Volodymyr Zelenskyy once played a schoolteacher who ends up as president of Ukraine. In 2019 he won the real job. He took the second round of that election with 73.23 percent of the vote and beat the sitting president, Petro Poroshenko, in the biggest landslide Ukrainian presidential voting has produced.
From Kryvyi Rih to Kvartal 95
Born on 25 January 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, Zelenskyy earned a law degree at the city’s Institute of Economics and never worked as a lawyer. At 17 he joined his local team in KVN, a comedy competition popular across former Soviet countries. In 1997 he created Kvartal 95 with other members of the Transit team, naming it after the neighborhood where he grew up.
The group left KVN in 2003 after disputes with its Russian management over money and political censorship. Zelenskyy turned down a highly paid offer that would have meant dropping his team. Kvartal 95 moved to Kyiv and founded its studio that September.
Evening Kvartal, launched on the channel Inter in 2005, became the most popular comedy show in Ukraine in the 2000s. By 2019, more than 85 percent of Ukrainians said they had seen it. The studio also sold the format of Make the Comedian Laugh into China, Italy and Finland. Zelenskyy himself won the first season of Ukraine’s Dancing with the Stars in 2006, co-produced the sitcom Svaty and starred in romantic comedies.
After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Kvartal 95 closed its Moscow office and began cutting business ties with Russia. By Zelenskyy’s own estimate, the break cut the studio’s average revenue per hour of television from $200,000 to $30,000. The troupe also started performing for Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbas war zone.
Servant of the People
The series Servant of the People, in which he played a fictional president, ran from 2015 to 2019. A party with the same name was founded in March 2018 by Zelenskyy and other Kvartal 95 associates. He campaigned as an anti-establishment, anti-corruption candidate and had led opinion polls for months before he declared. His party then won the snap parliamentary election held shortly after his inauguration.
In his first two years in office he oversaw limited progress against corruption, ended legal immunity for members of the Verkhovna Rada, and handled the country’s response to COVID-19 and the recession that followed. He also tried to end the war in the Donbas through the Minsk agreements and sought talks with Vladimir Putin.
The invasion
During 2021 a large Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s borders, along with more attacks by Russian proxy forces, set off an international crisis. Zelenskyy said his military would not respond to provocations and asked NATO for military support.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022. Zelenskyy stayed in Kyiv as the capital came under attack and turned down international offers to evacuate him. He declared martial law and a general mobilization. There have reportedly been numerous Russian assassination attempts on him since.
Early in the war he demanded a ceasefire and a Russian withdrawal, said he would discuss Ukraine becoming neutral if given “real” security guarantees, and was willing to negotiate over Crimea and the Donbas. He presented Ukraine’s Peace Formula in late 2022 and the Victory Plan in late 2024, and later called for an unconditional ceasefire and talks based on a 20-point peace plan. Time named him Person of the Year for 2022.
His term was due to end in May 2024, but martial law bars a regular election, and he is expected to stay in office for the duration of the war. That makes him the second-longest-serving president after Kuchma.
