Two days ago his audience consisted of Justin Bieber, Doja Cat, Dua Lipa, Lil Nas X, Olivia Rodrigo and Saweetie. This was Volodymyr Zelenskiy, president of Ukraine and man for all seasons, delivering a virtual message to the Grammy music awards in Las Vegas.
A little incongruous? A bit off key? The same might have been said on Tuesday when Zelenskiy addressed the UN security council, led by its five permanent members: the United States, Britain, China, France – and Russia.
Yes, the Ukrainian president found himself caught in the paradox of demanding that the security council secure itself.
If anyone could pull it off, it may have been Zelenskiy, now an old hand at taking his message around the world via video link, addressing parliament after parliament and earning comparisons with Winston Churchill as a wartime communicator.
“I’ve used up all my superlatives for Zelenskyy,” tweeted David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist who masterminded Barack Obama’s election victories. “An astonishing, courageous leader in the midst of unthinkable horror and evil. His words land with such force!”
Zelenskiy’s success is thrown into sharp relief by the glum and glowering presence of the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, mostly silent as his army faces growing accusations of war crimes.
The makeup of the security council meant that Putin’s man, bald and bespectacled Russian ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, got to speak first on Tuesday and complain it was “outrageous” that the council was not going to discuss “the horrific provocation of Ukrainian forces in Bucha”.
This was quickly dismissed and, a few speakers later, all eyes at the C-shaped table turned to Zelenskiy on the giant screen. Once again he sat on a brown leather chair in a white-walled office, a Ukrainian flag to his right, wearing a beard and open-necked dark green shirt.
At the Grammys the former actor and comedian had described the sound of silence in his country and the redemptive quality of music. At the UN, he was in full war leader mode, hammering home a message about the massacre of the innocents.
Zelenskiy gave a vivid eyewitness account of what he had just seen in Bucha, a town near the capital, Kyiv. “They cut off limbs, slashed their throats, women were raped and killed in front of their children,” he said unsparingly. “Their tongues were pulled out only because the aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear.”
As Nebenzia looked on, Zelenskiy then highlighted the contradiction at the heart of the security council. “This is no different from other terrorists such as Daesh [Islamic State], who occupied some territories, and here it is done by a member of the United Nations security council.”
He called for Nuremberg-style trials – but what hope for justice when Russia can veto any effort by the security council to prosecute Putin for war crimes? And what hope when Russia, Ukraine and, for that matter, the US, are not signatories to the international criminal court?
Zelenskiy added an uncomfortable truth that the UN did not want to hear: “Where is the security that the security council needs to guarantee? It’s not there, although there is a security council. So where is the peace? Where are those guarantees that the United Nations needs to guarantee?
“It is obvious that the key institution of the world which must ensure the coercion of any aggressor to peace simply cannot work effectively.”
The implication was clear: a broken security council can only lead to a broken world.
Zelenskiy suggested hosting a global conference in Kyiv to discuss fundamental reform of the UN. “It is now clear that the goals set in San Francisco in 1945, for the creation of a global security international organisation, have not been achieved,” Zelenskiy said. “And it is impossible to achieve them without reforms.”
As has become familiar on his virtual world tour, Zelenskiy concluded by asking his audience to watch a video from the frontline. But this time there was a technical hiccup and it did not appear. Some TV viewers may have switched off and gone about their day. But minutes later the glitch was solved so Nebenzia and others present were compelled to watch it.
Set to plangent music, the film depicted a tragedy too deep for tears, with scene after scene of dead bodies, children included. It was the small intimacies that stung: dropped keys next to a blackened hand, red nail varnish on limp fingers, a child’s abandoned pink shoe.
Soon after, one diplomat compared what is happening to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica. Which brings to mind the story from Nazi-occupied Paris when a Gestapo officer is said to have asked Picasso about the painting: “Did you do that?” The artist replied: “No, you did.”
