Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is, among other things, one of the world’s most gifted storytellers. And I mean that in the best sense.

Coming from a Jewish family and speaking Russian as his first language, he knows as well as anybody that Ukrainian-ness is a fraught identity and a work in progress. But the same is true of other nationalities too — all others, as I’ll argue in this essay. National character, it turns out, ultimately rests neither on ethnicity nor on language, but on narrative. Zelenskiy understands that.