The Nightmare of Vasily Goloborodko (also known as Volodymyr Zelensky)

Originally published in Author's Substack in 18 February 2025

As a fan of the Ukrainian television series Servant of the PeopleI can't help but notice the irony of an actor who played a president becoming, in fact, an actor who became president. However, scripts are one thing. Reality is something completely different. And Volodymyr Zelensky's last scene, unlike the character Vasily Goloborodko he played in the series, will not have a happy ending, but rather the stuff nightmares are made of.

By any standard, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's term has been a real rollercoaster.

In March 2018, after three seasons as the lead in the popular Ukrainian television series Servant of the PeopleZelensky's advisors filed documents to create a new political party in Ukraine, also called Servant of the PeopleThe party was nothing more than a device to politicize the role played by Zelensky in the series, in which he portrayed an ordinary Ukrainian citizen named Vasily Goloborodko—who ended up becoming president of Ukraine—allowing Zelensky, the real-life "ordinary man" of Ukraine, to turn theater into reality.

The move worked, and in April 2019 Zelensky was elected, defeating the unpopular incumbent president, the chocolate oligarch Petro Poroshenko.

Although he campaigned on a promise to promote peace with Russia regarding the ongoing fighting in the separatist region of Donbass, just weeks after taking office, Zelensky took a radical turn to the right, vowing to wage war against Russia over the disputed territories.

And in February 2022, the actor who became president had his wish fulfilled.

He immediately assumed his assigned role, operating from a script written for him by his Western mentors (it was the CIA that coined the now-famous phrase: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride”), rejecting a supposed offer from the United States to evacuate him from Kiev, which at the time was under attack from Russia.

However, both the evacuation offer and Zelensky's incisive response were works of fiction—neither actually happened, but they were brought to life by a complacent media that published, word for word, the narrative relayed by anonymous US intelligence sources operating within the American embassy in Kiev.

But the CIA scriptwriters couldn't erase the military pressure imposed on Ukraine by Russia's Special Military Operation, and less than a week after the start of the Russian attacks, Zelensky was forced to send a delegation to Gomel, Belarus, to begin negotiations aimed at ending the conflict. These negotiations eventually moved to Turkey, where, at the end of March, the two sides reached a comprehensive peace agreement, the so-called "Istanbul Communiqué," which, in retrospect, ended the conflict on terms that were extremely favorable to Ukraine. 

But Zelensky's new Western production decided that the pilot episode about a conflict between Russia and Ukraine was too lucrative not to be turned into a series, and so Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, flew to Kiev and convinced the actor-turned-president that the show had to go on.

And continuing is exactly what happened.

The Western collective, now fully supporting Zelensky's new series as an action drama, has poured billions of dollars into the production, transforming a simple story of survival against all odds into an epic David versus Goliath narrative.

Zelensky himself was reconfigured as a Churchill-esque figure, a larger-than-life character whose exhortations to "fight them on the beach" quickly captured the world's imagination.

The first season was a great success, with Zelensky leading his besieged troops to victory, retaking lost territories in Kharkov and Kherson, and setting the stage for a climactic second season in which Ukraine would advance to victory.

The producers went all out in promoting the second season, with trailers depicting the Ukrainian army's victory over Russia in what was announced as the "Counteroffensive of Summer 2023."

But the production encountered some insurmountable obstacles. The budget for "Summer Counteroffensive 2023" was larger than the sponsors were willing to spend, and there was also a writers' strike, which caused significant changes to the script—instead of delivering a dramatic victory, the drama would turn into a bloody stalemate.

The problem was that the audience had been won over by the original script, which had been reflected in the trailers. Denied their victory, viewership began to decline, and the money for the series' grand episodes also decreased.

Unable to deliver a victory, the screenwriters attempted to transform the action drama into a more character-driven series. This required rewriting Zelensky's character, who had become accustomed to playing a "Churchillian" figure, transforming him into a more tragic character who saw his dreams of glory slipping through his fingers.

The third season attempted to extract maximum entertainment value from this approach, but without success.

The producers were being bombarded with counterproposals for new programs, including a big-budget concept based on a reconciliation story between brothers who were once friends but now violently opposed each other.

The series "Servant of the People" had lost its appeal.

The sponsors were cutting funding.

Producers and writers were abandoning the project to join the team promoting the fraternal reconciliation storyline. This left the remaining production team with the problem of how to finish not only the third season, but the series as a whole.

In 2018, the producers of Servant of the People They solved their problem by transitioning from screen to reality, transforming Vasily Goloborodko into Volodymyr Zelensky. They wrote nightmarish scripts, creating scenes that depicted the rise and fall of Zelensky's character, only to have the series end in victory. But no screenwriter can transform the real-life drama of Volodymyr Zelensky into a happy ending. Goloborodko's nightmare, which began in the third season of the television version of... Servant of the PeopleThis became Zelensky's reality—cornered on all sides by people seeking to depose him, with no way out. Instead of a carefully scripted narrative, Zelensky resorted to drug-fueled improvisations, which turned tragedy into farce. Where the world once applauded the Churchillian hero Zelensky portrayed, now there is nothing left but pity for the despicable character Zelensky plays today. We are now in the fourth season. There is one last act to be performed before the series ends, and the producers are considering competing scripts. 

One script has the tragic hero fleeing into exile, where he can reflect on the causes of his downfall. The other, written by admirers of the HBO series The Sopranos, has a bloodier and more fatal ending for the common man who became a dictator. But the fact is that the fourth season of the real-life version of Servant of the People will not end well for Zelensky. And the reality is that none of those who sold him as the second coming of Churchill will care.