PARIS : As Russia's invasion of Ukraine is close to completing a month, a person who stood out in all of this is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The comedian turned president has won praises globally, as the West rallies behind Ukraine, issuing sanctions against Russia.
Zelensky reportedly refused to leave the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, even under heavy threat. Not only him, his family is also reportedly within Kyiv. Zelensky has been rallying western superpowers to stop Russian moves.
The idiosyncratic nature of this president is, when rallying rallying British MPs, he reaches for Churchill. When addressing the US Congress, he invokes Pearl Harbor. When beamed into the Bundestag, he conjures the threat of a new Wall in Europe.
Having a knack for the theatrics, this former comedian has won standing ovations in parliaments across the West with a series of impassioned addresses from wartime Kyiv tailored to each audience.
Here's looking at some of the outstanding moments during his virtual tour, as the president of the war-torn country prepares to talk to Japanese and French lawmakers.
'Prove you are with us'- On 1 March, less than a week into the war, a haggard-looking Zelensky addresses the European Parliament.
The 44-year-old former TV actor frames the fight against Russia as a struggle to defend the European ideals for which Ukrainians staged two revolutions in the past two decades.
"Prove you are with us," he tells MEPs. "Prove you are not abandoning us and you are really Europeans," he says, a day after requesting fast-track EU membership for Ukraine.
'We will fight on the shores' -On 8 March, as the number of Ukrainians fleeing the fighting tops two million, he invokes the wartime defiance of British prime minister Winston Churchill in pledging a fight to the end.
"We will fight in the forests, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets," he tells the UK's House of Commons, echoing Churchill's historic "We shall fight on the beaches" speech in the face of Nazi German advances in June 1940.
'Please close the sky'- On 15 March, as residential neighbourhoods in Kyiv come under attack, he asks MPs in Canada, the country with the world's second-largest Ukrainian diaspora, to imagine their cities and children being bombed.
"Please close the sky," he implores Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, calling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
'Remember Pearl Harbor'- On 16 March, he brings members of the US Congress to their feet with a rousing speech comparing the bombardment of Ukrainian cities to the attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the United States into World War II.
As Ukraine mourns 10 people killed queueing for bread in the city of Chernihiv, Zelensky likens the Russian invasion to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US, "when evil tried to turn your cities... into battlefields".
'Tear down this Wall'- One of his most powerful speeches is to MPs in German on 17 March, as reports emerge that a theatre accommodating hundreds of civilians in Mariupol has been reduced to rubble.
Zelensky warns that Russia is erecting a new "Wall" in Europe between "freedom and bondage" and calls on German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to tear it down, echoing US President Ronald Reagan's 1987 appeal to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
'Final solution'- After hitting the right notes with his European and US audiences, Zelensky, who is Jewish, draws criticism in Israel after a speech to the Knesset on 20 March comparing the Russian invasion to the Holocaust.
Urging Israel, which has not joined in Western sanctions against Russia, to step up for Ukraine, he declares: "Ukraine made the choice to save Jews 80 years ago."
He is rebuked by Israel's Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel, who notes that part of the genocide of Europe's Jews took place in Ukraine.
‘Freeze their yachts’- On 22 March, he tells lawmakers in Italy, long a top holiday destination for rich Russians, to stop being a playground for Russia's elite.
"Don't be the place that welcomes these people," he urges.
"We must freeze them all: freeze their properties, their accounts, their yachts, from Scheherazade to the smallest," he says referring to a mega yacht docked on the Tuscan coast.
