Zelensky

Yesterday, President Donald Trump asked Volodymyr Zelensky whether he would ever go to Moscow. Zelensky replied, “It is difficult. There are many Ukrainian drones there. It is dangerous.”

That’s the most gangster thing I have heard come out of a Western leader’s mouth in my lifetime, and the only thing close is the other Zelensky-ism: “I need ammo, not a ride.”

It is funny. It is defiant. It subtly pokes fun at the most self-absorbed physical coward to ever lead the United States of America who he was sitting next to, and was delivered by a man who has spent more than four years living with the knowledge that every public appearance could be his last. Putin tried to kill him, and wasn’t wrong to think his SOF could pull it off. I’ve been on missions to grab an individual back in the day, and ahead of the launch time, there’s a fair amount of confident shit-talking as guys load mags and gas up trucks. I can only imagine the bravado of the Russian Spetznatz and the Wagner mercenaries on the opening gambit of the war as they prepared to infiltrate Kiev and bring back Zelensky’s head. They came close. At one point, Zelensky’s security detail handed him a Kalishnikov and told him to get ready to defend himself. Most heads of state would find that a good time to relocate to an area where the government can carry on the war, like 1940 London.

But Zelensky still didn’t go anywhere.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky has accepted a burden that no Western leader has truly faced since Winston Churchill. He has led not from secure conference rooms or campaign buses, but from a capital that many believed would fall within days. He declined evacuation when it was offered. He walked the streets of Kyiv while Russian assassination teams hunted him. He visited soldiers at the front, and the killing fields at Bucha, and met grieving families whose suffering no speech could erase. He has lead with empathy and courage.

I’ve never been asked to carry that much weight and I doubt I could. Zelensky has become, in many ways, the modern embodiment of what Admiral James Stockdale described and what Jim Collins later called the Stockdale Paradox: the ability to retain absolute faith that you will prevail in the end while simultaneously confronting the brutal facts of your current reality.

And he does it with jokes.

Zelensky has never pretended the war was easy. He has never promised quick victories or painless sacrifice. He has not blown sunshine up anyone’s backside. He has spoken openly about losses, shortages, exhaustion, and death. Yet somehow, even while acknowledging every hardship, he has never appeared defeated. Too much hope and your are adressing reality with fantasy. Too much reality, and you give in to despair. Certain human qualities are remarkable when tested under extraordinary pressure, and Zelensky, like all good leaders, has the balance down.

As children, our heroes are often athletes, teachers, or parents. We watch them because we want to become like them. Somewhere along the way, many adults convince themselves they have outgrown heroes. I think that is a mistake. We all need examples, not of success per se, but of character. We need people whose lives force us to ask uncomfortable questions about our own. Would I have stood there? Would I have laughed in that moment? Would I have remained kind? Would I have found the courage to keep going?

David Foster Wallace, in his commencement address This Is Water, argued that everyone worships something. He warned that if we worship money, status, beauty, or power, those things will eventually consume us. “They will eat you alive,” he said. He was profoundly right.

Money goes. Beauty fades. Power shifts to someone else. Fame lasts until the next headline, and the more completely we orient our lives around them, the emptier we become.

But there is another way to understand what it means to “worship.” We can devote ourselves not to possessions, but to virtue: Courage, humor, integrity, and humility.

These are things that do not hollow us out. They enlarge us. We never fully possess them, so we are never finished pursuing them. Every day becomes another opportunity to practice them, another chance to become just a little closer to the person we hope to be.

I do not admire Volodymyr Zelensky because he is the president of Ukraine. I admire him because, when history demanded that he become more than a politician or a comedian, he answered with courage, humility, wit, and steadfastness. It is beside the point to litigate all of his decisions because what he has done for us demonstrated what moral and physical courage can look like under unimaginable pressure.

In a world increasingly filled with influencers, celebrities, and manufactured idols, I still think it is worth looking up to people who remind us what the best of humanity can be.

I still love Zelensky, not because he is flawless but because he reminds me of the qualities I hope I never stop chasing.