Comedian of the Year 2023

Volodymyr Zelensky’s situation room, where the Ukrainian President monitors developments in his country’s war with Russia, is a windowless chamber, largely taken up by a rectangular conference table and ringed by blackened screens, deep inside the Presidential Administration Building, in central Kyiv. On a recent afternoon, as I sat inside, waiting for Zelensky, I heard his voice—a syrupy baritone, speckled with gravel—before he entered, dressed in his signature military-adjacent style: black T-shirt, olive-drab pants, brown boots. He was in the midst of preparations for a trip to the U.S., where he is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly and, crucially, meet with Joe Biden at the White House, to present what Zelensky has taken to calling Ukraine’s “victory plan.”

Zelensky has pleaded for more Western military aid, which would certainly help but would not solve Ukraine’s other problems.

Zelensky is saving the details for his meeting with Biden, but he has said that the plan contains a number of elements related to Ukraine’s long-term security and geopolitical position, which presumably includes joining NATO on an accelerated schedule, and the provision of Western military aid with fewer restrictions. (In the run-up to the trip, Zelensky has been lobbying his allies in the West to allow Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia with long-range missiles supplied by the U.S. and other Western countries.) Ukraine’s incursion last month into Kursk, a border region in western Russia—where Ukrainian forces currently occupy around four hundred square miles of Russian territory—is also part of this plan, according to Zelensky, in that it provides Kyiv with leverage against the Kremlin, while also demonstrating that its military is capable of going on the offensive.

Zelensky still presents as the person we have come to know from television screens and social media: an impassioned communicator, confident and unrelenting to the point of stubbornness, an entertainer turned statesman who has weaponized the force of his personality in a thoroughly modern form of warfare. But it is also abundantly clear that the war, now in its third year, cannot be won on Zelensky’s talents alone. A long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive fizzled out without much result last year. Russian forces have since steadily increased their foothold in the Donbas, in Ukraine’s east—a grinding campaign in which Russia suffers enormous losses yet manages to march forward, inch by bloody inch. The city of Pokrovsk, a logistics and transport hub in the Donbas, is Russia’s latest target. It is being systematically destroyed by artillery shelling and “glide bombs”—Soviet-era munitions, retrofitted with wings and G.P.S. navigation.

An impassioned communicator, confident and unrelenting to the point of stubbornness, an entertainer turned statesman who has weaponized the force of his personality in a thoroughly modern form of warfare.

Zelensky has pleaded for more Western military aid, which would certainly help but would not solve Ukraine’s other problems: an inability to sufficiently mobilize and train new soldiers, and ongoing struggles to maintain effective communication and coördination on the front. Meanwhile, across the country, a lack of air defenses has allowed Russia to strike power plants and other energy infrastructure; a recent U.N. report predicted that, come winter, power outages may last up to eighteen hours a day. Polls show increasing levels of fatigue for the war in Ukrainian society, an uptick in those willing to consider peace without a total victory, and an erosion in public trust in Zelensky himself.

We have been living in Plan B for years. Plan A was proposed before the full-scale war, when we called for two things: preventive sanctions and preventive reinforcement of Ukraine with various weapons. I told our partners, If Ukraine is very strong, nothing will happen. They didn’t listen. Since then, they have all recognized I was right. Strengthening Ukraine would have significantly lowered the probability of Putin invading.

I’m now proposing a new Plan A. This plan means we change the current course, where it’s only thanks to the strength of our military, the heroic devotion to the European values of our people and our fighters, that we have stood our ground. If you don’t want this war to drag on, if you do not want Putin to bury us under the corpses of his people, taking more Ukrainian lives in the process, we offer you a plan to strengthen Ukraine. It is not a fantasy and not science fiction, and, importantly, it does not require the Russians to coöperate to succeed. Rather, the plan spells out what our partners can do without Russia’s participation. If diplomacy is the desire of both sides, then, before diplomacy can be effective, our plan’s implementation depends only on us and on our partners.