. Putin used to do everything citizens expected a wartime leader to do. He visited wounded soldiers, hurt during Russia’s invasion of Georgia and, in 2019, Putin even celebrated with victors, attending a raucous Hell’s Angels-like motorcycle rally in annexed Crimea. 

But, now, as Putin’s faked and over-orchestrated imagery is put alongside Zelensky’s gritty heroism, the contrast is particularly obvious and grating. Zelensky is real, while Putin is exposed as a sad fake, trapped in a luxurious Potemkin village of his own making.

Since COVID, Putin has largely abandoned any effort to hone his man-of-the-people persona. Insulated from outside contacts, he has resorted largely to the trappings of a remote ruler, a modern-day tsar, ensconced in the regal confines of a Kremlin redoubt. 

Throughout the Ukraine crisis, Putin has rarely been photographed outside his regal quarters. His global audience has seem him meet leaders at a 100,000 euro, gold-encrusted, six-meter long table, or in a comically grandiose state ballroom, holding well-choreographed ceremonies, his boyar-like advisors spread before him. His rambling, aggrieved speeches, coupled with his dismissive treatment of Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, have further diminished Putin’s once-coveted image of KGB-empowered international savvy.

But little has done more damage to Putin’s image than the daily contrast with his Ukrainian foe, President Zelensky. While Putin has hidden himself away, appearing in separate statements in the same tie and outfit, Zelensky has risen to the crisis, becoming a heroic foil to Putin’s increasingly over-the-top “B-movie” villain.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Zelensky, long dismissed by observers as a media confection—he rose to stardom in a TV show, playing a high-school history teacher who unexpectedly is elected President of Ukraine—apparently had hidden steel in him that only a mortal crisis could temper. And now, as he is hunted by Russian special forces, Zelensky spurned offers of rescue, quipping, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”

The youthful and “unexpected” President was obviously underestimated by the older Putin. But Zelensky’s guts, rejecting America’s cautions to make an emotional appeal to Europe, hours before Russia invaded, followed by his eloquent speeches in response to Russian aggression, and his noble last-stand in Kyiv stood in stark contrast to the rambling grievance-filled speeches from the Russian leader, sweating under his TV makeup. 

Zelensky’s rough-and-ready, social media-savvy image may not save him in Kyiv, but the Ukrainian President’s poise under desperate circumstances has certainly helped Ukraine unite and overlook serious miscalculations and errors in confronting their current war for survival. Ukraine, by many conventional military calculations, was ripe to fall and to fall fast. A refusal to mobilize reservists, inexplicable failures to plan out a cohesive defense, and a country-wide failure to collect and stockpile supplies for Ukraine’s urban areas could have sapped Ukrainian resistance by now. But the dynamic and motivating presence of a leader who has put it all on the line, sharing in his nation’s suffering, has helped keep the Army and the rest of the Ukrainian nation motivated and fighting in the field 

The battle for Ukraine may well be turning Russia’s way right now, but the contrast between the two leaders has been a catastrophe for Russia, emphasizing Putin’s emerging weaknesses at the very moment the Russian President wanted to project regal power. In battle, Russia’s ornate lies are poor gruel to Ukraine’s simple truths.

And Zelensky, even if he is shot down in the streets this weekend, can die content, knowing he has punctured Putin’s regal façade, and done more damage to Putin’s regime than the most sophisticated decapitation strike could ever hope to manage.