Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s international charisma throughout the first year of war

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is currently considered one of the world’s most talked about politicians, whose post-24 February 2022 image is strongly associated with that of a heroic charismatic commander who inspires the people to follow him and fight (Potapenko 2023; Saine 2022; Wright 2022). The media compare Zelenskyy to other charismatic leaders regarding him as “the Winston Churchill of our time” (McFall 2022), extol him as a “Ukrainian Superman” with “an Eastern heart that the West has lost” (FF 2022), portray him as “an international icon”, profiling for his charisma and courage comparing to George Washington (Grant 2022). The figures for Google searches on the keywords Zelensky + charismatic are also indicative of this trend: Latin worldwide is about 170,000 links, Cyrillic and Ukrainian links are 140,000.