Portrait of insensitivity: How Zelenskyys were busy photo-shooting while Ukraine burnt

This is some sort of a crazy record. Of exactly what sort, I am not sure, but it is of some sort. Your country is at war, more than one-third of your people have been rendered refugees, inside their homeland or fleeing to neighbouring countries, and you find the time and leisure to appear to the world’s poshest fashion magazine? Really?

Olena Zelenska, wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is on the cover of the latest issue of Vogue. Inside, or if you scroll down, there are lovey-dovey pictures with her husband.

This is war debased to advertising campaign.

The Vogue writer says that she met Olena on a “rainy afternoon in Kyiv, where cafés were busy even amid frequent air-raid sirens, (and) her luminous face and green-brown eyes seemed to capture the range of emotions coursing through Ukraine today: deep sadness, flashes of dark humour, recollections of a safer, happier past, and a steely core of national pride”.

Super.

Vogue has gone all out here. Visuals are more important than text in a magazine of this genre, so it carries perfectly arranged pictures of Olena with her husband (who is wearing the drab green T-shirt which he seems to have trademarked) by Annie Leibovitz, one of the most expensive photographers on earth. I have been a journalist for several decades, and a mere glance at these pictures tells me that the photo shoot — with its precise lighting and props and Leibovitz’s obsession with detail — would have taken at least six to eight hours.

This, while people are engaged in combat and are getting killed.

The narrative of this war is a mammoth advertising campaign, something that Zelenskyy, former TV show star, is probably the thing he does best. Or the only thing.

The Zelenskyys are not living in a heavily bunkered state of siege as they so eagerly try to portray (You can check the pictures on the Vogue website). If Vladimir Putin wanted, he could have bombed Kyiv to rubble by now. He has not. Several European prime ministers have visited the Ukrainian capital in the last two months for what were basically photo ops. Nice grand old buildings and Zelenskyy in the man’s T-shirt are always available for photo ops.

A huge human tragedy is happening here, and what we end up with is The Devil Wears Prada, where Meryl Streep played a character that is obviously Anna Wintour, the legendary and fiercely perfectionist editor of Vogue.

Maybe Wintour doesn’t like some of Leibovitz’s pictures of the Zelenskyys and wants a reshoot with the Zelenskyys? Maybe it has happened already.

The Vogue journalist writes that there are frequent air-raid siren signals in Kyiv. That seems to be part of the show. But who pays for the show?

Ukrainians with their lives, and citizens of the West with their money.

The Zelenskyys have the right to express themselves as they please. But we too have the right to scrutinise. So let’s get down to some facts.

From day one, the war in Ukraine has been a war of narratives, and narratives are what Zelenskyy is good at. With a lot of help from his friends, as the Beatles sang many years ago. Western politicians and media have censored every view or analysis that did not fit their story. The coverage of the war — and what the war is about — has been the most astonishing feat of un- or mis-information in the last 50 years.

What are the principles that this war is being fought over? Surely, a soldier — or a bystanding civilian — needs some tenet of grace to justify their death?

But this is what the West has completely blacked out. For instance, the Minsk agreements.

The eastern regions of Ukraine — the Donbas — are almost entirely Russian-speaking. They were in fact gifted — just a scrawl of a pen over a map — to the former Soviet republic of Ukraine in 1956 by the supreme leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was a Russo-Ukrainian (as was his successor, Leonid Brezhnev).

The Minsk 2 agreement, mediated by Germany and France, was signed in February 2015. The treaty guaranteed a limited autonomy to the Donbas people. But successive Ukraine governments violated the accord. In fact, Ukraine even revised its Constitution by providing for its NATO membership, which meant the crossing of a line with the deployment of troops — and possibly nuclear missile systems — near Russia’s border.

The West, meanwhile, pushes a mutually profitable relationship with a couple who stayed toned and gymmed and well-fed and have the time for make-up artists who have flown in from New York to prep you for the shoot.

The Vogue article says that Zelenska “has suddenly found herself centre stage in a tragedy”. Yes. A horse, a horse, a kingdom for a Wintour saddle. And Amazon, keep those drab gray T-shirts in stock. I need them for the next photo-op in Kyiv.

The writer is a former editor of ‘Financial Express’, and founder-editor of ‘Open’ and ‘Swarajya’ magazines. Views expressed are personal.

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