

It counteracts Russian misinformation and disinformation, rallies support on the ground and around the world, and helps to justify the conscription of Ukrainian men aged 18-60, who have been banned from leaving the country. Zelenskyy’s soaring reputation as the president who stayed behind in his country has also been a useful weapon in Ukraine’s own propaganda war against Russia.

“I think we might find it uncomfortable, but perhaps the ‘yassification’ of Zelenskyy conceptualises that.”Īnd conflict is not just fought on the battlefield. “Historically when there are disruptions in the social order, within a few decades, predominantly, a strong man will fill that void,” he explains.
#Sexy simbl tv
Even the story of his most popular TV show, Servant of the People, in which he played an ordinary man who becomes president – a fictional role he literally brought to life when he was elected in a 2019 landslide – serves to cement his myth.ĭr Andrieu thinks our attraction to political figures has to do with power and its pull on our hearts and minds, particularly in times of crisis. Oh, and if you are so inclined, there’s even topless Zelenskyy getting the vaccine. Hip-shaking Zelenskyy? Check out his moves on the Ukrainian version of Dancing with the Stars. Inspirational Zelenskyy? Listen to any one of his defiant wartime speeches. Want cuddly Zelenskyy? Look up his voiceover for the Paddington Bear film. Zelenskyy – with a years-long career in entertainment and TV prior to his election – has more raw material for these fantasies than your average politician. That can be incredibly seductive, on occasion.” “If there is an alignment between who we think they are and how they act, we fall into confirmation biases, and it reaffirms our positions on who we believe them to be. “We start to construct narratives around who they are, based on who they remind us of and who we are accustomed to,” Dr Tehara adds. “You could go right the way back to Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, all the way up to men who by most historical accounts aren’t pretty attractive like Napoleon, at least in his later years.” (Sorry, Bonaparte.) “War or conflict and sex or sexualisation have always been yoked together and have always had a pretty intimate close relationship in Western cultural representation, which goes all the way back to ancient Greece and the Odyssey,” says Dr Kieran Andrieu, a doctor of political economy and an associate lecturer at Birkbeck University. This kind of romanticisation or sexualisation of a political figure isn’t anything new though – you only have to look back on the 2015 articles proclaiming a newly elected Canadian PM Justin Trudeau “ the sexiest leader in the world” or the one-time phenomenon of “Cuomosexuals” stanning now-disgraced New York governor Andrew Cuomo to know that politician thirst has a long and lurid history.īut it goes even further back than that, according to experts. “It's such an awful situation there, and seeing the footage from the ground is heartbreaking, so I'm glad they have someone like him to lead them.” Salisbury would like to clarify that she doesn’t actually have a crush on him, but she admires and respects him greatly nonetheless. “I think it's that he could have easily left the country and commanded from safety elsewhere,” she tells VICE, “but he chose to stay and fight with his people for their home – bravery and heroism.”

“I am begging liberals to stop treating an actual war like a tv show with fun characters,” tweets another.Įmma Salisbury, who wrote the viral tweet “BREAKING: every woman in your life now has at least a small crush on Volodymyr Zelenskyy and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it”, says she was originally being tongue-in-cheek. Some have described these statements as distasteful: “The yassification of armed conflict”, writes one person on the emerging phenomenon. One person even claimed that they got “pregnant just watching him”. People on the internet have confessed to having a crush on him, calling him “sexy”, a “daddy” even a “zaddy”. Yet one unexpected phenomenon in this terrifying news cycle has been what can only be described as the creation of a Zelenskyy stan base.
