Serhiy Prytula asks to meet me at St Andrew’s church, an 18th-century landmark with green and gold onion domes at the top of Kyiv’s most picturesque street. I am puzzled as to why. It is only a short walk to his preferred restaurant in the Ukrainian capital. But the answer soon becomes clear. Prytula is a showman who adores the spotlight. As we stroll to our destination, he turns the head of every person we pass.
For Ukrainians, the 41-year-old was already a television star, comedy actor and host for the national stage of the Eurovision Song Contest. Now he has become one of the most prominent figures in their liberation struggle against Russian invaders. He is the country’s other comedian turned wartime leader: Volodymyr Zelenskyy is president and Ukraine’s top military commander; Prytula has become a sort of chief volunteer and fundraiser-extraordinaire for the army.
Prytula has chosen to have lunch with the FT at the clunkily named Sto Rokiv Tomu Vpered (“One Hundred Years Ago in the Future”) not because of the food, although it is good, but because of what the restaurant and its chef-proprietor Ievgen Klopotenko represent.
Klopotenko has reinvented Ukrainian cuisine, producing modern dishes from local ingredients. Ukrainians know him best for winning the “battle of the borscht”. He last year persuaded Unesco to classify the beetroot-based soup as a part of Ukraine’s “intangible cultural heritage”, albeit not exclusively Ukrainian. It was an assertion of Ukrainian national identity as distinct from Russia — and it annoyed the Russians no end.
“I feel some love for him,” says Prytula. “It was not enough for Russians to steal our history, to steal our territory. They decided they had to steal our borscht.”
Installed in a private room, we order our food — both choosing the signature wood-fired borscht, with a side order of salo, thinly sliced cured pork lard flavoured with herbs. It is a meal in itself. But I follow up with roasted pork ribs in a sauce made from fermented bread. Prytula wisely chooses a spinach salad with a “Ukrainian avocado” cream (actually made from dried peas). Weary from lack of sleep, he turns down wine. I have a glass of Ukrainian Pinot Gris from Odesa.
Since February last year, the Serhiy Prytula Foundation says it has collected nearly $120mn for military and humanitarian causes. That is only a tiny fraction of the amount western countries have given as aid to Ukraine. But for Ukrainians, it is a galvanising effort. With about 1,000 hryvnia — the amount of the average donation, equivalent to roughly $25 — ordinary Ukrainians can help buy much-needed kit and even sophisticated weaponry for the army. They can become warriors, as one of the foundation’s staff put it when I visited its headquarters in Kyiv. “People have the chance to join something big,” Prytula says. “It makes them happy.”
I ask Prytula about his fundraising techniques. The foundation holds crowdfunding campaigns for specific items, so donors know exactly what they are supporting. It raised $20mn in three days last June to buy three Turkish-built Bayraktar attack drones which, when used by the Ukrainian armed forces in the early stages of the war, became a symbol of the country’s unexpected resilience. The Turkish manufacturer was so impressed with Prytula’s fundraising prowess that it handed the three drones to the Ukrainian military for free.
Prytula knows how to sense the mood of his audience (he has 1.4mn followers on Facebook) and to use it to good effect. After Russia launched its first mass missile strike against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in October last year, the foundation launched what it called a “revenge” fundraising drive, bringing in $9mn in one day. It later revealed it had used the money to buy Ukrainian-built attack drones with ranges from 30km up to 800km.
The foundation does not have an arms dealing licence — which could deter foreign donors from contributing to its humanitarian efforts, Prytula says — and cannot buy weapons, so it co-ordinates purchases with the defence ministry.
His latest acquisition is of 101 armoured vehicles that used to belong to the British army. They may be old but they will offer protection to Ukrainian infantry in their expected counter-offensive later this spring.
These vehicles — Spartans and other models — are being bought from various UK dealers for between £30,000 and £60,000 a piece. It sounds like a lot for a vehicle, stripped of weapons, that first entered service in 1978. How does he know he’s not being ripped off?
The foundation shops around, says Prytula. “We’ve worked hard in this case because there are a few big companies in Great Britain that tried to sell the APCs [armoured personnel carriers] at really high prices. So we started to work with smaller companies. We bought five here, 10 there. And after that the big prices came down.”
But he realises the price demanded by the dealers may be steep. “War is our pain. I understand them. They are commercial. This is the moment they have been waiting for.”
After the Turkish manufacturer of Bayraktar drones gifted them to Ukraine, Prytula’s foundation had $20mn to spare. “[Defence minister Oleksiy] Reznikov said: ‘Try to buy a satellite.’ I thought he was joking. No one in our team had any experience of this . . . But we started to dig into the information and we understood that there was no law saying that a charitable foundation couldn’t buy a satellite. And we started the process, and in just two months we opened the eyes of our society.”
The foundation purchased a satellite, already in orbit, operated by Finnish company ICEYE, which provides high-resolution radar imagery, with just a three-hour delay, to Ukraine’s military intelligence.
We tuck into our borscht, which is meaty, smoky and slightly sweet from added plums. A dollop of sour cream, from a hollowed-out beetroot, lends some tartness. Only I venture for the lard.
As well as helping the Ukrainian armed forces, Prytula’s fundraising is also bolstering his political career. In Kyiv’s political circles, he is expected to emerge as a liberal, reformist rival to the president — a rise that underscores how Ukrainians other than Zelenskyy are making a name for themselves in the war and eclipsing Ukraine’s old political elites.
Prytula’s rise is emblematic of the strength of Ukrainian civil society, which has spawned countless acts of charity in the war effort and injected a degree of crowdsourced ingenuity into its defence that Russia has struggled to match. “The big difference between our society and Russian society is that they don’t understand the value of human life,” Prytula says. “They have zero sense of responsibility.”
The Maidan revolution — when Ukrainians rose up against pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who rejected closer ties with the EU — was a bottom-up movement. “We are a people who can push our government,” says Prytula. It is NGOs, backed by western governments, who have chivvied successive governments into creating a system of anti-corruption agencies and prosecutors.
NGOs are “the glue holding society together”, Prytula says. “We are the key to the good reforms Ukraine has done over the past 10 years . . . We didn’t just sit there with our arms folded.”
When the war eventually ends, Prytula wants a role for his foundation in reconstruction. The government can’t do everything, he says. And his staff have proved their aptitude. “If we have skills to buy a satellite we can find people with skills to build a kindergarten.”
Civil society’s role in Ukraine’s reconstruction could become a point of contention given the Zelenskyy government’s centralisation of power and resources in Kyiv. But Ukraine’s army of volunteers as well as its military one will be more demanding of politicians in the future and far less tolerant of the corruption and cronyism that have bedevilled the country. It’s a transformative moment for Ukraine’s politics, Prytula believes.
“People who are prepared to die under Russian bullets will not be afraid to discuss things with an MP or council member. So this war is a game-changer for society. One hundred per cent.”
Prytula ran for parliament in 2019 for the small, liberal Holos party, but failed to win a seat. In 2020 he came third in the election for Kyiv’s mayor. He had assembled a team of political activists and advisers and was preparing to launch a new liberal party last year when Russian troops poured across the borders. His team pivoted to helping the armed forces instead.
So what about his plans now? Ukraine is due to hold parliamentary elections by October and presidential elections by the spring of 2024. However, the war and martial law make the timing uncertain. Whatever the timing, Prytula is seen as a potential rival to Zelenskyy. There is also speculation that Valeriy Zaluzhniy, the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, has political ambitions, though there is little evidence to support it.
Prytula is adamant that it is not the right time for “political games”. “Thinking about the political future destroys the moment we have now,” he says.
But once the war is over? He gives a politician’s answer: “I understand 100 per cent I want to be good for society when the hostilities end.”
I ask him what many people outside Ukraine want to know of its leadership: if he were president, would he be prepared to negotiate with Putin to end the war, to find some sort of compromise?
“It is hard to negotiate with people who have raped your mother,” he shoots back.
Our main courses arrive. My tender wood-roasted ribs are smothered in a rich and slightly sour sauce and come with a side order of roasted parsnips and mushrooms. It is a challenge for me to finish — too much pork. Prytula’s spinach and “green cream” salad was definitely the healthier option.
I press him on his political philosophy. I assume he is liberal, reformist and pro-EU as well as fiercely patriotic. He adds that he favours political decentralisation for a country as vast as Ukraine, but other than that is vague.
“Our political parties have no political philosophy,” he explains. “We have no ideology,” he says, apart from the communists and ultranationalists, who are marginal forces. “Everything else looks like a project that lasts for only one electoral term.”
In Ukraine, people vote for dream-makers, one of Prytula’s consultants had told me. And it is television personalities who have the public recognition to purvey the dream.
A sure sign of Prytula’s rising political capital is the unsubstantiated claims on social media about mismanagement and corruption at the foundation. There has also been some embarrassing publicity about his brother-in-law, a former MP and businessman. He was one of scores of wealthy Ukrainians identified as holidaying on France’s Côte d’Azur last summer, despite the restrictions on military-age males leaving the country. The men were pilloried by Ukrainian media as members of the “Monaco Battalion”.
One MP from Zelenskyy’s party described Prytula to me as an “oligarch-chik” — a mini-oligarch, supposedly using his wealth and connections to wield political power.
Prytula has no time for such mud-slinging. “We have our enemy: the Russian army and Putin. My energy is 100 per cent with our defenders. But I have a good memory.”
I ask him what he thinks of Zelenskyy. Perhaps sensing a trap, he replies: “There is only one political player: the Ukrainian armed forces.”
It’s a curious formulation — surely the one political player is the president. But Prytula insists he has no reasons to reproach Zelenskyy’s wartime performance. “He is commander-in-chief. That is why everyone needs to support our government and our president. I try my best.”
However, their relationship appears strained. Prytula says he has not seen Zelenskyy in person for two years. The president seldom name-checks Prytula’s foundation, despite all its work supporting the army.
The two men first met 20 years ago when Prytula organised some shows for Zelenskyy’s comedy troupe Kvartal 95 in western Ukraine — “a time when they were young and crazy”.
Both appeared in comedy competitions and became famous as television entertainers and comic actors and as the voiceover artists for western films. Prytula performs in Ukrainian, which in his early career limited his commercial appeal; Zelenskyy’s mainly Russian-language shows tapped into a much larger market, making him hugely popular and rich.
Prytula began his volunteer work in support of the Ukrainian army in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and its forces orchestrated and fought in a pro-Moscow rebellion in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Zelenskyy was at the time absorbed with his comedy career.
I am surprised by Prytula’s seriousness — even in times as difficult as these. He doesn’t crack a joke all lunch. When the FT interviewed Zelenskyy in November — the day after a Russian missile attack cut off power and water to much of Kyiv — he had us in stitches about the state of his toilet.
Prytula says his comedy career is over. “I don’t feel the power inside me,” he says.
Our waitress brings the bill: zero. I protest. Klopotenko and his staff have made thousands of charity meals during the war. Lunch with the FT will not be one of them.
Prytula is now tired. Perhaps it is because he has been sitting in a private room with an audience of one. Perhaps it is the borscht kicking in. He wants to go home to sleep. But he has work to do. To survive, every Ukrainian citizen has “to fight and to help to fight”.
Ben Hall is the FT’s Europe editor
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