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KRYVYI RIH, Ukraine — Sergiy Milutin first saw Volodymyr Zelensky when they were both 17 — and competed in a popular improv and comedy writing contest. Zelensky won, and even Milutin, his rival at the time, grudgingly admitted that Zelensky was an engaging performer. He had a “crazy energy” that caught your attention, he said.
Almost three decades later, Milutin now attends Zelenskyy’s performances every night. The Ukrainian president’s late-night speeches, now deadly serious, have become routine for many in the country during the nearly two-month war with Russia.
“The whole country can’t go to sleep until we see its latest video,” said Milutin, the deputy mayor of Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city of nearly 700,000 in Ukraine’s heartland and Zelenskyy’s hometown.
Zelensky has become the unshaven face of a Ukrainian resilience and defiance that has captivated the world. His daily briefings to Ukrainians have evolved from selfie-style videos on the streets of Kyiv – proof he had not fled a country under attack – to more formal speeches behind a lectern in military green uniforms. They are must-reads and instantly shared across the social media channels.
On the international stage, he has questioned the West’s obligation to support Ukraine, specifically criticizing countries and leaders for their economic ties with Russia or their reluctance to supply Ukraine with heavy weapons.
And in Kryvyi Rih, where people have watched Zelensky’s rise from local boy to comedian to surprise presidential candidate to brave war leader, Zelensky embodies the working-class strength of the steel city. As the war now enters a second phase – which Zelenskyy dubbed this week the “Battle for Donbass,” Ukraine’s eastern region – people here and across Ukraine are once again looking to Zelenskyy to guide them through this phase .
“He has become not only a symbol of Ukrainian unity in the midst of the war, but also a symbol of the changing principles of the world order,” Milutin said.
Kryvyi Rih did not paint murals or erect statues in Zelensky’s honor. Its presence is most clearly acknowledged by large yellow signs around various buildings, indicating that their renovation is part of the Ukrainian President’s infrastructure initiative. Zelenskyy, on the other hand, nodded to his hometown when he named his television production company “Kvartal 95,” which refers to the neighborhood where he grew up. His father is a professor at a local university, and people here are impressed that the Selenskys continued to live their lives normally in the city, even after their son won an unexpected presidential victory in 2019.
These days, city officials are asking journalists not to visit or photograph Zelenskyy’s childhood home because it might frighten nervous neighbors who fear Russia might launch a missile attack on the house in some sort of personal revenge.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin misrepresented his country’s attack on Ukraine as opposed to Zelenskyy’s “neo-Nazi” government. The Kremlin’s original plans, analysts said, were largely based on the assumption that Zelenskyy would flee in the same manner as Zelenskyy Afghan President Ashraf Ghani last summer when the Taliban surrounded Kabul. Instead he stayed and the Ukrainians rallied around him.
His hometown has escaped major attacks, but even as the fighting shifts east, Kryvyi Rih sits on a key axis. It’s just north of Russia’s annexed Crimea, where the Russian military has several bases, and it’s sort of a halfway point between the contested eastern Donbass region and Ukraine’s main Black Sea port, Odessa, which is considered a potential target.
Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of Kryvyi Rih’s military administration, bent over a map of Ukraine in his office and drew a pen over the current front line between Ukraine and Russia, some 40 km south of Kryvyi Rih in the Kherson region.
He moved the pen to create a vertical line from the position of Russian forces to Kryvyi Rih and said that if the Russian plan is to encircle Ukraine’s military in the Donbass region, as many suspect, then Kryvyi Rih is in line of fire western boundary point for this operation. And if there are plans to launch an offensive along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, Kryvyi Rih is still a city through which Russian forces will have to pass.
“We’re definitely in each other’s way,” said Vilkul. “Everything is pretty obvious on the map.”
Dubbed the “longest city in Europe,” the wide streets of Kryvyi Rih were built to allow military planes to land on them. Vilkul said Russia’s forces attempted an air raid on the city in the early days of the war to use it as an “airlift” for their paratroopers. He ordered large articulated trucks to be parked across the airport runway as a landing obstacle.
With the practical defenses in place, Vilkul took a symbolic step. At the city’s main World War II memorial, Vilkul tied a Ukrainian flag to the sculpted soldier’s outstretched hand — an unsubtle response to Putin’s neo-Nazi narrative of Zelensky’s government.
“At that time we fought against German Nazis,” said Vilkul. “Well, this is now a war against Russian fascists.”
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With other industrial centers in eastern Ukraine, notably Mariupol and Kharkiv, still under heavy bombardment, the importance of Kryvyi Rih is expected to increase. ArcelorMittal, Ukraine’s largest integrated steel company, restarted production in the city last week – and part of its work is likely devoted to supporting the war effort.
The job opportunities in the industrial sector and the city’s sober identity have made it an attractive landing spot for thousands of people displaced from Ukraine’s coal-producing Donbass. Some have started to call this area “Kryv-bas”.
“You have to keep your word here and you have to be a strong person here,” Milutin said. “Our president is like that.”
Even in the midst of the war, Kryvyi Rih maintained a spring Saturday tradition – a sort of cleansing day for the city. Volunteers planted trees in local parks and swept sidewalks. Maria Mirchenko, 37, collected rubbish in a downtown square. The night before she watched Zelenskyy’s last speech and then went to bed feeling reassured, even though Ukraine had plunged into uncertainty.
“I would be proud that he would be our president even if he wasn’t from here,” Mirchenko said. “You have to be a man of steel to withstand all this. He’s made of steel, just like Kryvyi Rih.”