Real life is, of course, never as tidy or satisfying as fiction. The good guys don’t necessarily finish first, the villains don’t always get their just deserts, and the gutsy little character who no one thought would achieve anything doesn’t end up the winner merely because we want him to. Volodymyr Zelenskiy would make a tremendous hero in an undemanding Hollywood movie along the lines of Independence Day: Mr Ordinary Saves the Nation. If Russia’s ugly, wholly unnecessary war against Ukraine were something out of a blockbuster, the eighth reel would see Crimea falling to Ukraine’s victorious armed forces, Putin being chased out of office by a democratic uprising, and Zelenskiy going back to being a television comedy star, with his wife and children standing in the darkness behind the studio cameras, watching in loving admiration.
That last bit could still happen, but probably not the rest of it. Ukraine’s counteroffensive has come to nothing, Russia’s huge manpower advantages are starting to tell, Putin has faced down the only challenge to his power, and Zelenskiy is touring the world like Haile Selassie in the 1930s, appealing for help from countries that increasingly have other things to think about. Far from watching good triumph over evil, we’ll see a sordid negotiation over which bits of territory, stolen from a sovereign nation, Russia can keep hold of; while Donald Trump, re-elected, does one of his trademark deals in which he surrenders his best card in exchange for promises that, as happened with North Korea and Afghanistan, the other side doesn’t keep. This, rather than a heart-warming Hollywood ending, seems most likely now. And in Kyiv, the political opponents who’ve had to keep quiet ever since the Russian invasion are now starting to criticise Zelenskiy in increasingly sharp terms. The ethos of the superhero movie is giving way to the greyness of ordinary life.
But we mustn’t forget how well Zelenskiy has played his part. Genuinely normal and decent and without pretension, he has never forgotten where he came from: TV comedy and soap opera. When Simon Shuster calls this definitive, thoroughly researched and deeply insightful biography The Showman, he is exactly right. As a professional actor, Zelenskiy always seems to be asking himself, “What would a real leader do in my position?” It makes him a real human being – a mensch. I’ve met and interviewed something like 200 presidents, prime ministers and other assorted leaders, but I’ve only really liked three of them: Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel and Zelenskiy. In person, Zelenskiy is as warm, emotional and genuine as the other two. There’s no imperiousness, no pride of office, no standing on dignity. He treats you as an equal, and when you ask him sharp questions he doesn’t retreat into irritability or try to dodge them. If it’s an act, it’s something he’s made his own.
The Showman is a far more intimate and much better informed biography than most politicians get from journalists. Shuster is an honest and frank biographer, thoroughly equipped for the job. He was born in Moscow, the son of a Ukrainian father who had grown up near Zelenskiy’s home town, and a Russian mother. In 1989 they fled to the US, where Shuster grew up and became a staff writer for Time magazine. In 2014, when Putin’s men seized Crimea, Shuster was the first foreign journalist to get there and start reporting. He met and interviewed Zelenskiy during the presidential campaign of 2019, and after Zelenskiy was elected he spent months embedded with the presidential team: the kind of access most foreign correspondents can only dream of.
This relationship, of course, often makes reporters go soft. In order to keep the enviable position of trust they find themselves pumping out the kind of thing that their hosts want to hear. It says a great deal for Shuster, and for Zelenskiy and his team, that this hasn’t happened. Anyone who wants to know what Zelenskiy and his administration are doing and thinking reads Time, and this is thanks to Shuster. Even before Putin’s flacks started yelling that Ukraine was neo-Nazi on Russian television, Shuster was writing about the Hitlerian proclivities of the Azov Brigade. He wrote bitingly of the corruption that has been endemic inpost-Soviet Ukraine, and he was completely honest about the way Zelenskiy flirted with the thought of suppressing political opposition. Yet the president’s men and women continue to trust him.
Shuster is particularly good in describing Zelenskiy’s courage in staying put in Kyiv with his family on the morning the Russian army invaded. That ensured the failure of the initial assault. Ever since, it’s been a slogging match between Russian numbers, Nato weaponry and Ukrainian stubbornness; and as Trump’s shadow has grown and US Republicans have chosen to ignore the threat that Putin poses, the balance of the war has shifted against Ukraine. As a result, Zelenskiy’s political position is weaker. If, like some showbiz Cincinnatus, he returns to his farm, or maybe to some new television series, he’ll thoroughly deserve the honours that will be showered on him.
And presumably he’ll remain the ingenu he’s always been. One of the most arresting passages in this insightful book comes when Shuster quotes an interview Zelenskiy gave to a German reporter immediately after he had seen some appalling photographs of dead Ukrainian civilians. A few days before, Zelenskiy had visited the dormitory town of Bucha, outside Kyiv, which had been captured by Putin’s men at the start of the invasion; they had executed the inhabitants at random and tortured dozens in the most bestial fashion. And yet, in his interview, Zelenskiy didn’t express any hatred towards Putin himself. “It was,” Shutter writes, “as though Zelensky was still clinging to the illusion he had brought with him to the presidency. He seemed to believe that if he could only take Putin on a tour of Bucha, if he could bring him to the edge of that pit in the churchyard and let him peer down at the bodies, the war might stop. ‘I don’t think we have any other choice,’ he said. ‘Even though we’re fighting very hard, I don’t see any option, other than to sit with him at the negotiating table, and to talk.’”
Sadly, that’s naive. When this war ends, the result will be an angry, armed peace. Russia will hang on to most of the land it has seized, and Putin will be able to use its Ukrainian territories to stir up trouble against Kyiv whenever he needs to. The idea that he can be made to confront the horrors he has unleashed, and that this will change him, is pure sentimentality.
And Zelenskiy? He doesn’t need fame and admiration, because he had plenty of that before he stood for the presidency, and he’ll keep it for the rest of his life. He tells Shuster it’s his life’s work to get Ukraine out from Russia’s imperial shadow, and in that he has surely succeeded: eventual membership of the EU and Nato will entrench that. But the price has been shocking and savage – and though the good guys won’t have lost, they certainly won’t have triumphed.
• John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor. The Showman: Inside the Invasion Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster is published by William Collins (£22). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
