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STEVEN DERIX is a journalist at the prestigious Dutch newspaper nrc Handelsblad. Together with Dolf de Groot he wrote Blood Brothers: The Downfall of Team Rabobank, which uncovered Michael Boogerd's doping fraud. From 2014 to 2020 he was nrc correspondent for Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
MARINA SHELKUNOVA studied journalism and was a researcher and coordinator for NRC Handelsblad and De Standaard.
AUTHOR NOTES
This book draws from many hundreds of sources - books, newspaper articles, original press releases from media agencies, and interviews, in Ukrainian, Russian, and other languages. Before Zelensky became President, he was already a superstar; countless hours of online video footage are available on his life and work. The authors of this book invested a great deal of time in viewing this sometimes unedited source material.
In several instances, the authors have borrowed from Steven Derix's work as NRC media correspondent in Moscow and Ukraine. Many gems were unearthed by searching through archived webpages, such as the Kvartal 95 fan sites from the 1990s.
Volodymyr Zelensky and his colleagues from Kryvyi Rih are Russian-speaking; the President did not become fluent in Ukrainian until later in life. Nevertheless, this book uses Ukrainian forms of the names for Ukrainian places and people wherever possible. In doing so, the authors have gone a step further than the general practice of using Ukrainian except where a different (e.g. Russian) spelling has become standard, such as for 'Kiev' and 'Charkov.' In a time when Ukrainian independence is under constant threat of largescale military violence, such alternative designations seemed inappropriate. For this reason, the authors decided on 'Kyiv' and 'Kharkiv,' as is becoming more customary throughout the English-speaking world.
The Ukrainian and Russian languages are written in the Cyrillic alphabet. While both a scientific and official transliteration exist, media in the English-speaking world use a plethora of different spellings. The authors of this book have tried to maintain a certain rigor in their spelling, but in some cases decided that common use is more important. Former heavy-weight Vitali Klitschko, who was based in Germany during his career, appears not as Klichko, but with his 'German' name. For the same reason, we spell the name of the incumbent president of Ukraine as 'Zelensky' and not 'Zelenskyi' or 'Zelenskyy'. The spelling 'Zelenskiy' reflects his name in Russian. Although Zelensky is Russian-speaking and learned Ukrainian only later in life, the authors felt it inappropriate to use this spelling.
When transliterating the Cyrillic script into legible English, the authors made grateful use of the excellent online engine transcriptor.nl, an initiative by Radboud University Nijmegen, the Dutch Language Union and the Institute for the Dutch Language.
This biography is not an academic publication, and therefore does not have footnotes or references. However, we have provided an extensive bibliography and list of sources.
Steven Derix and Marina Shelkunova |
