Zelenskyy asks Canadian students not to tire of the war

Though he leavened his address to Canadian university students on 22 June 2022 with humour – “We know who is Voldemort in this one and who is Harry Potter, so we know how the war will end,” in answer to one question – Volodymyr Zelenskyy spared the students gathered at 11 universities none of the horror his nation is living through.

Ukraine’s president, the first speaker invited to talk to Canadian students who had to speak from an undisclosed location, said that over the past three years he has worked, as he promised at a meeting in Toronto, to make Ukraine’s institutions more transparent. Then he added: “Today the walls of our buildings are transparent. Literally. They are destroyed by Russian missiles and bombs.”

Some of the word pictures he sketched during the address sponsored by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy were familiar and inspiring: the farmer who used his tractor to close the road to the Russian tanks, “the ordinary woman in our village who went out and stopped the armoured vehicles with her hands”.

Others were painful, made all the more so when recalling them after the talk. For, shortly before he finished speaking, the president answered the question ‘Why did you go into politics’ by pointing to his own daughters, 17 and 9, and asking the students to imagine “look[ing] at your children” and wanting to make their country a better place.

Earlier, he had eulogised “the beautiful children who sat in their apartments when the enemy missiles hit their house, and, unfortunately, [now] they rest in peace, and in our history and memory”.

Save for the refugees from Ukraine in the audience, the students, from six of Canada’s 10 provinces, could not have helped but ask themselves what it would be like for them to have their professors “teaching from the frontlines”.

Rhythm and repetition

Much of Zelenskyy’s speech was structured according to the rules of anaphora, the rhetorical term that denotes repetition of opening phrases, such as in Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, where the phrase begins eight consecutive sentences. The repetitions make the points easier to remember even as they build on one another in an aural drumbeat.

Zelenskyy’s trope is “Three years ago/later”. Three years ago, in Toronto, he pledged full-fledged reform of infrastructure. “Three years later, Russia started their so-called ‘special operation’. We’ve created badges, schools, hospitals, stadia. Russia has been building bombs and missiles in order to destroy all that.”

“Three years ago in Toronto, I was talking about the restoration of the Donbass, and we’ve brought together hundreds of investors and companies from around the world. We organised a forum in Mariupol.

“Three years later, that city is almost non-existent, eradicated.”

Zelenskyy, as is well known, was a successful comedian. For three years starting in 2015, in the situation comedy Servant of the People, he played a high school teacher who improbably becomes president of Ukraine.

But he is also a trained lawyer. With a lawyer’s grasp of how to make the most of a small point – the exact hour the Russian invasion began – he knits facts together to make a narrative that strikes at the heart of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s false narrative about Ukraine’s government being modern-day Nazis.

Referring to 22 June, he says: “This is a sad day of commemorating the victims of war. … On the same day in 1941, the Nazis started bombing Kiev at four o’clock in the morning.

“Those were different times, in a different occupation in a different war. But our spirits, our longing for freedom and our fight have not changed. On 24 February, at four o’clock, at that same time, Russian missiles flew into Ukraine.”

Questioned by students

Among the five students who asked questions was Kateryna Luchka, an exchange student from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, who fled the capital in the early days of the war and told the Globe and Mail that she filled out her application for refugee status in Canada as air raid sirens wailed around her.

She asked what the Ukrainian government could do to ensure that students like her return after the war to help rebuild Ukraine, an issue, incidentally, that was the subject of a recent seminar hosted by NAFSA: Association of International Educators at which leading Ukrainian educators spoke.

The president began by thanking Canadian universities for taking in refugee scholars like Luchka (one of the 100 students per term the University of Toronto is taking in). In a partnership with the university’s school of economics, this September, 30 students will receive financial support, including living expenses.

Zelenskyy then went on to underline the importance of Luchka and the other students both striving to better themselves and being ready to return to help rebuild Ukraine once the nation is secured. New policies and digitalisation now make it possible to register a business there in seven to 10 minutes.

In answer to a question from a University of Calgary student about the importance of social media and the internet, Zelenskyy began by noting how this has cut the distances between countries.

He emphasised how this allows him and others to “share the truth” of what is happening in Ukraine, which led to the point that the internet is almost like a weapon, comparable to shells and bombs – although he was careful to underscore that Ukraine’s international partners should not take this assertion to mean that Ukraine’s victories in the information war let them off the hook, as t¬he transfer of “very powerful pieces of weaponry” is vital.

At one point in this answer, Zelenskyy drew a distinction between the use of the internet in Russia and similar countries compared with its use in Ukraine and the West. Russia and similar countries see the internet as a danger, whereas for Ukraine it means “freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of thoughts”. The echo of United States President Franklin D Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms Speech’ delivered on 6 January 1941 was almost certainly intended.

In those countries, “there is no opportunity to talk freely,” he added. “The challenge of a dictatorship” is to ensure that “people don’t have the possibility to analyse, and decide what is true and what is a lie. In order to do this, you have to compare facts and arguments.”

War fatigue

In his answer to Luis Sanchez, who is studying international relations at the University of Toronto, Zelenskyy directly addressed the issue of war fatigue. Not the fatigue of his own soldiers; their spirits remain high, even as the news of the battle for the last stronghold in the Luhansk region, the city of Severodonetsk, worsened. (Zelenskyy issued the order for a strategic retreat from Severodonetsk four days after his address to the Canadian students.)

Indeed, the former comedian answered a question about humour by saying that while “these are not humouring times and you don’t feel like joking, humour is a kind of medicine, which helps because you cannot be with your thoughts of the war 24/7. … I know it helps not only me but the soldiers in the trenches.” He especially likes the satiric memes about political leaders, presumably, including himself.

The fatigue that worries him is ours. After expressing his gratitude to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland (whose family immigrated to Canada from Ukraine and who has been sanctioned by Russia) for their support, he turned and implored the students not to tire.

“It’s not the first time I was asked [this question], and I will mention it again; this will be the 1000th time, but what I will say is still very important.

“We need weapons. We need financial support. We need humanitarian support. And we need permanent, 24/7 sanction pressure.

“Everybody becomes weary of war,” he says. “But, by your actions on social media, in your communication with friends, going to rallies in your countries, please do not allow your governments to forget about what’s going on in Ukraine.

“Please don’t become tired because of the war,” he said, as he sat at a desk flanked by two Ukrainian flags, wearing not his trademark battle green T-shirt but what appeared to be a flak jacket.