Volodymyr Zelensky
6th President of Ukraine
Wikipedia
Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (Ukrainian: Володимир Олександрович Зеленський, pronounced [woloˈdɪmɪr olekˈsɑndrowɪtʃ zeˈlɛnʲsʲkɪj]; born 25 January 1978) is a Ukrainian comedian and politician who is the 6th and current president of Ukraine since 20 May 2019.
Prior to his political career, he obtained a degree in law and created a production company, Kvartal 95, which produces films, cartoons and TV comedy shows, including Servant of the People, in which Zelensky played the role of President of Ukraine. The series aired from 2015 to 2019. Before entering politics, he was a comedian, actor, screenwriter, film producer, and director.
A political party bearing the same name as the television show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95. Zelensky announced his candidacy for the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election on the evening of 31 December 2018, alongside the New Year's Eve address of President Petro Poroshenko on 1+1 TV Channel. At the time, Zelensky had already been one of the frontrunners in opinion polls for the election. Zelensky won the election with 73.2% of the vote in the second round, defeating Poroshenko.
Zelensky was born 25 January 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union to Jewish parents. His grandfather, Semyon (Simon) Ivanovych Zelensky, served in the Red Army (in the 57th Guards Motor Rifle Division) during World War II; Semyon's father and three brothers were killed in the Holocaust. Volodymyr's father, Oleksandr Zelensky, is a professor and head of Department of Cybernetics and Computing Hardware at the Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics; his mother, Rymma Zelenska, used to work as an engineer. Prior to starting elementary school, he lived for four years in Mongolia in the city of Erdenet where his father worked. At age 16, he passed the TOEFL and received an education grant to study in Israel, but his father did not allow him to study there.
Zelensky 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 has not worked professionally in the legal field. He speaks Ukrainian, Russian and English.
At age 17, he joined the local KVN (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. Zelensky 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. Zelensky also played the leading role in the 2012 film 8 First Dates and in sequels which were produced in 2015 and 2016.
Zelensky was a member of the board and the general producer of the TV channel Inter from 2010 to 2012.
In August 2014, Zelensky spoke out against the intention of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture to ban Russian artists from Ukraine. Since 2015, Ukraine has banned Russian artists and other Russian works of culture from entering Ukraine. In 2018, the romantic comedy Love in the Big City 2 starring Zelensky was banned in Ukraine.
After the Ukrainian media had reported that during the war in Donbas Zelensky's Kvartal 95 had donated 1 million hryvnias to the Ukrainian army, some Russian politicians and artists petitioned for a ban on his works in Russia. Once again, Zelensky spoke out against the intention of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture to ban Russian artists from Ukraine.
In 2015, Zelensky became the star of the popular television series Servant of the People, where he played the role of the President of Ukraine. In the series, Zelensky's character was a thirty-something high-school history teacher who won the presidential election after a viral video showed him ranting against government corruption in Ukraine.
Zelensky's comedy series Svaty, In-laws, was banned for display on the territory of Ukraine in 2017. The ban was lifted in March 2019.
Zelensky 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.
The political party Servant of the People was created in March 2018 by people from the television production company Kvartal 95, which also created the television series of the same name.
In a March 2019 interview with Der Spiegel, Zelensky stated he went into politics to restore trust in politicians and that he wanted "to bring professional, decent people to power" and "would really like to change the mood and timbre of the political establishment, as much as possible".
Starting 31 December 2018, Zelensky led a successful, almost entirely virtual, presidential campaign to unseat the incumbent President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, in just three to four months. Zelensky clearly won both the first round of elections on 31 March, and the run-off election on 21 April 2019. One of Zelensky's presidential campaign promises was that he would only serve one term in office.
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Six months before he announced his candidacy for the Ukrainian presidential election in 2019 (31 December 2018), Zelensky was already one of the frontrunners in opinion polls. After months of ambiguous responses, during the Kvartal 95 New Year's Eve evening show on the TV channel 1+1, he announced his candidacy for the election. In so doing, he up-staged the New Year's Eve address of President Petro Poroshenko on that particular channel. Zelensky later denied that up-staging the president was intentional, and attributed this to a technical glitch.
During the election campaign Zelensky continued to tour with Kvartal 95. During the campaign his engagement with mainstream media was minimal. He talked to the electorate on social media channels and in YouTube clips. On 16 April 2019, 20 Ukrainian news outlets called on Zelensky to stop avoiding journalists. Two days later, Zelensky stated that he was not hiding from journalists but that he did not want to go to talk shows where "people of the old power" were "just doing PR" and that he just did not have time to satisfy all interview requests. Prior to the elections, Zelensky presented a team that included former Finance Minister Oleksandr Danylyuk and others. During the campaign, concerns were raised over his links to the oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi. President Poroshenko and his supporters claimed that Zelensky's victory would benefit Russia. On 19 April 2019 at Olimpiyskiy National Sports Complex presidential debates were held in the form of a show. In his introductory speech, Zelensky acknowledged that in 2014 he voted for Poroshenko, but "I was mistaken. We were mistaken. We voted for one Poroshenko, but received another. The first appears when there are video cameras, the other Petro sends Medvedchuk privietiki (greetings) to Moscow".
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