Perhaps no other national leader has traveled the world over the past year as often as Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine. Most of his trips have been to corridors of traditional power, such as a NATO summit, to drum up war supplies or money to help defeat Russia’s military. Lately, his mission has gone deeper and wider.
The former TV star has taken to talking over the heads of diplomats and directly to people everywhere, often through journalists or social media. His goal: rebuild the grassroots consensus on the territorial integrity of all countries. It is a cause he sees akin to ensuring the integrity of rights and liberties for each individual.
Without the restoration of a global norm for the sovereignty of national borders, Ukraine may not win the war. Too many countries either support Russia’s violation of that norm or remain outwardly indifferent to it. Mr. Zelenskyy finds himself on the front lines of a war for public opinion.
A good example of his new mission was an interview in late May with journalists from Central Asia. The region, once part of the Soviet Union, still treads carefully with Moscow, which has hinted at retaking parts of the region as it has done in Ukraine.
“Everyone [in the region] found a balance with the Russians, with their policies – economic, military, and so on, so as not to awaken the beast,” he told the journalists inside a building bombed by Russia in the city of Kharkiv. “But the fact is that the beast does not ask anyone: it wakes up when it wants.”
He wants Central Asians to see “the real consequences of the war, what the Russian world brings and what it will definitely try to bring” to their region. “I believe that your peoples are our friends,” he added, implying that Ukraine is fighting for the principle of sovereignty for all nations.
Official ties between Ukraine and Central Asian governments remain weak. But “people-to-people relations are a different story,” with citizens in the region offering support to Ukrainians, wrote journalist Nurbek Bekmurzaev in the media outlet Global Voices.
Mr. Zelenskyy’s new cause faces a test at a June 15-16 peace summit sponsored by Switzerland. Most nations plan to attend, but Russia is pressing countries to skip it. The reason: The summit’s main topic is how to restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
“The only way to end the war is to force Russia to agree to the beginning of a peace settlement, whose principles will be developed not in Moscow, but in Kyiv, together with the partner states and having a broad international consensus,” wrote Ihor Solovei of Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security, in the Kyiv Post.
That task of renewing that consensus now relies on Mr. Zelenskyy’s campaign – when he’s not also commanding a military to restore Ukraine’s borders.