In the beginning, it was just a T-shirt: basic, olive green; the kind worn under military fatigues or hauled out from the bottom of a wardrobe for workouts and weekends. Sometimes it was more brown than green. Sometimes there was a cross over the heart, with a coat of arms in the centre.
But over the past four weeks, as the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has shed his former navy suits, white shirts and ties – the uniform of the politician – for the T-shirt, wearing it in his daily videos to his country; in his speeches to the European parliament, to the British parliament, to the US Congress; in his interview with CNN (and his widely tweeted Zoom call with supporters Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis). It has become something more: a symbol of the strength and patriotism of the Ukrainian people, a host of values and purpose packed into an outline everyone knows.
