On New Year’s Eve 2018, a comedian went on national television in Ukraine and said he was running for president. Plenty of viewers assumed it was a bit.
It was not. Volodymyr Zelenskyy won the vote in April 2019 with more than 73 percent.
A kid from Kryvyi Rih
Zelenskyy was born in Kryvyi Rih, then part of the Soviet Union, into a Russian-speaking Jewish family whose relatives had survived the Holocaust. His father taught computer science and his mother was an engineer. The family had little money, in an industrial town that was falling apart after the Soviet collapse. He finished at the top of his class.
He earned a law degree, but comedy pulled harder. He joined Kvartal 95, a group that grew out of student improv competitions across the former Soviet Union. By the early 2000s the team had its own TV show. He married Olena, a university sweetheart who also wrote for the production, in 2003. In 2006 he won Ukraine’s version of “Dancing with the Stars,” and in 2014 he voiced Paddington Bear for Ukrainian audiences.
A colleague quoted in the documentary credits his stage discipline for his appeal. “Everything we see about Zelenskyy that is so engaging, inspiring, and authenticity, it all comes from years of performance discipline,” one speaker says.
The president on screen
In 2014 mass protests drove out President Viktor Yanukovych after he refused to sign a European trade deal. More than 100 people died. Russia annexed Crimea, and Moscow-backed separatists took over parts of the eastern Donbas region.
The next year Zelenskyy started a political satire, “Servant of the People,” in which a history teacher suddenly becomes president. It was hugely popular in Ukraine and in Russia. His fictional leader was honest in a country weary of corruption and oligarchs.
Running for real
His slogan was “No promises, no excuses.” He skipped the stump speeches and ran almost wholly on short YouTube and Instagram clips. By 2018 he had a million Instagram followers.
Voters were nervous. “Many people were actually scared of entrusting Ukraine to somebody who has absolutely no experience of statecraft,” said one analyst in the film. Another said it was “almost like he has hacked a political system of Ukraine.”
He had won on a promise to fight corruption and curb the oligarchs, and the record is mixed. One commentator says there was progress, then rollbacks after he replaced the prime minister and the reform prosecutor general about six months in. The anti-oligarch law he signed, another says, is vague about what counts as an oligarch. His first priority was ending the fighting in the east. Early on, he was also pulled into Donald Trump’s first impeachment dispute.
February 24, 2022
That day Zelenskyy, then 44, made a televised appeal in Russian to 144 million Russians, urging them to stand up against their own government and not to believe state television. It did not stop the invasion.
The PBS documentary, aired on March 18, 2022, says the weeks that followed turned a man some had called a political lightweight into a figure of national defiance. “If you ask me whether he ever expected to be a war leader, I would say no,” says one of those interviewed.
