They also had a good communicator with a man-of-the-people image. Now the Ukrainian leader reminds them of the unwarranted optimism they had in 2020.
For Ukrainians and much of the rest of the world, President Volodomyr Zelenskiy has become a cult hero for his inspiring wartime messages as he rallies his people against an invading enemy.
For Armenians, though, it has triggered a different reaction: unhappy memories of the 2020 war with Azerbaijan, when their own leader, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, affected much of the same style and messaging, only for it to prove hollow and unable to prevent an eventual defeat.
In Azerbaijan, meanwhile, the comparisons are less common, but some have drawn unflattering comparisons between the everyman, cheery Zelenskiy and their own closed-off, bitter leader.
In Armenia, the comparisons are ubiquitous: on social media, at conversations over coffee or drinks, at family dinners. Zelenskiy and Pashinyan are both relatively young political outsiders with strong communication skills: the former a comedian, the latter a journalist. Zelenskiy relies, as Pashinyan did in 2020, on rhetoric rallying the entire population to fight and on informal social media videos outside rather than being hunkered down in a command center.
On February 28, the fourth day of the war, Zelenskiy issued a public address: “When I was running for president, I said that each of us is a president. Because we are all responsible for our state. For our beautiful Ukraine. And now it so happened that each of us is a warrior. A warrior in his/her own place. And I’m sure that each of us will win.”
To Armenians, it sounded familiar.
“Each of us must dedicate himself/herself to one goal, the name of that goal is victory,” Pashinyan said on October 3, 2020, the eighth day of that war. “And each of us must be ready to be at the frontline of that victory at any moment. And we will win. And we will definitely win.”
Zelenskiy’s “each of us is a president” line also recalled another well-known Pashinyan phrase from his election campaign: “I believe that in our country we have three million prime ministers.”
One Armenian Facebook user posted Zelenskiy’s speech with the comment: “Doesn’t this remind you of something? Makes me nervous.”
Armenians also have noticed a popular Ukrainian hashtag, #мипереможемо – “We Will Win.” While the Ukrainians’ fight is far from over, that confidence has brought back unhappy memories of the wartime Armenian slogan, ՀաղթելուԵնք – also “We Will Win.”
The rosy – and ultimately false – military pronouncements from 2020 were blamed on the then-spokesperson of the Armenian Defense Ministry, Artsrun Hovhannisyan, whose memory also has been resurrected in the current war. Early in this war one Armenian Facebook user posted an image of Ukraine’s flag with the caption: “’We will win,’ Artsrun Hovhannisyan.”
While the parallels between Pashinyan and Zelenskiy are strongest, Zelenskiy also is seen to share traits with Hovhannisyan as well as with Arayik Harutyunyan, the de facto leader of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Like Zelenskiy, Harutyunyan lost his suits during the war and adopted an unshaven, camo-wearing image. When Zelenskiy posted a photo of himself sitting around a table of food with soldiers, to Armenians it recalled a famous photo op by Harutyunyan when he visited soldiers on the front line and drank coffee with them.
“He has reached the scene of drinking coffee with the army … It is obvious that the end is near,” wrote government critic Narek Samsonyan on Facebook. “We should ask Arayik Harutyunyan what the next step would be, but most importantly, what scale of losses is Ukraine looking forward to after the coffee … By the way, this photo is being spread on the net with the same intensity by the innocent Ukrainian people, under the slogan ‘we are winning.’”
“Zelinsky might be suffering from a multi-personality disorder,” one Armenian Twitter user suggested. “The guy is Nikol, Arayik & Artsrun at the same time.”
The bad memories of 2020 are compounded by the sense that Ukraine is getting the international support that Armenians felt they deserved in their war, and the fact that Zelenskiy has consistently taken Azerbaijan’s side in the conflict.
From the other side of the line, Azerbaijanis are more unreservedly rooting for Zelenskiy. And some are seeing their own wartime leader, President Ilham Aliyev, in a comparatively unfavorable light.
Prominent journalist Khadija Ismayil noted Zelenskiy’s public appearances with soldiers and compared him to wartime Aliyev, who remained mostly isolated during the 2020 war. “Our nation’s expectation from the president was so low that it saw him giving interviews from his warm office as heroism,” Ismayil wrote on Facebook. “Zelenskiy gives interviews, holds negotiations, and does it all right from hot spots. … We should raise our heroism standards a bit.”
The post occasioned a spirited debate. “Our enemy didn’t make it to Baku,” another journalist and war reporter, Heydar Mirza, commented, noting that Kyiv now is under attack while the 2020 war took place many miles from Azerbaijan’s capital. “President [Aliyev] didn’t need to walk with a helmet on the frontline. People were as one fist anyway, our situation was different,” Mirza wrote.
Another journalist, Aytan Farhadova, recalled Aliyev’s rhetorical style of slinging slurs, calling Armenian soldiers “dogs” and Pashinyan a “drunk clown.” In his speech announcing Azerbaijan’s victory on November 10, 2020, Aliyev made reference to the style of his wartime addresses, saying that he knew that the “nation likes my words”.
Zelensky “doesn’t call names or use insulting slurs against Putin’s personality,” Farhadova wrote on Facebook. “The head of the state, under attack by the Russian army, knows he is on the right side and with confidence in that righteousness doesn’t lose his temper,” she added.
Source: https://eurasianet.org/armenians-see-unhappy-parallels-between-zelenskiy-and-their-own-wartime-leaders