Statesman and nations
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President Zelensky’s address to the House of Commons reminds us why democracy is not only the best but ultimately the only enduring system of government. Speaking before the “mother of parliaments” from war-torn Kyiv, the leader of one of the world’s youngest democracies appealed to one of the oldest.
He chronicled his country’s ordeal, day by day, with tragic intensity. His theatrical past prompted him to quote Hamlet, evoking the existential choice that he and all Ukrainians have had to make: to be, or not to be. The historical past, too, came into play, as he paraphrased Churchill to declare the unshakable resolve of his compatriots to resist the Russian invaders.
The parliamentarians gathered may have expected a rebuke for not doing enough, but instead Zelensky was generous with his gratitude to the British people for their solidarity and “greatness”, genial in saluting “Boris” for his role in rousing Europe and America. He did plead the case for stepping up sanctions and for help in defending “our Ukrainian skies” — both requests that are already being answered. More striking was the fact that he refused to mention Russia or Putin by name. Instead he enjoined his audience to banish them from the civilised world: “Please recognise this country as a terrorist state.”
He concluded with words that now need no translation: Slava Ukraini! and added for good measure: “Glory to Britain!” It was the perfect peroration, combining his own national slogan, coined during the first Ukrainian war of independence against Russia (1917-1921), but paying the same compliment to the British, thereby implying a universal commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights.
As remarkable as the speech was the impact on those present in the chamber. No parliamentary gathering on earth is more allergic to applause, none has a more finely-tuned ear for cant or bombast. Yet they greeted him rapturously, frequently roared their approval as he spoke and finally rose as one to acknowledge the eloquence and heroism of their virtual guest. The atmosphere was one of unity, not only with him but, briefly, with one another.
A month ago, such a scene would have been unimaginable. Many, perhaps most, MPs and peers would have struggled to find Ukraine on a map, let alone have troubled to grasp what had already been a nightmarish threat to peace for months if not years. Some of them still find it hard not to say “the Ukraine”, thereby treating it as a merely geographical concept and erasing its nationhood. Few had even heard of Zelensky until a few weeks ago.
Readers of TheArticle will have been unusually well informed, by contrast, because I and others have been writing here frequently about Putin’s Russia and its threats to its neighbours. When Zelensky was elected three years ago, Marina Gerner (who is, like him, both Ukrainian and Jewish) wrote here in praise of this man who had come from nowhere to rally his nation. “He speaks,” she wrote, “with great clarity, humility and humanity.”
Ever since the end of the Cold War, the weaknesses of the free world have been all too manifest. At home and abroad, many have mistaken temporary flaws as terminal decadence. In recent years, not only Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, but even less powerful dictatorships, such as Iran and North Korea, have sometimes run rings around a West that often feels hamstrung by self-doubt. The pandemic took a heavy toll on us, leaving the power of the tyrants seemingly immune. Now, in this trial of strength, it is becoming clear that the democratic world still has the better of its autocratic adversaries.
Russia is visibly falling apart, about to default on its debts and become an outcast from the global economy, a beggar on a par with Venezuela. China, too, is for once lost for words, incapable of playing the part of honest broker due to its serial dishonesty. Suddenly “wolf warrior diplomacy” is redundant and the once and future superpower finds itself sidelined in the present. The impotence of omnipotence, once the besetting weakness of the globalised West, now condemns China to irrelevance.
Despotism no longer looks so dynamic, as the arsenal of democracy is mobilised against the Kremlin with a speed that has confounded Putin and his partners in crime. Xi, too, is damaged by association, however much he may now seek to evade his own complicity in catastrophe. Their sinister summit at the Beijing Winter Olympics, on the eve of the invasion, was the last chance to forestall the whole scheme; instead, Xi stands convicted of a joint enterprise in evil.
Volodymyr Zelensky is now seen by many in the West as the true leader of the free world. It is an accolade to which no other statesman of Eastern or Central Europe has ever aspired, not even Lech Wałęsa or Václav Havel in the 1980s or the Masaryks before the war. If Zelensky survives this war, his prestige will be unmatched. He is not infallible: until the early hours of February 24, he hoped against hope that the warnings from US and British intelligence of imminent invasion would prove false. But he has risen to the occasion with such modest magnificence that he has made his own people and the best part of humanity believe that anything is possible.
His youthful determination and lack of the usual politician’s baggage render him uniquely magnetic to people of every nation and generation. His is an equal opportunity inspiration. Let us hope that, once Putin is defeated and the Russians have been brought to their senses, Zelensky’s formidable energy can be devoted not only to the reconstruction of Ukraine, but perhaps also put to constructive purposes on the world stage. You may need us now, Volodymyr; we shall have need of you in the years to come.
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