Search results

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confronted the aggressors on the military front while galvanising Ukrainians and fighting a parallel war on the information battlefield. This study examines Zelenskyy’s communication strategy in the first 100 days of the conflict and his use of mainstream media to share the Ukrainian story globally. It also aims to provide an opportunity in modern history to explore communication led by a head of state.

This case study focuses on Zelenskyy’s external communication with the global mainstream media and evaluates his 77 official speeches and interview transcripts within the first 100 days. Using the inductive categorisation approach (Berg, 2009), a comprehensive dataset analysis was made to distill the different message types, media platforms used, target audiences and any embedded rhetorical elements. These were evaluated using the stakeholder theory (Freeman, 2002), mediating the media model (Pang, 2010) and information vacuum (Pang, 2013; Woon and Pang, 2017) as the study’s theoretical lens.

Zelenskyy focused on four key audience groups in the first 100 days of the conflict and scaffolded his audience engagement at different points in time. He tailored his rhetoric specifically to the country of his audiences and dominated the information space by using first-person accounts to connect with audiences, ensuring disinformation and alternate narratives were debunked. His use of “direct video press release” enabled mainstream media globally to report him as they were a ready form of information subsidy.

This study contributed to understanding Zelenskyy’s efforts in identifying targeted audiences and his curated communication strategy. Zelenskyy understood the prevailing contexts of his messages, saturated the information space on multiple platforms and sought to eliminate countervailing narratives, particularly from Russia, from forming in the information vacuum (Pang, 2013). As this study was focused on how he leveraged mainstream media, future studies could examine how he leveraged social media that were harnessed in communication. Zelenskyy’s verbal and non-verbal cues could also be examined to understand how this may influence stakeholder perceptions.

The study found practical lessons to show how Zelenskyy engaged with different audiences who could directly and indirectly influence Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression and aligned his communication with his national strategic objectives even as the conflict unfolded. These can serve as a foundational framework for national leaders navigating crises in today’s information landscape and provide valuable insights into effective leadership and crisis communication.

Few studies have examined how a leader communicates in times of crises, specifically one of such scale with international involvement. This study is a nascent attempt to do so, with the hope that it would provide critical insights into effective media communication and lay the groundwork for future research in this evolving field.