The Zelenskyy Effect: Public Persona and the War Narrative

Annenberg’s Liz Hallgren analyzes Western media’s fascination with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the early months of the Russia-Ukraine war.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — 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 journalists and audiences alike.

In a paper published in Media, War & Conflict, Liz Hallgren, a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, analyzed 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 readers to sympathize with Ukraine and revealed mainstream media’s fixation on dramatic, individualized storytelling.

“Just weeks after the invasion began, TikTok hashtags related to Zelenskyy 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 wrote. Profile journalism latched onto his viral self-produced storytelling, amplifying and legitimizing his virality online by translating it to legacy media settings.

Zelenskyy’s virality and uptake in the mainstream Western press can’t be separated from his carefully curated persona of “Marlboro-esque masculinity,” she noted. 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. It is his unique ability to tap into those ideals that spurred the feedback loop between Zelenskyy and journalists, facilitated by a symbiosis between genres of social media and profile storytelling.

“I hope my research encourages us to take the political work of the profile piece — a genre often brushed aside as ‘human interest’ seriously,” Hallgren said. “Profiles authenticate their subjects; in this case, Zelenskyy 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.”

“Clearly, profile reporting on Zelenskyy hasn’t translated to a victory for Ukraine in its over three-year struggle with Russia,” she said. “The question at play here isn’t if Ukraine deserves Western support, but rather, how certain kinds of reportage play a role in making some crises legible to Western publics more than others.”