A painstaking study that's both gripping and moving

Featuring revealing interviews with Ukraine's president and his wife Olena, 'The Zelensky Story' is a sensitive look at the leader's rise and his tireless optimism, writes Sean O'Grady

- Sean O'Grady

Had things gone according to Russia’s plan, Volodymyr Zelensky would by now be either dead, courtesy of a Russian assassin, or holed up in exile in some comfortable villa in Surrey, far away from Ukraine. But things didn’t turn out that way. Ukraine is still free; Zelensky, and his family, are very much alive, and even if the Russians don’t actually lose this war, it looks like they cannot win it either, in the sense of occupying the whole of Ukraine’s territory and extirpating any trade of its own proud history and culture. The reason why Vladimir Putin’s euphemistically named “special military operation” failed in its principal objectives is told in BBC Two’s landmark biopic of the Ukrainian leader, The Zelensky Story.

Specifically, we see footage from 2022 of Ukrainian soldiers in Kyiv apprehending a gang of Putin’s goons on their way to kill Zelensky; and we hear from Boris Johnson, indiscreet as ever, telling us that he was making preparations to get his friend out of there so he could lead the resistance from the English home counties. Yet, as we know, Zelensky did not leave his people because, as he explains in a remarkable and very personal interview, “if I am not here, people will stop fighting”.

Soon after the Russians attacked, he started making those short videos on his smartphone, to show he was indeed still in Kyiv, and he had not fled as, it seems, Putin expected. As one of the experts interviewed makes plain, had Zelensky not been so smart and so stubborn, and patriotic enough to defy and surprise Putin, then the first great international war of the 21st century would have already been lost.