Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (born 25 January 1978) is a Ukrainian politician and former entertainer who has served as the sixth president of Ukraine since 2019. He took office five years after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War with Russia's annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas, and has continued to serve during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has been ongoing since February 2022.

Born in Kryvyi Rih into a Russian-speaking Jewish family, Zelenskyy obtained a law degree at the city's Institute of Economics; he never practiced, however, instead pursuing a career in comedy and entertainment. Zelenskyy co-created the production company Kvartal 95, which produced films, cartoons, and TV shows including the TV series Servant of the People, in which he played a fictional Ukrainian president. The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. A political party with the same name as the TV show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.

Zelenskyy announced his candidacy in the 2019 presidential election on the evening of 31 December 2018, alongside the New Year's Eve address of then-president Petro Poroshenko on the TV channel 1+1. A political outsider, Zelenskyy positioned himself as an anti-establishment and anti-corruption figure, and had already become one of the frontrunners in opinion polls for the election months before he formally declared his candidacy. He won the election with 73.23 percent of the vote in the second round, defeating Poroshenko in the biggest landslide in the history of Ukrainian presidential elections.

As president, Zelenskyy has been a proponent of e-government and of unity between the Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking parts of the country's population. He makes extensive use of social media, particularly Instagram. His party won a landslide victory in the snap legislative election held shortly after his inauguration as president. During the first two years of his administration, Zelenskyy oversaw the lifting of legal immunity for members of parliament (the Verkhovna Rada), the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic recession, and some limited progress in tackling corruption in Ukraine. A poll in May 2021 by the Rating Group gave Zelenskyy the highest trust rating out of all Ukrainian presidents, and ranked him as the second-best president after Leonid Kuchma.

During his presidential campaign, Zelenskyy promised to end Ukraine's protracted conflict with Russia, and he has attempted to engage in dialogue with Russian president Vladimir Putin. His administration faced an escalation of tensions with Russia in 2021, culminating in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Zelenskyy's strategy during the Russian military buildup was to calm the Ukrainian populace and assure the international community that Ukraine was not seeking to retaliate. He initially distanced himself from warnings of an imminent war, while also calling for security guarantees and military support from NATO to "withstand" the threat. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Zelenskyy remained in Kyiv, declining international offers to evacuate him from the capital under attack; he declared martial law across Ukraine and a general mobilization of the armed forces. Zelenskyy was named the Time Person of the Year for 2022. He has frequently visited frontline and newly liberated areas.

Zelenskyy's term was originally scheduled to end in May 2024, but the ongoing Russian invasion and the resulting ongoing martial law prevented the regularly scheduled presidential election from being conducted. He is expected to remain president for the duration of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Due to this extension of his term, Zelenskyy is the second-longest serving president in Ukrainian history, after only Kuchma.

Early life

Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy was born into a Jewish family on 25 January 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast of Ukraine. Ukraine was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union at the time. Zelenskyy's mother, Rymma Zelenska, is a retired engineer; his father, Oleksandr Zelenskyy – a professor and computer scientist – is the head of the Department of Cybernetics and Computing Hardware at the Kryvyi Rih State University of Economics and Technology. Oleksandr's father, Semyon Zelenskyy, served as an infantryman, reaching the rank of colonel in the Red Army (in the 57th Guards Motor Rifle Division) during World War II. Semyon's father and three brothers were killed during the Holocaust. In March 2022, Zelenskyy said that both of Semyon's parents had been killed after German troops burned their home to the ground during a massacre. Oleksandr's mother survived World War II after leaving Kryvyi Rih in an evacuation of Jews to Almaty, Kazakhstan, and returned to Ukraine after the war.

Before starting elementary school, Zelenskyy lived for four years in Erdenet, Mongolia, where Oleksandr worked as a mining engineer from the mid-1970s to help build a copper mine, applying his abilities in computer science to mining. Zelenskyy grew up speaking Russian. At the age of 16, Zelenskyy took the Test of English as a Foreign Language and received an education grant to study in Israel, but Oleksandr did not allow him to go. Zelenskyy later earned a law degree from the Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics, then a department of Kyiv National Economic University and now part of Kryvyi Rih National University, but never worked in the legal field.

Entertainment career

KVN (1995–2003)

At age 17, Zelenskyy joined his local team competing in KVN, a comedy competition popular across former Soviet countries. He was soon invited to join another Ukrainian team known as "Zaporizhzhia-Kryvyi Rih-Transit", where he became dance director and writer in 1995. The Transit team performed in KVN's Major League and eventually won in 1997 in a tie with Armenian opponents.

That same year, Zelenskyy created and headed a new team known as Kvartal 95 together with other Transit members, such as Oleksandr Pikalov and Olena Kravets; this team was named after the Kvartal 95 neighbourhood in Kryvyi Rih where he had grown up. From 1999 to 2003, Kvartal 95 performed in the highest open Ukrainian league of KVN as well as in the KVN Major League; they were the only Ukrainian team in the Moscow-based highest league of KVN. The team members lived in Moscow much of the time, without a fixed address and struggling financially; they constantly toured former Soviet countries.

Zelenskyy and Kvartal 95 left KVN in 2003, after prolonged tension with KVN's Russian management over money, political censorship, and other disputes. Finally, Zelenskyy declined a highly paid job offer from KVN management that would have required him to abandon Kvartal 95, choosing instead to stay with his team and return to Ukraine. An incident where a Russian KVN producer used an antisemitic insult against Zelenskyy on stage also contributed to the split.

Kvartal 95 Studio

After leaving KVN, the Kvartal 95 team moved to Kyiv, where Zelenskyy and the brothers Borys and Serhiy Shefir - who had been members of the Transit KVN team - founded the Kvartal 95 Studio company in September 2003. That same year, Kvartal 95 started producing TV shows for the Ukrainian TV channel 1+1. In 2005, Kvartal 95 moved to the Ukrainian TV channel Inter, where they launched the Evening Kvartal comedy show the same year. This show's format was "theatre-style" with a mixture of skits, appearances by celebrities, and stand-up comedy; it included sketches on everyday life as well as political satire. Evening Kvartal was the most popular comedy television show in Ukraine in the 2000s, and over 85% of Ukrainians reported they had seen it by the time Zelenskyy became president in 2019. Kvartal 95 returned to 1+1 in 2012.

Kvartal 95 has been described by biographers as an "empire", a "comedy factory", and the "most successful production studio" in Ukraine. Apart from Evening Kvartal, the company also launched other show formats including Zelenskyy, such as Chisto News, League of Laughter, and Make the Comedian Laugh. By 2013, the third - a format in which contestants attempted to make comedians laugh - had been sold into China, Italy, and Finland, and Zelenskyy said in 2018 that he received royalties from 21 countries for the show.

As Zelenskyy's and Kvartal 95's popularity grew, he and they were frequently invited to host or perform at corporate and private events. Zelenskyy said in 2018 that he had performed in front of numerous presidents of post-Soviet countries, including his own predecessors in office as well as then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.

In 2006, Zelenskyy won the first season of Ukraine's Dancing with the Stars.