A Eulogy for a Living President: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Moral Courage

By Matthew Parish

Monday 19 October 2026

Eulogies are normally written for the dead. This one is not. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is alive, President of Ukraine and still engaged every day in the exhausting business of holding together a country fighting the largest European war since 1945. Yet there is something to be said for writing a eulogy for a man before his life is over, because we have a curious habit of waiting until people are dead before saying clearly what was remarkable about them. In Zelenskyy’s case, the central quality deserves to be identified while he is still exercising it.

That quality is moral courage.

There are many forms of courage, and they should not be confused. Physical courage is the willingness to expose oneself to danger. Political courage is the willingness to take decisions that may destroy one’s career. Intellectual courage is the willingness to admit that comfortable assumptions are wrong. Moral courage is something more difficult still. It consists in accepting responsibility when escape remains possible, and continuing to accept it long after the exhilarating moment of the original decision has passed.

That distinction is essential to understanding Volodymyr Zelenskyy. His defining moment was not merely that extraordinary period in February 2022 when Russian troops were advancing upon Kyiv and the Ukrainian government appeared, to many foreign observers, to have only days or perhaps hours left. His decision to remain in the capital was unquestionably an act of personal bravery. Yet had Zelenskyy’s contribution to history ended there, his story would have been simpler than it has become. A few days of heroism can sometimes be easier than years of endurance.

The extraordinary thing is that the years came afterwards.

Since then Zelenskyy has lived a life that very few human beings could reasonably be expected to endure indefinitely. He must be President, commander-in-chief, diplomat, fundraiser, national spokesman, international advocate, mediator between competing personalities, consoler of the bereaved and chief custodian of the morale of a country in which virtually everyone knows somebody who has been killed, wounded, displaced or otherwise transformed by war. He must visit soldiers and hospitals, receive foreign leaders, travel between capitals, address parliaments, negotiate weapons packages, argue about sanctions, confront wavering allies and return home to a country in which the air-raid sirens continue to sound.

Even as these words are written, Ukraine is enduring another campaign against its energy infrastructure, while Zelenskyy is publicly complaining that Kyiv no longer receives the degree of advance warning from its partners that it once did. His recent diplomacy has involved navigating an increasingly difficult relationship with Washington while simultaneously consolidating European support. In London only days ago he was received by the King and the British Prime Minister amid another period of intense Russian attacks and growing uncertainty about American policy.

The physical demands alone are difficult to comprehend. Presidential travel is exhausting in peacetime. Wartime presidential travel involves extraordinary security arrangements, disrupted sleep, overnight journeys, military briefings and the perpetual possibility that the telephone call received at three o’clock in the morning will report the destruction of an apartment building, another battlefield reverse or another Russian missile barrage. Then there are the meetings, speeches, interviews and ceremonies. Whatever private exhaustion he experiences must repeatedly be suppressed because the Ukrainian President’s face has itself become part of Ukraine’s war effort.

That last point matters. Zelenskyy cannot merely experience emotions; he must manage their public consequences. When Ukraine suffers a military setback, he cannot appear defeated. When Ukrainian soldiers are exhausted, he must appear confident. When civilians sit without electricity during another winter of Russian attacks, he must convince them that endurance remains worthwhile. When allies hesitate, he must be simultaneously grateful for everything they have already supplied and insistent that it is insufficient. When foreign politicians insult him, lecture him or attempt to manoeuvre him towards concessions he considers dangerous, he must calculate whether indignation, silence, humour, flattery or defiance will best serve Ukraine.

This is emotional labour on a scale almost impossible to imagine.

And Zelenskyy must perform it while knowing that every expression upon his face will be analysed across the world. He is not permitted the ordinary human luxury of despair. A Ukrainian soldier may admit to his comrades that he is exhausted. A civilian may say that he cannot take another winter. A President fighting an existential war has far less freedom. His exhaustion, if displayed too openly, becomes political information. His hesitation becomes diplomatic leverage for somebody else. His pessimism might become pessimism throughout the country.

Hence the strange cruelty of wartime leadership: the moment at which a man most needs permission to be human is precisely the moment at which history denies it to him.

Nor have Zelenskyy’s burdens arisen solely from Russia. The romantic Western image of Ukraine’s wartime President can obscure the fact that he must govern an actual country, with all the ugliness that entails. Ukraine continues to struggle with corruption. People who have stood close to Zelenskyy have become embroiled in serious investigations and scandals. His former chief of staff Andriy Yermak, once amongst the most powerful figures in wartime Ukraine and one of Zelenskyy’s closest associates, has become a suspect in a major corruption investigation, allegations he denies. Other former senior officials and people associated with Zelenskyy’s political circle have also come under scrutiny. Zelenskyy himself has not been named as a suspect in these investigations.

This must be understood as more than a political inconvenience. Leadership is personal. Presidents rely upon people because no human being can absorb the quantity of information that flows through a wartime state alone. They develop relationships of confidence with advisers, generals, ministers and negotiators. When those relationships collapse, whether through disagreement, scandal, dismissal, rivalry or allegations of wrongdoing, the President must do something psychologically unnatural. He must detach personal loyalty from public responsibility.

That can be agonising. The loneliness of supreme office is a cliché because it is true. In Zelenskyy’s case, it must be intensified by the knowledge that mistakes in judgement about people can carry consequences measured not merely in opinion polls but in lives, weapons, diplomatic support and the credibility of Ukraine before governments financing its survival.

Corruption presents him with a particularly cruel dilemma because Zelenskyy originally came to power promising something very different from the Ukrainian political establishment that preceded him. Ukrainians therefore have every right to judge him severely when corruption penetrates the circles surrounding the presidency. Recent polling suggests that they do. Yet the same polling reveals something striking. In early October 2026, 53 per cent of Ukrainians said they trusted Zelenskyy against 40 per cent who did not, and he remained narrowly ahead of Valerii Zaluzhnyi in a hypothetical presidential first round. Another recent poll placed his trust figure at 54 per cent.

That is not overwhelming popularity in the mathematical sense, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. Ukraine remains a democracy and Zelenskyy has serious critics. But in another sense these figures are remarkable. After years of war, mobilisation, casualties, displacement, blackouts, economic hardship, political controversies and corruption scandals involving people close to the administration, more Ukrainians still trust their President than distrust him. He remains the leading individual contender in hypothetical presidential polling. That is political endurance of an unusual kind.

Abroad, his symbolic standing remains greater still. Whatever disagreements foreign governments may have with individual Ukrainian policies, Zelenskyy remains one of the most recognisable representatives of democratic resistance in the contemporary world. The receptions he continues to receive in European capitals demonstrate something beyond diplomatic protocol. He has acquired the unusual status of a political leader whose personal story has become inseparable from the story of his country.

None of this requires us to believe that Zelenskyy is infallible. Quite the contrary. Eulogies often do their subjects a disservice by transforming complicated people into saints. Zelenskyy has made mistakes. He has trusted people who may not have deserved his trust. His government has taken controversial decisions. He has been accused of concentrating power excessively around the presidency. Ukrainians themselves have argued passionately about mobilisation, corruption, political pluralism, military strategy and the conduct of his administration. A democratic country’s leader ought to be criticised, particularly during war, because war provides governments with powers that must never become immune from scrutiny.

But moral courage does not mean never making mistakes. It means continuing to accept responsibility for decisions when their consequences become painful.

This is where Zelenskyy’s story becomes genuinely extraordinary. The most famous episode of his presidency remains his refusal to leave Kyiv in 2022. Yet perhaps history will eventually conclude that this was not his greatest act of courage. The greater courage may have consisted in waking up the next morning, and the morning after that, and continuing to do so for years.

Imagine the accumulation. Another list of casualties. Another destroyed town. Another argument with a foreign government over ammunition. Another conversation with commanders who need weapons that do not exist in sufficient quantities. Another meeting with families of the dead. Another accusation of corruption. Another trusted colleague lost to scandal or disagreement. Another overnight journey. Another summit. Another speech. Another missile attack. Another demand to reassure forty million people and a watching world that Ukraine can continue.

And then imagine knowing that one cannot simply resign from the psychological consequences of any of it.

There must surely have been mornings when Volodymyr Zelenskyy wished that somebody else could carry this burden. We cannot know his private thoughts, and we should not pretend to. But we know enough about ordinary human beings to understand that exhaustion accumulates, grief accumulates and responsibility accumulates. No President possesses an inexhaustible reservoir of psychological strength.

Indeed photographs themselves tell part of the story. Compare Zelenskyy’s face before the full-scale invasion with his face today. One need not indulge in amateur medical diagnosis to see the passage of time. Wartime leadership has written itself upon him. That is hardly surprising. He has spent years living within an institutional machine that can never entirely sleep because the country it governs may be attacked at any hour.

Yet every morning the President of Ukraine must put on the familiar clothes, enter another meeting room, speak into another camera and begin again.

This is why Zelenskyy’s greatest contribution may ultimately prove to have been psychological rather than military. He did not command every brigade, design every drone or negotiate every weapons shipment. What he did was personify continuity. In the most dangerous period of modern Ukrainian history, the state did not disappear. The President did not flee. The flag remained above the government buildings in Kyiv. Ministers continued working. Diplomats continued negotiating. Soldiers continued fighting. Civilians continued believing that their country possessed a future.

Political symbolism is sometimes dismissed as superficial. In war it can be decisive. Nations are partly imaginary constructions: millions of strangers agreeing that they belong to something larger than themselves. When such a community comes under existential attack, somebody must give visible form to that abstraction. Churchill did it for Britain. De Gaulle did it for Free France. Zelenskyy has done it for Ukraine.

There is another aspect of his moral courage that deserves recognition. Zelenskyy knows that the decisions he makes will be judged by people who do not bear their consequences. Foreign commentators can propose territorial concessions from comfortable studios. Politicians thousands of kilometres from the front can explain what Ukraine ought to sacrifice for peace. Strategists can move coloured lines across maps. Zelenskyy must consider what those lines mean to the people who actually live behind them.

That does not mean he is always right. It means that the moral weight of his decisions is different.

The responsibility for ordering men to continue fighting when some will die is almost unbearable if one permits oneself fully to comprehend it. So too is the responsibility for accepting a peace that might leave millions under occupation or create the conditions for another war. There are no clean choices. Moral courage in such circumstances does not consist in discovering an option without suffering. There may be none. It consists in choosing while understanding the suffering attached to every available alternative.

Perhaps that is why Zelenskyy appears harder now than he once did. The entertainer who entered politics promising to reconcile people has become a wartime President obliged repeatedly to say no: no to surrender, no to imposed settlements, no to the proposition that exhaustion makes aggression legitimate, no to the suggestion that a smaller country’s sovereignty matters less because a larger neighbour possesses more soldiers and nuclear weapons.

And there is something profoundly lonely about saying no for years.

One day Volodymyr Zelenskyy will no longer be President of Ukraine. One hopes that day arrives peacefully, constitutionally and in a Ukraine secure enough once again to indulge in the magnificent normality of elections, political quarrels and changes of government. When it does, historians will begin the difficult work of separating the man from the mythology. They will identify mistakes that contemporaries missed. Archives will reveal arguments, miscalculations and compromises of which we presently know nothing. The heroic portrait will become more complicated, as all serious historical portraits eventually do.

But one fact is unlikely to disappear.

When history came for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he did not run away.

And then, much harder than that, he stayed.

He stayed through the exhilaration of Ukrainian resistance and through its darkest periods. He stayed when Western capitals applauded him and when they became impatient with him. He stayed while friends became liabilities, colleagues departed, scandals accumulated and political relationships fractured. He stayed while Ukrainian cities were bombed, while soldiers died and while the diplomatic itinerary continued from one capital to another. He stayed while millions of Ukrainians looked towards the presidency not merely for government but for reassurance that their sacrifices still possessed meaning.

That is why this is a eulogy for a living man.

Not because Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s story is finished. It plainly is not. Not because he should be placed beyond criticism. No democratic leader ever should be. And not because we know how history will ultimately judge every decision he has taken.

It is because sometimes we should recognise courage while the person displaying it can still hear us.

There will eventually be time enough for monuments, biographies and historians’ verdicts. For the present, there is simply a man approaching another evening in a country at war, carrying responsibilities of a magnitude that most of us will mercifully never experience. Tomorrow there will be another briefing, another crisis, another telephone call, another journey, another argument with an ally, another bereaved family and another address to Ukrainians asking them to endure.

And somehow he must find the strength to tell them that they can.

That is leadership. That is sacrifice.

And whatever history ultimately makes of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that is moral courage.