Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (born 25 January 1978) is a Ukrainian politician and former entertainer who has served as the sixth president of Ukraine since 2019. He took office five years after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war with Russia's annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas, and has continued to serve during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has been ongoing since February 2022.
Born in Kryvyi Rih into a Russian-speaking Jewish family, Zelenskyy obtained a law degree at the city's Institute of Economics, but instead pursued a career in comedy and entertainment. Zelenskyy co-founded the production company Kvartal 95, which produced films, cartoons, and television shows including the television series Servant of the People, in which he played a fictional Ukrainian president. The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. A political party with the same name as the television show was founded in March 2018 by Zelenskyy and other associates of Kvartal 95. During his campaign in the 2019 presidential election, Zelenskyy positioned himself as anti-establishment and anti-corruption, and had already been a frontrunner in opinion polls months before he declared his candidacy. He won the election with 73.23 percent of the vote in the second round, defeating incumbent president Petro Poroshenko in the biggest landslide in the history of Ukrainian presidential elections. His party won a landslide victory in the snap parliamentary election held shortly after his inauguration.
As president, Zelenskyy has been a proponent of e-government, and of unity between the Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking parts of the country's population. He makes extensive use of social media. During the first two years of his presidency, Zelenskyy oversaw some limited progress in tackling corruption in Ukraine, the ending of legal immunity for members of parliament (the Verkhovna Rada), as well as the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic recession.
During his early presidency, Zelenskyy attempted to end the war in Donbas by implementing the Minsk agreements through the "Steinmeier formula", and sought dialogue with Russian president Vladimir Putin. During 2021, there was a large Russian military buildup on Ukraine's borders and increased attacks by Russian proxy forces, sparking an international crisis. Zelenskyy said his military would not respond to provocations. He attempted to calm the Ukrainian people and asked for military support from NATO. On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Zelenskyy remained in the capital Kyiv as it came under attack, declining international offers to evacuate him. He declared martial law across Ukraine and a general mobilisation of the armed forces. There have reportedly been numerous Russian assassination attempts on Zelenskyy since the invasion.
During the early peace negotiations, Zelenskyy demanded a ceasefire and Russian withdrawal, said he was willing to discuss Ukraine becoming a neutral country if given "real" security guarantees, and was willing to negotiate the status of Crimea and Donbas. He presented Ukraine's Peace Formula in late 2022, and the Victory Plan for Ukraine in late 2024. After Russia "annexed" southeastern Ukraine, Zelenskyy applied for Ukraine to join NATO. He has frequently visited frontline and newly liberated areas, and met with other world leaders, calling on the international community to support Ukraine's resistance, to provide Ukraine with military aid, and to impose tougher sanctions on Russia to bring an end to its war. As well as visiting Ukrainian troops on the frontlines, Zelenskyy has repeatedly met with other world leaders, calling on the international community to support Ukraine's resistance and its efforts to end Russia's war. Zelenskyy has called for an unconditional ceasefire and negotiations based on a 20-point peace plan.
Zelenskyy was named the Time Person of the Year for 2022. Rating Group polls in 2022 and 2026 have ranked Zelenskyy among the five most outstanding Ukrainians of all time. Zelenskyy's term was originally scheduled to end in May 2024, but the ongoing Russian invasion and the resulting martial law prevents the regularly scheduled presidential election from being held. He is expected to remain president for the duration of the war. Due to this extension of his term, Zelenskyy is the second-longest serving president after Kuchma.
Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy was born into a Jewish family on 25 January 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union. His mother, Rymma Zelenska, is a retired engineer, while his father, Oleksandr Zelenskyy – a professor and computer scientist – is the head of the Department of Cybernetics and Computing Hardware at the Kryvyi Rih State University of Economics and Technology. Oleksandr's father, Semyon Zelenskyy, served as an infantryman, reaching the rank of colonel in the Red Army (in the 57th Guards Motor Rifle Division) during the Second World War. Semyon's father and three brothers were killed during the Holocaust. Zelenskyy said in March 2022 that, during a massacre, both of Semyon's parents were killed after German troops burned their home to the ground. Oleksandr's mother survived the Second World War after leaving Kryvyi Rih in an evacuation of Jews to Almaty, Kazakh SSR, and returned to Ukraine after the war.
Before starting elementary school, Zelenskyy spent four years in Erdenet, Mongolia, where Oleksandr worked as a mining engineer from the mid-1970s to help build a copper mine, applying his abilities in computer science to mining. Zelenskyy grew up speaking Russian. At the age of 16, he took the Test of English as a Foreign Language and received an education grant to study in Israel, but Oleksandr did not allow him to go. Zelenskyy 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 never worked in the legal field.
At age 17, Zelenskyy joined his local team competing in KVN, a comedy competition popular across former Soviet countries. He was soon invited to join another Ukrainian team known as "Zaporizhzhia-Kryvyi Rih-Transit", where he became dance director and writer in 1995. The Transit team performed in KVN's Major League and eventually won in 1997 in a tie with Armenian opponents.
That same year, Zelenskyy created and headed a new team known as Kvartal 95 together with other Transit members, such as Oleksandr Pikalov and Olena Kravets; this team was named after the Kvartal 95 neighbourhood in Kryvyi Rih where he had grown up. From 1999 to 2003, Kvartal 95 performed in the highest open Ukrainian league of KVN as well as in the KVN Major League; they were the only Ukrainian team in the Moscow-based highest league of KVN. The team members lived in Moscow much of the time, without a fixed address and struggling financially; they constantly toured former Soviet countries.
Zelenskyy and Kvartal 95 left KVN in 2003, after prolonged tension with KVN's Russian management over money, political censorship, and other disputes. Finally, Zelenskyy declined a highly paid job offer from KVN management that would have required him to abandon Kvartal 95, choosing instead to stay with his team and return to Ukraine. An incident where a Russian KVN producer used an antisemitic insult against Zelenskyy on stage also contributed to the split.
After leaving KVN, the Kvartal 95 team moved to Kyiv, where Zelenskyy and the brothers Borys and Serhiy Shefir – who had been members of the Transit KVN team – founded the Kvartal 95 Studio company in September 2003. That same year, Kvartal 95 started producing TV shows for the Ukrainian TV channel 1+1. In 2005, Kvartal 95 moved to the Ukrainian TV channel Inter, where they launched the Evening Kvartal comedy show the same year. This show's format was "theatre-style" with a mixture of skits, appearances by celebrities, and stand-up comedy; it included sketches on everyday life as well as political satire. Evening Kvartal was the most popular comedy television show in Ukraine in the 2000s, and over 85% of Ukrainians reported they had seen it by the time Zelenskyy became president in 2019. Kvartal 95 returned to 1+1 in 2012.