New Research Explores How Volodymyr Zelensky’s Public Persona Shaped Early Narratives of the Russia-Ukraine War
New research from Annenberg doctoral candidate Liz Hallgren analyzes Western media’s fascination with Volodymyr Zelensky in the early months of the Russia-Ukraine war.

A self-filmed video by Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, Ukraine on February 25, 2022
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — and his background as a comedian and actor — dominated headlines in the Western press. His viral social media posts, a flurry of self-filmed videos in the streets of Kyiv, differed from the PR typically associated with heads of state and captured the hearts and minds of Western journalists and audiences alike.

In a new paper published in Media, War & Conflict, Liz Hallgren, a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzes how journalistic coverage — specifically the genre of the profile piece — during the early months of the conflict reinforced the president’s self-branding as a “scrappy underdog turned brilliant military mind,” encouraged Western readers to sympathize with Ukraine, and revealed mainstream media’s fixation on dramatic, individualized storytelling.
In journalism, the profile genre stands out from traditional reportage — its storytelling feel lends a sense of closeness and logic of narrative authority to the story it tells. Because the profile relies on journalistic impressions and narrative rather than the “hard facts” associated with breaking news, it has become “prime real estate for a news ecosystem increasingly reliant on fast-paced clickbait,” Hallgren argues. In the early months of the Russia-Ukraine war, profiles of Zelensky appeared almost immediately in nearly every mainstream media outlet, a pace and scale unparalleled in coverage of other public figures at the time.
Profile journalism was a perfect venue for the kind of performance and impression management that Zelensky excelled at online in the early months of the invasion, Hallgren argues. “Just weeks after the invasion began, TikTok hashtags related to Zelensky already had over 350 million combined views, and one of his own videos, posted to Telegram, garnered over 5 million views in the span of one week,” she writes. Profile journalism latched onto Zelensky’s viral self-produced storytelling, amplifying and legitimizing his virality online by translating it to legacy media settings.
Zelensky’s virality and uptake in the mainstream Western press can’t be separated from his carefully curated persona of “Marlboro-esque masculinity.” His performance as a leader who stands by his troops, wears fatigues and T-shirts, and talks to everyday people in peril acutely aligns with Western myths of resilience and leadership, Hallgren notes. Before the invasion, Zelensky’s online presence was one of sharp suits and shaking hands with world leaders. “However, as soon as the invasion began, Zelensky’s posts shifted in tone, picturing him in his now infamous green T-shirt, seated behind his desk poring over his computer or bundled in rugged outerwear surveying the state of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv,” Hallgren recounts. It is Zelensky’s unique ability to tap into aspirational Western ideals that has spurred the feedback loop between Zelensky and journalists — facilitated by a symbiosis between genres of social media and profile storytelling.

“I hope my research encourages us to take seriously the political work of the profile piece — a genre often brushed aside as ‘human interest,’” Hallgren says. “Profiles authenticate their subjects; in this case, Zelensky emerges legible, believable, and proximate. We should ask ourselves why and how. What kinds of stories do our media institutions naturalize as truth? That’s what attention to journalistic genre can help us answer.”
Ultimately, this symbiotic relationship between the press and Zelensky reveals the pull that personal branding and social media have on mainstream journalism. Whether Zelensky is truly a “man of the people” or just an actor good at playing one, and what this means for his country’s war effort, isn’t at the core of Hallgren’s inquiry. What matters, she urges, are the kinds of values and norms that this love affair between Zelensky and the press privileges. The success of Zelensky’s self-branding affirms that in mainstream journalism, ideals of whiteness, and masculinity still dominate.
It is hard to disentangle what is seen and heard from what is felt and acted in a news economy, she writes, noting that “the Zelensky profile encourages us to think critically about how news genres enable proximity with certain conflicts (and the individuals who represent them) – and whether this proximity might come at the expense of others.”