“Today I’ll begin with long-awaited phrases, which I want to announce with delight,” he mentioned.
“Finally,” he continued. “Ukraine is United … This is our victory.”
The speech was fiction. It is from the closing scene of “Servant of the People,” a satirical TV present a couple of down-on-his-luck high-school trainer, performed by Zelensky, who’s thrust into the Ukrainian presidency after his rant about corruption goes viral.The sequence did not simply make Zelensky a star. It finally served because the springboard for his real-life presidential marketing campaign. In April 2019, inside a month of the present’s finale, the comedian-turned politician was elected Ukraine’s president.Zelensky once more discovered himself in entrance of a lectern Friday, however the image he outlined within the present’s last moments has by no means felt additional away after Russian forces invaded Ukraine Thursday. The battle for the capital, Kyiv, continued to rage Friday. Explosions lit up the sky because the Kremlin focused the town with missile strikes earlier than daybreak, forcing individuals into air raid shelters.In his Friday morning televised tackle, Zelensky was once more a person in character, this time enjoying David to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Goliath. In a darkish inexperienced tee shirt with darkish circles beneath his eyes, the Ukrainian president struck a defiant tone and praised the nation’s armed forces for “brilliantly defending the nation.”
“Now is a crucial second,” Zelensky mentioned. “The destiny of our nation is being determined.”
‘This gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis’
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine started early Thursday. Moscow’s forces attacked by land, sea and air, prompting a barrage of worldwide condemnation and sanctions — and questions on Putin’s wider ambitions for Ukraine and its capital.
Putin framed the “army operation” as a crucial motion after the United States and its allies crossed Russia’s “pink strains” by increasing NATO eastward.
Zelensky on Friday once more known as for Putin to carry direct talks.
“There is combating throughout Ukraine now. Let’s sit down on the negotiation desk to cease the individuals’s deaths,” he mentioned in Russian.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov mentioned on Friday that Russia was prepared to participate in talks in Minsk, in accordance with reporting by Russian state information company RIA-Novosti. An adviser to Zelensky advised CNN that Kyiv is contemplating the proposal.
Ukraine’s democratically elected authorities stays intact, however Putin has made it clear this week that he doesn’t see Ukraine as a authentic sovereign state. On Friday he known as on Ukrainians to overthrow Zelensky themselves.
“Take energy into your individual fingers,” Putin mentioned. “It seems like it is going to be simpler for us to come back to an settlement (with you) than with this gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis that has settled in Kyiv and brought hostage your complete Ukrainian individuals.”
Putin and his authorities have repeatedly put ahead baseless and inaccurate claims that the democratically elected Ukrainian authorities is a “fascist” or “Nazi” regime. Zelensky is Jewish and had members of the family die within the Holocaust. Putin’s feedback are unlikely to spur any form of Ukrainian rebellion. Many of Kyiv’s residents have left the town, and those who stay are unlikely to help him, contemplating Ukraine’s final pro-Russian chief was ousted in a well-liked rebellion in 2014.Zelensky was elected 5 years later, thrashing incumbent Petro Poroshenko, however his tenure has been rocky. The first a number of months of his time period had been engulfed by the quid-pro-quo scandal which noticed former US President Donald Trump’s try to exert strain on Ukraine to dig up dust on election opponent and now-President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Covid-19 then tore by way of the nation. Zelensky’s marketing campaign guarantees, resembling ending the conflict in japanese Ukraine and stamping out corruption, stay unfilled.
But the hazard Zelensky faces is not simply political.
US officers warned lawmakers that Russian forces who entered Ukraine by way of Belarus had been about 20 miles away from Kyiv, sources advised CNN.
And intelligence officers in Washington are involved the town might fall beneath Russian management inside days. State Department spokesman Ned Price mentioned Zelensky stays a “prime goal for Russian aggression,” whereas Zelensky himself mentioned Russia had marked him as their “primary goal.”
“They need to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying the top of state,” he mentioned.
CNN’s Anna Chernova, Kara Fox, Helen Regan and Nathan Hodge contributed to this report.