Real life is, of course, never as tidy or satisfying as fiction. The good guys don’t necessarily finish first, the villains don’t always get their just deserts, and the gutsy little character who no one thought would achieve anything doesn’t end up the winner merely because we want him to. Volodymyr Zelenskiy would make a tremendous hero in an undemanding Hollywood movie along the lines of Independence Day: Mr Ordinary Saves the Nation. If Russia’s ugly, wholly unnecessary war against Ukraine were something out of a blockbuster, the eighth reel would see Crimea falling to Ukraine’s victorious armed forces, Putin being chased out of office by a democratic uprising, and Zelenskiy going back to being a television comedy star, with his wife and children standing in the darkness behind the studio cameras, watching in loving admiration.
That last bit could still happen, but probably not the rest of it. Ukraine’s counteroffensive has come to nothing, Russia’s huge manpower advantages are starting to tell, Putin has faced down the only challenge to his power, and Zelenskiy is touring the world like Haile Selassie in the 1930s, appealing for help from countries that increasingly have other things to think about. Far from watching good triumph over evil, we’ll see a sordid negotiation over which bits of territory, stolen from a sovereign nation, Russia can keep hold of; while Donald Trump, re-elected, does one of his trademark deals in which he surrenders his best card in exchange for promises that, as happened with North Korea and Afghanistan, the other side doesn’t keep. This, rather than a heart-warming Hollywood ending, seems most likely now. And in Kyiv, the political opponents who’ve had to keep quiet ever since the Russian invasion are now starting to criticise Zelenskiy in increasingly sharp terms. The ethos of the superhero movie is giving way to the greyness of ordinary life.
