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An Open Letter to President Zelenskyy: Leave X

Dear President Zelenskyy,

First of all, I want to express my deepest sympathy for the suffering of the Ukrainian people under Russia’s aggression, and my profound respect for your courage and leadership.

Your resistance, together with the extraordinary determination of the Ukrainian people, has helped prevent a Russian victory that would have made Europe far more unstable and dangerous. Your ability to mobilize international support has been remarkable. Ukraine deserves all the support it needs to resist Putin’s aggression and secure a just and lasting peace.

I am writing, however, about something that might seem relatively minor in the context of a devastating war: your continued use of X as a major channel for political communication.

You have millions of followers on X. Reaching an international audience matters, especially when Ukraine depends on public support across the world.

But this is precisely the problem. The more political leaders rely on X to communicate, the more indispensable the platform becomes to journalists, citizens, and other political actors. And the more indispensable it becomes, the greater the power of its owner, Elon Musk, over public debate. Even European leaders who have openly accused Musk of interfering in elections and fomenting hatred, such as Emmanuel Macron and Pedro Sánchez, still rely on X.

In January 2025, I published an open letter to European politicians arguing that democratic institutions and leaders should stop depending on platforms whose algorithms amplify outrage, polarization, and disinformation, and later challenged the common argument that politicians must remain on these platforms to provide an opposing voice.

The most effective way to reduce the political power of X is to stop treating it as indispensable.

If you decided to publish your statements through independent channels, journalists around the world would follow. Your words matter because you are the president of a country fighting for its survival, not because they appear on a particular social network.

The same principle applies to any platform controlled by a single individual, including Telegram, which plays such a central role in communication within Ukraine. My concern is not one company, but the dependence of democratic voices on infrastructure controlled by unaccountable private owners.

On top of that, there is another dimension that makes your situation particularly difficult.

Ukraine relies on Starlink, operated by SpaceX, another company controlled by Musk. Openly challenging the owner of X might have diplomatic or strategic consequences, particularly when communications technology plays such a critical role in Ukraine’s defense. I would never presume to know better than you what decisions are necessary to protect Ukrainian lives.

But this raises an even more troubling question: what does it say about our technological dependence if the president of a European country fighting for its independence must consider the political consequences of leaving a social media platform?

The struggle for sovereignty is also a struggle over the infrastructure through which information flows. No democratic society should have to depend on the decisions of a single billionaire to communicate with its citizens or the rest of the world.

That is why this letter does not ask you to leave X overnight, but to consider a few concrete steps toward greater communication independence:

  • Publish first on channels you control. Your office already maintains an official website. Make it the primary source of your statements.
  • Join the open social web. Decentralized networks are not owned by any single company or billionaire, and Europe already has alternatives such as Mastodon and Eurosky.
  • Use X only to point elsewhere. Instead of publishing full statements natively on X, share links to the original sources, so that X is no longer where your words live.
  • Leave X when the time is right. Once your other channels are established, publish a final post explaining your reasons and pointing to where people can continue to follow you.

Your leadership has already demonstrated that circumstances that seem impossible to change can, in fact, be challenged. Perhaps you could also help show other European leaders that political communication can exist beyond the platforms of Big Tech.

I do not know whether this letter will ever reach you. But among Europe’s political leaders, you are one of those whose courage gives me hope that such an appeal might be taken seriously.

Slava Ukraini!

With solidarity and respect,

Everton Zanella Alvarenga
LeaveX

Germany, 15 October 2026