Zelensky

https://dbarkhuff.substack.com/p/zelensky

Zelensky
Daniel Barkhuff
Jul 11, 2026

Yesterday, President Donald Trump asked Volodymyr Zelensky whether he would ever go to Moscow. Zelensky replied, “It is difficult. There are many Ukrainian drones there. It is dangerous.”

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It is funny. It is defiant. It subtly pokes fun at the most self-absorbed physical coward to ever lead the United States of America who he was sitting next to, and was delivered by a man who has spent more than four years living with the knowledge that every public appearance could be his last. Putin tried to kill him, and wasn’t wrong to think his SOF could pull it off. I’ve been on missions to grab an individual back in the day, and ahead of the launch time, there’s a fair amount of confident shit-talking as guys load mags and gas up trucks. I can only imagine the bravado of the Russian Spetznatz and the Wagner mercenaries on the opening gambit of the war as they prepared to infiltrate Kiev and bring back Zelensky’s head. They came close. At one point, Zelensky’s security detail handed him a Kalishnikov and told him to get ready to defend himself. Most heads of state would find that a good time to relocate to an area where the government can carry on the war, like 1940 London.

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Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky has accepted a burden that no Western leader has truly faced since Winston Churchill. He has led not from secure conference rooms or campaign buses, but from a capital that many believed would fall within days. He declined evacuation when it was offered. He walked the streets of Kyiv while Russian assassination teams hunted him. He visited soldiers at the front, and the killing fields at Bucha, and met grieving families whose suffering no speech could erase. He has lead with empathy and courage.

I’ve never been asked to carry that much weight and I doubt I could. Zelensky has become, in many ways, the modern embodiment of what Admiral James Stockdale described and what Jim Collins later called the Stockdale Paradox: the ability to retain absolute faith that you will prevail in the end while simultaneously confronting the brutal facts of your current reality.

And he does it with jokes.

Zelensky has never pretended the war was easy. He has never promised quick victories or painless sacrifice. He has not blown sunshine up anyone’s backside. He has spoken openly about losses, shortages, exhaustion, and death. Yet somehow, even while acknowledging every hardship, he has never appeared defeated. Too much hope and your are adressing reality with fantasy. Too much reality, and you give in to despair. Certain human qualities are remarkable when tested under extraordinary pressure, and Zelensky, like all good leaders, has the balance down.

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