# The Bunker Selfie *A Biography of Zelensky* — Legendary Biographies No. 029 - **Subject:** Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky - **Written by:** Ostap Bilyk - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / World Politics - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 233 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 233 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 233 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-024-9) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-005-8) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/029-the-bunker-selfie.html ## About this book On a winter morning in Kyiv, a man who had spent his career making people laugh stood in front of a camera and told his country he was staying. The footage was grainy, the streets behind him empty. Within hours it would travel further than any sketch he had ever written. Volodymyr Zelensky's path to that moment began in Kryvyi Rih, a Soviet steel city where a Jewish boy learned the timing of a punchline and the cost of being conspicuous. It moved through the late-night clamor of KVN, the Moscow comedy circuit that taught a generation of post-Soviet performers how to read a room and, eventually, a republic. It passed through a television studio where he played a high-school history teacher accidentally elected president — a role the country then asked him to play in life, by a margin of seventy-three percent. Ostap Bilyk traces the arc from improv stage to wartime bunker with the patience of a biographer and the ear of a critic. Drawing on book-length studies and primary reporting in seven languages, she examines a man who has been variously cast as saint, salesman, and symbol, and asks what is left when the lights are turned off and the decisions are real. What emerges is a portrait of a performer learning, in public and under fire, the difference between a part and a self. ## Contents 1. The Iron City 2. The Language of Laughter 3. Servant of the People 4. The Campaign 5. The Presidency Begins 6. The Oligarch's Shadow 7. The Weight of the Office 8. February 24 9. The Smartphone War 10. The Grind 11. The World Tour 12. The Counteroffensive 13. The Kursk Gambit 14. The Election That Did Not Happen 15. Trump Returns 16. The Energoatom Scandal 17. The Drone Diplomat 18. The Price of Endurance 19. The Man and the Myth ## Questions **Who is The Bunker Selfie about?** Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Bunker Selfie — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,672 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 71,000 words, 19 chapters, 233 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Ostap Bilyk is a Kyiv-born journalist whose reporting on the Donbas war for The Kyiv Independent has been translated into eight languages. Over the last decade, he has transitioned from investigative newsprint to long-form historical writing, focusing on the complex lives of Eastern European political figures. His debut biography, The Bunker Selfie, explores the modern realities of leadership under siege. Bilyk utilizes his extensive archives of personal interviews and field notes to craft intimate, thoroughly researched portraits of contemporary regional leaders. He currently lives in Kyiv, where he continues his journalism work and spends his free time hiking in the Carpathian Mountains.