Swear words and insults: Why Zelensky used profanity in an interview and what viewers need to understand - Svetlana Chunikhina.

What's going on with Zelensky? Why did he use so much profanity during his interview with American podcaster Lex Fridman? Is the Ukrainian president in a fit of rage? Is he playing to the MAGA audience as he perceives it?

Vladimir Zelensky is generally known for his spontaneity in expression, even when it may be politically inappropriate or risky. However, until recently, he refrained from using profanity. Now that barrier has been crossed. What has changed?

Psychologists describe a phenomenon known as the fundamental attribution error. This is a type of cognitive distortion that occurs when evaluating complex situations. When we observe events from the outside, we tend to focus on analyzing the personality traits and behaviors of the immediate participants—where they are right, where they went wrong, how they should have acted differently, what provoked or exacerbated the situation, or, less frequently, which of their qualities helped them succeed. Conversely, if we are the participants, our attention is devoted to analyzing the situation—what is happening, where it came from, and how to resolve it? In other words, outside observers are blind to the situation, while participants are blind to themselves as part of the problem.

It's hard to say that we, having followed the informal conversation between Zelensky and Fridman for three hours in three languages, are outside observers in this war. However, we are certainly looking from the outside at the political decision-making process, in which the president is the key actor.

That’s why it’s crucial to understand whether he is in a sound state of mind. And it’s easy to suspect that he might not be.

The problem is that we lack reliable references against which we could gauge the psychological norm for a leader of a country that has been waging a bloody war for survival against a superior enemy for several years. No one had prolonged and regular conversations on camera, for example, with Churchill in 1940. Or with Kuwaiti Emir Jabir III in 1991.

The only fitting example that comes to mind is Mikhail Saakashvili's interview for the BBC on August 16, 2008, during the height of the Russian intervention in Georgia. It seems that the interview didn’t turn out well, as Saakashvili received a phone call with bad news during it, and journalists captured the Georgian president anxiously chewing on his tie. An unexpected leak of a childhood habit for dealing with stress. The impact on Saakashvili's reputation is hard to overstate. You can still find a segment from the independent TV channel "Dozhd" dated September 2, 2011, where two journalists cheerfully discuss a new product appearing on Georgian store shelves—“Edible Reformist Tie.” According to "Dozhd," the product's description states that eating the tie stimulates an appetite for freedom and democracy. This was meant to entertain viewers of the independent Russian channel.

Unlike the audience of Russian TV channels, we now know what it means to live in a state of war—not knowing when and how it will end, not knowing the price that will have to be paid, and not even knowing what the outcome will be. It’s easy to draw conclusions about the quality of decisions and the mental resilience of political leaders whose wars have already ended and whose results are widely known. Those who won were wise and capable. Those who lost were weak and shortsighted. We do not know which category Vladimir Zelensky will fall into. He doesn’t know either.

Thus, the situation in which he, like all of us, finds himself, and the context in which he makes his decisions, is extremely complex. And it seems to be getting more complicated as time goes on.

The January 7 press conference of elected U.S. President Donald Trump leaves no illusions that with his arrival in the White House, global chaos will only intensify. Frankly, Trump appears to be a pure political maniac with his promises to annex Canada and Greenland, potentially by military means.

Ukraine now finds itself in a situation reminiscent of a cheap American horror film from 1988, "Maniac Cop." A girl is fleeing from robbers and, hoping to finally find protection, throws herself at a passing police officer. But he starts to choke her because he is also a serial killer.

In a situation where Ukraine's main ally in this bloody war is about to embrace our enemy in the ecstasy of a new world reorganization, I honestly don't know how the Ukrainian president should look and express himself—probably like Zelensky, very tired and frazzled.

But I do know what we should really be asking him, and asking persistently: what decisions do you intend to make when the volume and reliability of external support for the Ukrainian army and economy significantly decline? Not why you are swearing. That part is quite clear. We are all presidents today.