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. Prior to starting elementary school, Zelenskyy lived for four years in the Mongolian city of Erdenet, where his father worked. In March 2022 Zelenskyy revealed that his great-grandparents had been killed after German troops burned their home to the ground during a massacre. His grandfather, Semyon (Simon) Ivanovych Zelenskyy, served as an infantryman, reaching the rank of Colonel, in the Red Army (in the 57th Guards Motor Rifle Division) during World War II Semyon's father and three brothers died in the Holocaust. His father, Oleksandr Zelenskyy, is a professor and computer scientist 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. Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy was born to Jewish parents on 25 January 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, then in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. 4.2 Attempts to end the Donbas conflict.His leadership during the crisis has won him widespread international admiration, and he has been described as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance. After the start of the invasion, Zelenskyy declared martial law across Ukraine and a general mobilisation of the armed forces. He initially distanced himself from warnings of an imminent war, while also calling for security guarantees and military support from NATO to "withstand" the threat. Zelenskyy's strategy during the Russian military buildup was to calm the Ukrainian populace and assure the international community that Ukraine was not seeking to retaliate. Zelenskyy's administration faced an escalation of tensions with Russia in 2021, culminating in the launch of an ongoing full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Zelenskyy promised to end Ukraine's protracted conflict with Russia as part of his presidential campaign, and has attempted to engage in dialogue with Russian president Vladimir Putin. During his administration, Zelenskyy oversaw the lifting of legal immunity for members of the Verkhovna Rada, the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic recession, and some progress in tackling corruption in Ukraine. : 7–10 His party won a landslide victory in a snap legislative election held shortly after his inauguration as president. : 11–13 His communication style heavily uses social media, particularly Instagram. He has positioned himself as an anti-establishment and anti-corruption figure.Īs president, Zelenskyy has been a proponent of e-government and unity between the Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking parts of the country's population.
He won the election with 73.23 per cent of the vote in the second round, defeating Poroshenko. A political outsider, he had already become one of the frontrunners in opinion polls for the election.
Zelenskyy announced his candidacy in the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election on the evening of 31 December 2018, alongside the New Year's Eve address of then-president Petro Poroshenko on the TV channel 1+1. A political party bearing the same name as the television show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.
The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. 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. Prior to his acting career, he obtained a degree in law from the Kyiv National Economic University. Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine. Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (born 25 January 1978) is a Ukrainian politician, former actor and comedian, who is the sixth and incumbent president of Ukraine.