Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a Ukrainian politician, former actor, and comedian, who is the sixth and current president of Ukraine.
Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine. Prior to his acting career, he obtained a degree in law from the Kyiv National Economic University.
He then pursued comedy and created the production company Kvartal 95, which produced films, cartoons, and TV shows including the TV series Servant of the People, in which Zelenskyy played the role of the Ukrainian president.
The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. A political party bearing the same name as the television show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.
Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy was born to Jewish parents on 25 January 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, then in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. His father, Oleksandr Zelenskyy, is a professor and the head of the Department of Cybernetics and Computing Hardware at the Kryvyi Rih State University of Economics and Technology; his mother, Rymma Zelenska, used to work as an engineer.
His grandfather, Semyon (Simon) Ivanovych Zelenskyy, served as Infantry reaching the rank of Colonel the Red Army (in the 57th Guards Motor Rifle Division) during World War II; Semyon’s father and three brothers were murdered in the Holocaust.
Prior to starting elementary school, Zelenskyy lived for four years in the Mongolian city of Erdenet, where his father worked. Zelenskyy grew up speaking Russian.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s father was a computer scientist, and his mother was an engineer.
At the age of 16, he passed the Test of English as a Foreign Language and received an education grant to study in Israel, but his father did not allow him to go.
He 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 did not go on to work in the legal field.
Full Name: Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy
Place of Birth: Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union
Date of Birth: 25 January 1978
Age: 44
Nationality: Ukraine
Profession: Politician,Actor
Political Party: Independent
Education: Kyiv National Economic University (LLB)
Personal Life:
In September 2003, Zelenskyy married Olena Kiyashko, with whom he had attended school.
The couple’s first daughter, Oleksandra, was born in July 2004. Their son, Kyrylo, was born in January 2013.
In Zelenskyy’s 2014 movie 8 New Dates, their daughter played Sasha, the daughter of the protagonist.
In 2016, she participated in the show The Comedy Comet Company Comedy’s Kids and won 50,000 hryvnias.
Zelenskyy’s first language is Russian, and he is also fluent in Ukrainian and English.
His assets were worth about 37 million hryvnias (about $1.5 million USD) in 2018.
Entertainment Career:
At age 17, he joined the local KVN[28] (a comedy competition) team and was soon invited to join the united Ukrainian team “Zaporizhia-Kryvyi Rih-Transit” which performed in the KVN’s Major League and eventually won in 1997.
That same year, he created and headed the Kvartal 95 team which later transformed into the comedy outfit Kvartal 95. From 1998 to 2003, Kvartal 95 performed in the Major League and the highest open Ukrainian league of KVN, the team members spent a lot of the time in Moscow and constantly toured around post-Soviet countries.
In 2003, Kvartal 95 started producing TV shows for the Ukrainian TV channel 1+1, and in 2005, the team moved to fellow Ukrainian TV channel Inter.
In 2008, he starred in the feature film Love in the Big City, and its sequel, Love in the Big City 2.
Zelenskyy continued his movie career with the film Office Romance. Our Time in 2011 and with Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon in 2012. Love in the Big City 3 was released in January 2014.
Zelenskyy also played the leading role in the 2012 film 8 First Dates and in sequels which were produced in 2015 and 2016. He recorded the voice of Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian dubbing of Paddington (2014) and Paddington 2 (2017).
In 2015, Zelenskyy became the star of the television series Servant of the People (TV series), where he played the role of the president of Ukraine. In the series, Zelenskyy’s character was a high-school history teacher in his 30s who won the presidential election after a viral video showed him ranting against government corruption in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy worked mostly in Russian language productions. His first role in the Ukrainian language was the romantic comedy I, You, He, She which appeared on the screens of Ukraine in December 2018.
The first version of the script was written in Ukrainian but was translated into Russian for the Lithuanian actress Agnė Grudytė. Then the movie was dubbed into Ukrainian.
Presidency:
In March 2018, members of Zelenskyy’s production company Kvartal 95 registered a new political party called Servant of the People – the same name as the television program that Zelenskyy had starred in over the previous three years. Although Zelenskyy denied any immediate plans to enter politics and said he had only registered the party name to prevent it from being appropriated by others,there was widespread speculation that he was planning to run.
As early as October 2018, three months before his campaign announcement and six months before the presidential election, he was already a frontrunner in opinion polls.
On 31 December, less than four months from the election, he announced his candidacy for president of Ukraine on the New Year’s Eve evening show on the TV channel 1+1.after months of ambiguous statements. His announcement up-staged the New Year’s Eve address of President Petro Poroshenko on the same channel, which Zelenskyy said was unintentional and attributed to a technical glitch.
Zelenskyy’s presidential campaign against the incumbent Petro Poroshenko was almost entirely virtual. He did not release a detailed policy platform and his engagement with mainstream media was minimal; he instead reached out to the electorate via social media channels and YouTube clips. In place of traditional campaign rallies, he conducted stand-up comedy routines across Ukraine with his production company Kvartal 95.
He styled himself as an anti-establishment, anti-corruption figure, although he was not generally described as a populist. He said he wished to restore trust in politicians, “to bring professional, decent people to power” and to “change the mood and timbre of the political establishment”.
Zelenskyy was elected President of Ukraine on 21 April 2019, beating the incumbent, Petro Poroshenko with nearly 73 per cent of the vote to Poroshenko’s 25 per cent.
Polish President Andrzej Duda was one of the first European leaders to congratulate Zelenskyy.
French President Emmanuel Macron received Zelenskyy at the Élysée Palace in Paris on 12 April 2019.
On 22 April, U.S. President Donald Trump congratulated Zelenskyy on his victory over the telephone.
Zelenskyy was inaugurated on 20 May 2019. Various foreign officials attended the ceremony in Ukraine’s parliament (Verkhovna Rada), including Salome Zourabichvili (Georgia), Kersti Kaljulaid (Estonia), Raimonds Vējonis (Latvia), Dalia Grybauskaitė (Lithuania), János Áder (Hungary), Maroš Šefčovič (European Union), and Rick Perry (United States).
Zelenskyy is the first Jewish President of Ukraine. With Volodymyr Groysman as Prime Minister, Ukraine became the second country to have both a Jewish President and Prime Minister.
Films:
Love in the Big City
Office Romance. Our Time
Love in the Big City 2
Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon
8 First Dates
Love in Vegas
Paddington (Ukrainian dub)
8 New Dates
Awards: Ronald Reagan Freedom Award
