THE ZELENSKY EFFECT
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20252025 (MMXXV) is the current year, and is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 2025th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 25th year of the 3rd millennium and the 21st century, and the 6th year of the 2020s decade. So far, the year has seen the continuation of major armed conflicts, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Sudanese civil war, and the Gaza war. Internal crises in Bangladesh, Ecuador, Georgia, Germany, Haiti, Somalia, and South Korea continued into this year, with the latter leading to Yoon Suk Yeol's arrest and removal from office.
Anne HathawayAnne Jacqueline Hathaway (born November 12, 1982) is an American actress. Her accolades include an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award. Her films have grossed over $6.8 billion worldwide, and she appeared on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list in 2009. She was among the world's highest-paid actresses in 2015. Hathaway performed in several plays in high school. As a teenager, she was cast in the television series Get Real (1999–2000) and made her breakthrough by playing the lead role in the Disney comedy The Princess Diaries (2001). After starring in a string of family films, including Ella Enchanted (2004), Hathaway made a transition to mature roles with the 2005 drama Brokeback Mountain. The comedy-drama The Devil Wears Prada (2006), in which she played an assistant to a fashion magazine editor, was her biggest commercial success to that point. She played a recovering addict in the drama Rachel Getting Married (2008), which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Hathaway had further commercial success in the comedy Get Smart (2008), the romances Bride Wars (2009), Valentine's Day (2010), and Love & Other Drugs (2010), and the fantasy film Alice in Wonderland (2010). In 2012, she starred as Catwoman in her highest-grossing film, The Dark Knight Rises, and played Fantine, a prostitute dying of tuberculosis, in the musical Les Misérables, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the latter. She has since played a scientist in the science fiction film Interstellar (2014), the owner of a fashion website in the comedy The Intern (2015), a haughty actress in the heist film Ocean's 8 (2018), a con artist in the comedy The Hustle (2019), Rebekah Neumann in the miniseries WeCrashed (2022), and an older woman dating a young pop star in the romantic comedy The Idea of You (2024). Hathaway has won a Primetime Emmy Award for her voice role in the sitcom The Simpsons, sung for soundtracks, appeared on stage, and hosted events. She supports several charitable causes. She is a board member of the Lollipop Theatre Network, an organization that brings films to children in hospitals, and advocates for gender equality as a UN Women goodwill ambassador.
Volodymyr ZelenskyyVolodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (born 25 January 1978) is a Ukrainian politician and former entertainer who has served as the sixth and current president of Ukraine since 2019. He took office five years after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War with Russia's annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas, and has continued to serve during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has been ongoing since February 2022. Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine. He obtained a degree in law from the Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics, but never practised law and pursued a career in comedy and entertainment. He co-created the production company Kvartal 95, which produced films, cartoons, and TV shows including the TV series Servant of the People, in which Zelenskyy played a fictional Ukrainian president. The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. A political party with the same name as the TV show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95. Zelenskyy announced his candidacy in the 2019 presidential election on the evening of 31 December 2018, alongside the New Year's Eve address of then-president Petro Poroshenko on the TV channel 1+1. A political outsider, Zelenskyy positioned himself as an anti-establishment and anti-corruption figure, and had already become one of the frontrunners in opinion polls for the election months before he formally declared his candidacy. He won the election with 73.23 percent of the vote in the second round, defeating Poroshenko in the biggest landslide in the history of Ukrainian presidential elections. As president, Zelenskyy has been a proponent of e-government and of unity between the Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking parts of the country's population.: 11–13 He makes extensive use of social media, particularly Instagram.: 7–10 His party won a landslide victory in the snap legislative election held shortly after his inauguration as president. During the first two years of his administration, Zelenskyy oversaw the lifting of legal immunity for members of parliament (the Verkhovna Rada), the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic recession, and some limited progress in tackling corruption in Ukraine. A poll in May 2021 by the Rating Group gave Zelenskyy the highest trust rating out of all Ukrainian presidents, and ranked him as the second-best president after Leonid Kuchma. During his presidential campaign, Zelenskyy promised to end Ukraine's protracted conflict with Russia, and he has attempted to engage in dialogue with Russian president Vladimir Putin. His administration faced an escalation of tensions with Russia in 2021, culminating in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Zelenskyy's strategy during the Russian military buildup was to calm the Ukrainian populace and assure the international community that Ukraine was not seeking to retaliate. He initially distanced himself from warnings of an imminent war, while also calling for security guarantees and military support from NATO to "withstand" the threat. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Zelenskyy remained in Kyiv, declining international offers to evacuate him from the capital under attack; he declared martial law across Ukraine and a general mobilisation of the armed forces. Zelenskyy was named the Time Person of the Year for 2022. He has frequently visited frontline and newly liberated areas. Zelenskyy's term was originally scheduled to end in May 2024, but the ongoing Russian invasion and the resulting ongoing martial law prevented the regularly scheduled presidential election from being conducted. He is expected to remain president for the duration of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Due to this extension of his term, Zelenskyy is the second-longest serving president in Ukrainian history, after only Kuchma.
Kvartal 95 StudioKvartal 95 Studio (Ukrainian: Сту́дія «Кварта́л-95»; Russian: Сту́дия «Кварта́л-95») is a Ukrainian production company founded in 2003 by Volodymyr Zelenskyy (who later became President of Ukraine) alongside Serhiy and Boris Shefir. The company produces films and television shows in Russian and Ukrainian, as well as organising concerts.
Olga OnuchOlga Onuch (born 1982) is Professor (Chair) of Comparative and Ukrainian Politics at the University of Manchester. In 2023 she became the first person to be appointed a Full Professor of Ukrainian politics at a university in the English-speaking world. She is the author of the books The Zelensky Effect and Mapping Mass Mobilization, and editor of Revolutionary Moments.
2025 Trump–Zelenskyy Oval Office meetingOn February 28, 2025, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, JD Vance, the vice president of the United States, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, held a highly contentious bilateral meeting televised live in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C. It was to discuss continued U.S. support for Ukraine in repelling the ongoing Russian invasion of the country, and was expected to conclude with the signing of the Ukraine–United States Mineral Resources Agreement; but the meeting ended abruptly without a clear resolution. During the last ten minutes of the discussion, Trump and Vance repeatedly criticized Zelenskyy, at times drowning out his voice. Media outlets described it as an unprecedented public confrontation between an American president and a foreign head of state. Leading up to the meeting, there were tensions between the Trump administration and Zelenskyy's government. Trump wanted Ukraine to agree on a ceasefire with Russia in order to immediately halt hostilities and work towards a comprehensive peace deal. He had implied Ukraine was to blame for the Russian invasion, and called Zelenskyy a "dictator" (a statement he had later retracted). Zelenskyy wanted strong security guarantees against future Russian aggression before committing to a ceasefire. He believed that without these, Russia's president Vladimir Putin would break any agreement, as he had before. The meeting was widely criticized for its fiery, confrontational, and antagonistic tone. Nearly all U.S. allies, along with other global figures, swiftly voiced their support for Zelenskyy following the confrontation, with many issuing statements that appeared to rebuke Trump's confrontational approach. In contrast, Russian officials praised the outcome of the meeting and directed criticism toward Zelenskyy while Russian media expressed shock. In the U.S., reactions were largely based on party support – with members of Trump's party, the Republican Party, largely commended his conduct, with few exceptions, while members of the Democratic Party also widely condemned it. In the aftermath of the meeting, the Trump administration suspended provision of intelligence and military aid to Ukraine for around a week. The provision of aid to Ukraine was resumed after Zelenskyy agreed to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire, contingent on Russian approval (as Russia rejected the proposal, the ceasefire did not actually materialize). In a March 2025 YouGov poll, 51% of Americans felt Trump was disrespectful toward Zelenskyy, while 32% felt Zelenskyy was disrespectful toward Trump.
The Zelensky EffectThe Zelensky Effect is a 2022 non-fiction book by Olga Onuch and Henry E. Hale. The book traces the development of Ukrainian civic national identity since independence and studies the leadership of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the context of this development, drawing on material from his pre-politics entertainment career, his 2019 campaign, and his presidency before and during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The authors use multiple research methods and sources of data, such as qualitative data including discourse and content analysis of material from Zelenskyy's presidency, campaign, and entertainment career (e.g. Kvartal 95 performances and Servant of the People episode transcripts); quantitative and regression analysis of data from the authors' research projects, sociological institutions, and other sources; interviews with relevant persons; and the authors' own experiences and field notes.: 30–31
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