CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS....:

Zelenskiy is hardly the first to grasp the tight connection between politics and storytelling. In some ways, he is merely succeeding in doing what Donald Trump longed to do: conducting a presidency like a top-rated TV series, with great visuals, shocking plot twists and plenty of action. Except Trump not only lacked Zelenskiy's talent, he had to rely on manufactured drama and imagined enemies. The Ukrainian president is in a bloody war against an enemy who is all too real.

Of course, the primacy of "comms" long predates Trump and Zelenskiy. In David Hare's new play Straight Line Crazy, the urban planner Robert Moses is hailed in the 1920s as "a new kind of man ... the man who believes that the way you're written about is as important as what you do". But Zelenskiy has taken it to a new level, not least because he has adapted everything he learned from conventional TV to the idiom of social media.

He understands that in the new era, the war leader does not stand besuited at a podium, declaiming a speech packed with rhetorical flourish. Instead, Zelenskiy's message is that he is a servant of the people because he is one of the people, no different from any of them. In his trademark short videos, he wears military olive-green, but it's not a formal uniform, still less the ceremonial getup of a head of state. He wears exactly what a civilian volunteer would wear.

The locations are chosen just as deliberately. If he's not at a simple desk in a plain office, he's just outside the presidential palace, with landmarks Ukrainians would recognise visibly in shot. As David Patrikarakos, whose book, War in 140 Characters, was among the first to identify the changing face of battle in the age of Twitter, tells me: "In those videos, Zelenskiy is literally the man in the street." Together with a knack for demotic, unflowery soundbites - "I need ammunition, not a ride" - he has become a master of what Patrikarakos calls "digital statesmanship". He's Churchill with an iPhone.

By comparison Moscow, until recently feared as the master of manipulation by social media, has looked lumbering, slow and old: "There's Zelenskiy," says Patrikarakos, "and then there's this Botoxed Bond villain who won't sit at a table with other people. All that's missing is a trapdoor and a pool of sharks." (As if to show he has not entirely lost his touch for fuelling culture wars in the west, today Vladimir Putin tried to cast himself as defender of JK Rowling against the western malaise of "cancel culture" - which would be convincing but for the fact that Rowling is no ally of his, but is instead spending big money protecting vulnerable children in Ukraine.)

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