Volodymyr Zelensky (born January 25, 1978, Kryvyy Rih, Ukraine, U.S.S.R. [now in Ukraine]) is a Ukrainian actor and comedian who was elected president of Ukraine in 2019. Although he was a political novice, Zelensky’s anti-corruption platform won him widespread support, and his significant online following translated into a solid electoral base. He won a landslide victory over incumbent Petro Poroshenko in the second round of the 2019 presidential election. President Zelensky’s leadership during the Russian invasion of Ukraine won him global acclaim.
Zelensky was born to Jewish parents in the industrial metropolis of Kryvyy Rih in southern Ukraine. When he was a small child, his family relocated to Erdenet, Mongolia, for four years before returning to Kryvyy Rih, where Zelensky entered school. Like many people from Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, he grew up as a native Russian speaker, but he also acquired fluency in both Ukrainian and English. In 1995 he entered Kryvyy Rih Economic Institute, the local campus of Kyiv National Economic University, and in 2000 he graduated with a law degree.
Although Zelensky was licensed to practice law, his career was already headed in a different direction. While still a student, he had become active in theatre, and this would become his primary focus. In 1997 his performance group, Kvartal 95 (“Quarter 95,” the neighbourhood in central Kryvyy Rih where Zelensky spent his childhood), appeared in the televised finals of KVN (Klub vesyólykh i nakhódchivykh; “Club of the Funny and Inventive People”), a popular improvisational comedy competition that was broadcast throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States. Zelensky and Kvartal 95 became regulars on KVN, and they appeared on the program until 2003. That year Zelensky cofounded Studio Kvartal 95, a production company that would become one of Ukraine’s most successful and prolific entertainment studios. Zelensky would serve as artistic director of Studio Kvartal 95 from the company’s creation until 2011, when he was named general producer of the Ukrainian television channel Inter TV.
Zelensky left Inter TV in 2012, and in October of that year he and Kvartal 95 concluded a joint production agreement with the Ukrainian network 1+1. That network was owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, one of the wealthiest people in Ukraine, and the relationship between Zelensky and Kolomoisky would become the subject of scrutiny when Zelensky declared his intention to enter politics. In addition to working in television during this period, Zelensky appeared in a number of feature films, including the historical farce Rzhevskiy Versus Napoleon (2012) and the romantic comedies 8 First Dates (2012) and 8 New Dates (2015).
Servant of the People and path to the presidency
In 2013 Zelensky returned to Kvartal 95 as artistic director, but his entertainment career would soon intersect with the seismic events rocking Ukraine’s political landscape. In February 2014 the government of Ukrainian Pres. Viktor Yanukovych was toppled after months of popular protests, and that May billionaire Petro Poroshenko was elected president of Ukraine. With a Russian-backed insurgency raging in eastern Ukraine and endemic corruption undermining public confidence in government, Poroshenko struggled to enact even modest reforms. It was against this backdrop that Servant of the People premiered on 1+1 in October 2015. Zelensky was cast as Vasiliy Goloborodko, an everyman history teacher who becomes a viral Internet phenomenon after a student films him delivering an impassioned and profanity-laden address against official corruption. The show was a massive hit, and Goloborodko’s unlikely path to the presidency of Ukraine would provide something of a road map for Zelensky. In anticipation of that move, in 2018 Kvartal 95 officially registered Servant of the People as a political party in Ukraine.
On April 21 Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine with an impressive 73 percent of the vote. Within days the president-elect faced his first foreign policy challenge, when Putin announced his decision to offer Russian passports to the Ukrainian citizens in separatist-controlled areas of war-torn eastern Ukraine. The Russian-backed hybrid war there was entering its fifth year, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians had been displaced by the conflict. Zelensky ridiculed the offer, responding with a Facebook post that extended Ukrainian citizenship to Russians and others “who suffer from authoritarian or corrupt regimes.”
Early challenges and snap election
On May 20, 2019, Zelensky was sworn in as president. He used his inaugural address, which he delivered in a mix of Russian and Ukrainian, to call for national unity and to announce the dissolution of the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council). This move was politically necessary: his presidential victory did not confer a legislative mandate, as Servant of the People did not occupy any parliamentary seats. Snap elections were held on July 21, and Zelensky himself characterized the contest as “maybe more important than the presidential election.” Servant of the People won an absolute majority, capturing 254 of 450 seats (26 seats, representing Crimea—a Ukrainian autonomous republic that was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014—and the war zone in the east, were not contested). The result marked the first time in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history that a single party could command absolute control over the legislative agenda.
While Zelensky worked to build his new administration, ties to his former business partner again became the subject of scrutiny. Kolomoisky’s media empire had provided a valuable platform for Zelensky during the presidential campaign, but Zelensky vowed that no special favours would be granted by his office. Kolomoisky himself had returned to Ukraine just days before Zelensky’s inauguration; the billionaire stated that he would not act as a “grey cardinal,” directing policy from behind the scenes.
Zelensky and U.S. Pres. Donald Trump
In September 2019 Zelensky found his administration thrust into the centre of a political scandal in the United States when a whistleblower in the American intelligence community lodged a formal complaint about the actions of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump. The matter concerned Trump’s alleged withholding of a significant military aid package to Ukraine unless Ukraine initiated an investigation of alleged wrongdoing by former U.S. vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Hunter Biden had served on the board of Ukrainian energy conglomerate Burisma Holdings, and Trump claimed, without evidence, that the elder
