Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Volodymyr Zelenskyy ran a comedy production company, Kvartal 95, and played a schoolteacher who accidentally becomes president in the television series Servant of the People, which began in 2015. He announced a real candidacy on the last day of 2018 and won the 2019 election with about three-quarters of the vote. A Message from Ukraine gathers sixteen speeches he chose himself, from the inaugural address to those given after the full-scale invasion of February 2022, and Crown and Penguin published it that December. The line he selected for is civic rather than military: what a Ukrainian nation is, who belongs to it, and what a country owes the people who stay in it. His proceeds go to United24, the fundraising platform his government set up. He grew up speaking Russian in Kryvyi Rih and learned to give these speeches in Ukrainian.