Servant of the People: a leader with fewer tanks, if any

Those of us who did not watch Ukrainian sitcoms during the endless machinations of the prior American administration cannot help but be surprised to discover that a popular Ukrainian comic actor (and excellent dancer) – playing an ordinary history teacher, fed up with governmental corruption, vaulted to political office by a stealth video of an ill-advised rant that has gone viral – is in fact now the actual President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. However improbable that may be, it is Vladimir Putin’s worst nightmare.

Zelenskyy’s fictional character and his factional character only have wit and courage in equal measure, and generational skill connecting to the people, their audience. Zelenskyy campaigned in selfies and street videos. He asked Ukrainians to let him know 5 things that ought to change about Ukraine, crowdsourcing his political platform. He won with 73% of the vote and in his Inaugural speech said, “To all post- Soviet countries: Look at us. Anything is possible.” Two months later he was being strong armed by an American president threatening to withhold much needed military aid in exchange for ‘a favor.’ Zelenskyy, a pragmatist, is no fool. His audience, his people and his character, are ordinary Ukrainians overwhelmingly frustrated with their country’s corruption, unchanging and unchallenged. But what was the man to do, sandwiched between two power players using him as a pawn? Would he become one of the ‘old politicians’ he lampooned, who “Promise a lot. Do nothing.”

Like Putin, like all of us, he has his own Pluto, his own deep drive for survival. But at what cost? There is the difference. Zelenskyy at 44, is of the generation with Pluto in Libra, which deepens desire for social justice. Putin’s Libran Twelfth House dream of reconstituting a lost social order, the great Russian Empire before the Soviet era, is not Ukraine’s dream. As a newly elected pragmatist, however improbably, Zelenskyy could have yielded to overwhelming power with reasonable justification; in fact he tried to play down the tanks amassing on the border, to tone down President Biden’s sharply pointing at the increasing likelihood of war. Putin eliminated any notion of negotiable middle ground on February 24.

Suddenly, the unafraid to be silly comic actor became a man of courage, an actual leader. Leo is a strange mix of childlike playfulness and heroic action. Zelenskyy’s Moon, Saturn and Mars are in Leo, which means that attachment to his homeland, his sense of responsibility for it, and his personal sense of honor require him to act from the heart, not from self interest. “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

From that moment on Zelenskyy demonstrated generational and personal savvy with business and communication technology. He may be an actor, but he is an actor who owns the means of production. He has Sun and Venus in Aquarius which value innovation and interest in the wider world, skeptical regard for authority, curiosity, and technical facility to amplify social connection. Zelenskyy is fully aware of the dangerous power of disconnection. Putin has criminalized reporting on, or listening to, anything other than state generated propaganda within Russia. It is illegal, punishable by years in prison, for Russian citizens to know or ask what their government is doing in Ukraine in their name. In peacetime Ukraine, ‘peaceful’ only relative to today’s full-on state of war, Zelenskyy appointed the youngest member of his cabinet Mykhailo Fedorov as minister of digital transformation with the intention to make ordinary civic business of Ukrainians a little easier. Now Fedorov deploys an array of digital tools and social media to isolate and wreak havoc on the economy of Russia, the invading enemy. With surprising success, Federov exerted international social pressure to withdraw or suspend businesses still operating in Russia. As missiles blow apart maternity hospitals and kill fleeing civilians, Zelenskyy and his cabinet are left with little choice in the weapons of war but to think outside the box. Whatever the efficacy of digital hacks and cryptocurrency behind the scenes, Ukrainians – and people around the world – take heart and improbable hope from this unshaven servant of the people in his rumpled t-shirt, cell phone in hand, saying, “I’m here.”