Volodymyr Zelenskyy has now spent more than four years as a president at war. For most of his adult life he was known for something else entirely: making people laugh.
Born on 25 January 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, he earned a law degree at the city’s Institute of Economics and never practiced. At 17 he joined a local team in KVN, the comedy competition popular across former Soviet countries. He became dance director and writer for another team, Zaporizhzhia-Kryvyi Rih-Transit, which won the KVN Major League in 1997. The same year he founded Kvartal 95, named for the neighbourhood where he grew up.
From KVN to the studio
The early years were lean. Kvartal 95 members lived in Moscow much of the time, without a fixed address, touring former Soviet countries. In 2003 Zelenskyy left KVN after disputes with its Russian management over money and political censorship. He turned down a highly paid job offer that would have meant abandoning his team. That September he and the brothers Borys and Serhiy Shefir founded Kvartal 95 Studio in Kyiv.
It grew into what biographers called the most successful production studio in Ukraine. Its show Evening Kvartal, launched on the channel Inter in 2005, was the country’s most popular comedy program of the 2000s, and by 2019 over 85 percent of Ukrainians said they had seen it. Zelenskyy also acted, wrote and produced films and won the first season of Ukraine’s Dancing with the Stars in 2006. His format Make the Comedian Laugh was sold to China, Italy and Finland.
After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Kvartal 95 closed its Moscow office and wound down business ties with Russia. By Zelenskyy’s own estimate, that cut the studio’s revenue per hour of TV programming from $200,000 to $30,000.
A television president becomes a real one
From 2015 to 2019 he played a fictional Ukrainian president in the hit series Servant of the People. In March 2018 he and other Kvartal 95 associates founded a political party with the same name. Running as an anti-establishment, anti-corruption candidate, he won the 2019 presidential runoff with 73.23 percent of the vote, defeating incumbent Petro Poroshenko in the biggest landslide in the history of Ukrainian presidential elections. His party then won a landslide in the snap parliamentary election.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, Zelenskyy stayed in Kyiv as it came under attack, declining international offers to evacuate him. He declared martial law and a general mobilisation. He presented Ukraine’s Peace Formula in late 2022 and the Victory Plan in late 2024, and has since called for an unconditional ceasefire and negotiations based on a 20-point peace plan. Time named him Person of the Year for 2022.
His term was due to end in May 2024. Martial law prevents a regular election, and he is expected to remain in office for the duration of the war.
