At 17, Volodymyr Zelenskyy joined his hometown team in KVN, a comedy contest popular across the former Soviet Union. Two years later he was writing and choreographing for a bigger squad. Nobody was thinking about politics.
He was born on 25 January 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, in what was then the Ukrainian SSR, into a Russian-speaking Jewish family. His father, Oleksandr, is a computer scientist and professor. His mother, Rymma, is a retired engineer. Before primary school he spent four years in Erdenet, Mongolia, where his father worked on a copper mine. At 16 he won an education grant to study in Israel, but his father would not let him go. He later earned a law degree at the Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics and never practiced.
The comedy factory
The Transit team won KVN’s Major League in 1997, tied with Armenian rivals. That same year Zelenskyy created Kvartal 95 with other Transit members, naming it after the neighbourhood where he grew up. The group lived in Moscow for much of the time, with no fixed address and little money, and toured former Soviet countries constantly.
They left KVN in 2003 after rows with its Russian management over money and political censorship. Zelenskyy turned down a well-paid offer that would have meant dropping his team. He moved the group to Kyiv and, with brothers Borys and Serhiy Shefir, founded Kvartal 95 Studio that September.
It grew fast. Evening Kvartal, a mix of skits, celebrity guests and stand-up on the Inter channel from 2005, became Ukraine’s most popular comedy show of the 2000s. By 2019 over 85 percent of Ukrainians said they had seen it. Biographers have called the studio a “comedy factory” and the country’s “most successful production studio”. One format, Make the Comedian Laugh, had been sold to China, Italy and Finland by 2013.
He won the first season of Ukraine’s Dancing with the Stars in 2006. He co-produced the sitcom Svaty, played the lead in romantic comedies including Love in the Big City, and voiced Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian dub. Russia was a big market for him too. In 2011 he co-hosted Russia’s X Factor, and in 2013 he fronted a New Year’s Eve show on Russia-1.
That ended with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Kvartal 95 shut its Moscow office, and Zelenskyy stopped working in Russia by the end of the year. He estimated the break cut the company’s revenue per hour of television from $200,000 to $30,000. The troupe also began performing for Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbas war zone.
Servant of the People
From 2015 to 2019, “Servant of the People” ran with Zelenskyy as a fictional president. It was immensely popular. In March 2018 he and other Kvartal 95 associates launched a political party with the same name.
He ran as an anti-establishment, anti-corruption candidate and was already leading opinion polls months before declaring. In the 2019 runoff he beat incumbent Petro Poroshenko with 73.23 percent, the biggest landslide in the history of Ukrainian presidential elections. His party also won big in a snap parliamentary vote soon after his inauguration. Critics worried he might be a puppet of the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who had backed his campaign. BBC reporting says he proved more independent than doubters thought.
War
Russia invaded on 24 February 2022. Zelenskyy stayed in Kyiv, turned down international offers to evacuate him, declared martial law and ordered a general mobilisation. Wikipedia notes reported Russian assassination attempts against him. He posted a video from Kyiv with top advisers after Russia falsely claimed he had fled. “We are here,” he repeated. “We are in Kyiv. We are protecting Ukraine.”
BBC reported that his approval hit a high of 90 percent right after the invasion. He visited the front and newly liberated areas, pressed foreign leaders for weapons and tougher sanctions, and applied for Nato membership after Russia annexed parts of southeastern Ukraine. In December 2022 he travelled to Washington to meet Joe Biden and addressed Congress. “Against all odds… Ukraine is alive and kicking,” he told lawmakers. Time named him Person of the Year for 2022.
His term was due to end in May 2024, but martial law blocked the election, and he is expected to stay in office for the duration of the war. Zelenskyy has since called for an unconditional ceasefire and talks based on a 20-point peace plan.
Sources
- Volodymyr Zelenskyy – Wikipedia
- Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky: The comedian who became a wartime leader
- Volodymyr Zelenskyy
