The Zelensky Story review: Meticulous study of Ukraine’s president is gripping and immensely moving

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.

As the three episodes turn from Zelensky’s peaceful, happy-go-lucky rise to his leadership in combat, it is immensely moving to see the widows and families of the war dead meeting the president to collect their posthumous medals. In these ceremonies we realise that whatever money and military equipment the West send over, it is they, the Ukrainians, who are fighting and dying for us as well as their own freedom. For the meticulous, sensitive, insightful way The Zelensky Story carries us along, this is a series that deserves to win the very highest of accolades the industry has to offer.

The documentary, made in conjunction with The Open University, is extremely gripping – the rigour in the storytelling is so impressive, the archive research so painstaking, and the tale itself remains as astonishing as it is inspirational. The programme’s producers managed to gain a decent slug of time from Zelensky for a genuinely revealing interview – and did no less well in gaining similar access to his wife, Olena, first lady of Ukraine.

Their conversations are filmed separately, which allows us to hear their (slightly) conflicting accounts of how they met and how they see the war – and Olena is especially frank about things. You can see, for example, how much she misses her husband, and remains a little perturbed, to say the least, when she relates how she only found out about him running for the presidency in 2019 from one of his television shows – something he is still bashful about. You get the distinct impression that Olena would have much rathered that her intelligent, witty, charming husband had remained the highly successful actor and media magnate he had become by the time she married him.

One old friend testifies that “he was a more romantic person then”. But, as is now fairly well known, life imitated art and he followed the storyline of his hit satirical series Servant of the People. He starred in that as an everyman schoolteacher so fed up with corruption that he accidentally becomes president of post-Soviet Ukraine. The comedy was so telling that it helped bring the old Russian puppet regime down, propelled Zelensky to the presidency, and earned him the eternal enmity of the Kremlin.

Through the series, the contrasts with Putin are thrown into sharp relief. When Putin turns up for what turned out to be abortive peace talks in Paris with Zelensky, brokered by President Macron and Chancellor Merkel, he arrives in a lumbering limousine; his interlocutor hops out of a Renault, in his usual khaki green combat gear. When Putin meets his officials in bombastic golden palaces, they are subservient and terrified; Zelensky’s colleagues are a team of friends, bound by love, not fear. While Putin, the old KGB man, is resentful of what he sees as Russia’s humiliations since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and consumed by the war and desires to rule for life, Zelensky looks forward, if improbably, to a return to entertainment and to winning an Oscar when the war is over and his work done. Well, he might. As Olena jokes, “he always wins”.

Ironically enough, it is Putin in an old clip who identifies the greatest single factor in Zelensky’s success. Some two decades ago, when times were easier, the then-new premier of Russia, Putin, was invited to watch the light entertainment talent show Zelensky ran (which was hugely popular in both countries). Zelensky and his Pythonesque pals clowned around on stage; Putin smiled, a little uncomfortably. Before the war broke out it was the nearest the two men came to meeting. The emerging autocrat, impressed, commented afterwards: “I like funny people because they are intelligent and they also have an invaluable gift called optimism.” Indeed so, and that very spirit of optimism is why this funny little man and his underestimated little country have survived for so long against neo-imperialist Russia. Putin’s not laughing now, though.