Ukraine’s Zelensky vs Russia’s Putin: who is winning the PR battle?
- Since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has delivered stirring messages on social media
- Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s style has been markedly different when delivering statements on television
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Ukrainian leader Zelensky will ‘try’ talks with Russia, but sceptical about chances for peace
As Russian bombs fell across Ukraine, the contrast between the leaders of the warring nations could not be starker.
In Ukraine, a T-shirt-clad President Volodymyr Zelensky, 44, was on the streets of Kyiv, posting yet another defiant video to social media. “I am here,” he said on the mobile phone recording. “We will not lay down any weapons. We will defend our state because our weapons are our truth.”
Two different styles, two different generations and two different visions of Europe. The war for Ukraine may be far from decided, but in the public relations battle, Zelensky is clearly winning.
A lawyer-turned-comic who wielded the power of social media to leap from playing Ukraine’s president on a popular television series to actually being elected president in 2019, Zelensky speaks to a modern Europe seeking to move beyond the nationalist tendencies that ignited two world wars.
Putin, who laments the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the last century and “a genuine tragedy” for his people, glowers, threatens and brandishes his army. A former KGB agent, he embodies the continent’s Cold War past, intent on resurrecting a world order that began to crumble back when Nintendo Game Boy was the rage and Zelensky was only 11 years old.
