The second episode focuses on Zelenksyy’s carefully crafted image and the PR-machine responsible for it. We explore the celebrity visits to Ukraine, U.S. media coverage of Zelenskyy, his high-profile visits to the United States, and the reproduction of his likeness in statues and busts around the world.
Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t quite who he’s portrayed to be. Even if you believe he is a righteous servant of democracy… one thing is without a doubt… he’s an actor –in more ways than one.
But he’s not an actor who simply became President… he had backing. What virtually no American knows about Zelensky is that he appears to be backed by shadowy billionaires accountable to no one other than their own business interests.
Zelensky’s image isn’t just something that happened. It appears to be carefully coordinated and orchestrated. Zelensky as a leader is being portrayed by the dominant, mainstream media, as a noble saint—selfless, brave, and…chic?
A hero to woke actors and warmongering politicians alike, Zelensky is the world’s biggest celebrity. And he’s being billed as something more: he is the New George Washington, the New Winston Churchill…. So what’s the truth?
I’m Ben Swann… and this is Zelensky Unmasked.
Celente: “who is Zelensky? I mean, this is a guy that used to play the piano with his penis when he was a comedian playing the president of Ukraine.”
Ruslan: It is a serious problem when an actor is chasing that type of recognition; chases to be in the picture on the first pages of newspapers and magazines, like Time magazine, Golden Globes, the Grammy’s… getting every award from everywhere.
Nixon: the history of Zelensky is very interesting, and it’s exactly what you would expect for a person who is acting as the president of a country right now.
He was in a TV show and he was a comedian. And in that TV show, he was a teacher who became president and he wanted the country to join Nato and join the EU and all of the things that, you know, he’s acting out now…it was called the Servant of the People. That was the name of his TV show Servant of the People.
So then his financial backers then started a party, and they called that party the servant of the people party. And they ran him as president with exactly the same platform that he had in the television show.
Volodomyr Zelensky didn’t just become President Ukraine. Not surprisingly, he had help. What mainstream media won’t tell you is where that help came from… a name you’ve probably never heard. Ihor Kolomoyskyi. Kolomoyskyi is one of the Ukraine’s leading oligarchs and owner of the 1+1 Media Group, one of the Ukraine’s largest media conglomerates.
Kolomoyskyi’s network aired Zelenskyy’s hit show Servant of the People—the one that made him a star.
Kolomoyskyi also has been accused of being one of the most notorious gangsters in Ukrainian history. He’s been accused of embezzling billions of dollars and of hiring people to kill his rivals. Though he’s never been charged.
That aside, Ukraine’s worst-kept secret is that Kolomoyskyi was pulling the strings of Zelenskyy’s Presidential campaign. His personal lawyer was Zelenskyy’s campaign advisor and Zelenskyy travelled to Israel on several occasions to meet with Kolomoyskyi, who lives in Tel Aviv.
And even though he’s Jewish, U.S. government officials claim that Kolomoyskyi was the brainchild and bank roller of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
Soon after Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party was launched, Kolomoyskyi’s got the attention of the attention of the FBI.
The Justice Department claims that his PrivatBank ran a Ponzi scheme, which stole billions from investors and hid seventy million dollars of it in the United States.
It was Kolomoyskyi’s money, and the enormous power he wielded, which was needed to complete Zelensky’s transformation from TV personality to his country’s top man.
Ritter: The show was so popular and Ukrainian presidents were so bad that they took him. Ran him.
And he beat the people not because he’s qualified, but because they were so sick of the old system.
ZELENSKY SOT: (In Russian or Ukrainian w/ English Sub.) “We only have a choice between two b******s. We just choose the lesser evil. We’ve been doing this for 25 years.”
Ritter: They thought this actor could pretend to be president better than presidents were actually being president.
Nixon: So clearly, it was a production to create a television show and then eventually turn it into a party. But they knew that the people of Ukraine wanted peace, as most people in most countries want.
Resident (DW VOICEOVER): “At least he’s promised to end the war. That’s what we are hoping for.”
NIXON: So he ran as a peace candidate and he ran, arguing that he would push for peace with Russia, peace with the Donbas, etc. And he won, of course. And when he won, unfortunately, he did a complete political reversal, and he went in the direction that his backers wanted.
Zelensky took office in 2019 amidst the catastrophic collapse of public confidence in Ukraine’s government and frustration with society’s endemic corruption.
Hope quickly turned to despair, however, once it was clear that nothing had changed. The economy was in shambles, corruption was still rampant, and the Donbass war still raged on.
Zelensky had failed to live up to any of his promises.
Ritter: Then the war comes, and they take this man with 23% popularity who shut down all democracy and we turn him into Winston Churchill.
As soon as Russia’s military operation kicked off in February of 2022, U.S. media outlets launched an unprecedented propaganda campaign in support of Ukraine, using its actor-turned-President as its lightening rod.
And that campaign was unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
Actor Sean Penn visited Zelensky in Ukraine, voiced his support, and even gave him his Oscar award. This bizzare show of support was covered widely in the U.S. and international press. But it didn’t stop there, shortly after, comedian and actor Ben Stiller made his way to Ukraine to take his turn in paying homage to the great hero.
And pretty soon, Zelensky was everywhere, on the cover of Time, Newsweek, Wired, and of course…Vogue.
(And pretty soon, Zelensky was everywhere, on the cover of Time, Newsweek, Wired, and he was even photographed for Vogue.)
You can’t make this stuff up. He and his wife posed for cover photos while he was in the midst of a war supposedly for his country’s survival? Really? And he had time for this? Actually, he had time for this and lot more.
The actor, turned President, also made his way to the U.S. stage by recording messages, which were played live at the Grammys and the Golden Globes.
He rang the bell at Wall Street—virtually–and he visited Congress live and in-person.
A weird sand statue of him was erected in Estonia and Congressman Joe Wilson, a Republican from South Carolina, introduced a bill to erect a permanent bust of Zelensky at The U.S. Capitol. By the way, you can now purchase a miniature version of this would-be bust on Amazon for 19.99.
Iversen: “He was selected to act in this role, and he’s doing a fantastic job as an actor, quite frankly. This is a role of a lifetime and he’s killing it.”
And it’s clear that Zelensky got a lot of help in prepping for this role.
Telizhenko: So basically today, the Ukraine is run by the deep state, the military in Washington, the people who want war to make money from war, the military industrial complex in the United States…Zelensky is just his puppet within this whole process.
Andreiy Yermak is the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine. He’s also a film maker and Zelensky’s business partner. But he’s far from the only marketing man behind the Zelensky phenomenon.
Nixon: So it was from the very beginning…was some kind of an intelligence-pushed media operation…
And that’s why he’s always behind green screens. That’s always why he’s doing coverage for various magazines, etc., because this is really a production for people worldwide to think that they have a president of a country and he’s just a hollow figure.
Throughout history, intelligence agencies have invested massive amounts of money to manage public relations campaigns. These campaigns have been waged to spread disinformation in the interest of getting public opinion behind a war. And you don’t have to look too far in the past to find examples.
In 1990, a girl from Kuwait, who said her name was Nayirah, testified that she witnessed babies being taken out of incubators and killed by Saddam Hussain’s forces. It turned out that this was a lie. And the girl wasn’t some random girl; she was the daughter of Kuwait’s Ambassador to the United States, Saud Al-Sabah. The story about the incubators never happened. But it was too late once we knew for sure. The publicity campaign associated with this lie swayed public opinion against Hussain and in favor of the U.S. invasion of Kuwait.
Twelve years later, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell took his turn at lying with an eye towards Iraq. Remember this famous shot of him holding up vials of those biological weapon samples? He testified before the world that the country had weapons of mass destruction. This bold-faced lie prompted the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the deaths of over one million people.
So the question that thinking people must grapple with. Could the same thing be happening in the case of Ukraine?
Nixon: I’s interesting because for the most part that that production has been successful. He’s been pushed as a, you know, a hero of democracy and this poor kind of the you know, this small, democratic, free country has been attacked by a brutal and angry, emotional person, not a country. Keep in mind that in the context of us, the US media is portrayal of this particular conflict. So he’s put forward as a you know, it’s the traditional Marvel Comics hero villain scenario. He’s a hero. He’s a good guy, stands for everything, Good.
And he’s attacked by the equivalent of Lex Luthor in a Superman movie, which would be Vladimir the evil Vladimir Putin.
And they’ve been, you know, pretty successful with that in the United States simply because that’s the only story that’s allowed to get out.
The reality of things in Ukraine are much more grim.
Under Zelenskyy’s watch, the Russian language has come under attack, as has the Orthodox Church.
Alternative media outlets have been banned, as have oppositional parties.
Zelensky’s cult-like status in the west is masking the rising tide of authoritarianism in Ukraine. And not just that, it appears that even Zelensky is starting to believe his own hype.
Ritter: Now he actually believes he’s a man of gravitas –that he is Winston Churchill…
Like the original Churchill, this one isn’t necessarily all about peace either. Even though the PR-machine that surrounds him tells us that he is.
According to the United Nations, 69 civilians were killed and over 300 injured from the time when the ‘peace candidate’ took office in May of 2019 until the launch of Russia’s military operation in February of 2022. Over 80% of the innocent victims were Russian-speakers in the Donbass Republics—those that the Russian government claims they have an obligation to defend.
As numerous military analysts have asked, what’s the end game here? There’s much agreement that—long-term– Ukraine doesn’t have much of a chance in this war. So why is there no peace?
Ritter: Ten years from now, when they write the history of this conflict, he’s going to be the most reviled man in the world because he is responsive for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians.
Hundreds of thousands of people he swore to protect. He slaughtered for what?
Because he’s addicted to weapons infused, ego driven narcissism.
Black: Ukraine is becoming a nation of widows and orphans. There’s, there’s this whole block of, of men of childbearing age and of the age where their father children, and they’ll raise the family, and, you know, bring in the bringing the food and so forth and the shelter, they’re wiped out, they’re gone.
Credico: There’s 300,000 Dead Ukrainians, Douglas McGregor would say 350,000. All right, I’ll go into the conservative side there. And 30,000 Russians, I don’t know they see the figures tend to one whatever it is, it’s a 4000 500,000 all we got it, whatever it is, it all could have been avoided. This awk and no one nobody in DC that’s connected, whether it be Raytheon, Victoria Nuland, Joe Biden, and Lloyd Austin, they don’t give a rat’s ass about any of those Ukrainian deaths at all.
NIXON: Zelensky is part of a pattern right now throughout the US Empire where you put an actor in place who appears to be making decisions, but he’s not, so he’s just another one of many and they bring him out and he does what he’s told.
If Zelensky just does what he’s told, that would mean he is the hollow leader… then somebody is pulling the strings. Who is it that appears to be telling Zelensky what to do, what to think and what to say? Who is really running Ukraine? We’ll investigate as we continue to unmask Zelensky.