Ukraine’s Comedian President Doesn’t Plan to Rule

The landslide victory of comedian and TV producer Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Sunday’s run-off presidential election in Ukraine poses a problem both for the country’s Western backers and those in the Kremlin who hope to exert control again. The Ukrainian people haven’t voted for a specific path, or even simply against politics as usual: They voted against being told what to do.

Zelenskiy will be the country’s sixth president in almost 28 years of independence. That’s more heads of state than any other post-Soviet country has had. That in itself shows Ukrainians are hard to please. But Zelenskiy’s way of winning tells a more important truth about them: Ukrainians are loath to accept any kind of authority. That complicates Ukraine’s position as perhaps the world’s most important buffer nation, sitting between Fortress Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s European flank.