Volodymyr Zelenskyy

His grandfather,, 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 were killed in the Holocaust.

In March 2022, Zelenskyy said that his great-grandparents had been killed after German troops burned their home to the ground during a massacre.

Before starting elementary school, Zelenskyy lived for four years in the Mongolian city of Erdenet, where his father worked.

Zelenskyy grew up speaking Russian.

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 never worked in the legal field.

At age 17, he joined his local team competing in the KVN comedy competition.

Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (also romanized as Zelensky or Zelenskiy; born 25 January 1978) is a Ukrainian politician and former actor who has been serving as the sixth president of Ukraine since 2019.

Born to a Ukrainian Jewish family, 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 a career in 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 a fictional Ukrainian president.

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 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.

He was soon invited to join the united Ukrainian team "Zaporizhzhia-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, and the team members spent a lot of 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 was a member of the board and the general producer of the TV channel Inter from 2010 to 2012.

Zelenskyy continued his movie career with the film Office Romance. Our Time in 2011 and with Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon in 2012.

Zelenskyy also played the leading role in the 2012 film 8 First Dates and in sequels which were produced in 2015 and 2016.

Love in the Big City 3 was released in January 2014.

He recorded the voice of Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian dubbing of Paddington (2014) and Paddington 2 (2017).

In August 2014, Zelenskyy spoke out against the intention of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture to ban Russian artists from Ukraine.

The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular.

A political party with the same name as the TV show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.

Zelenskyy announced his candidacy in the 2019 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 outsider, he had already become one of the frontrunners in opinion polls for the election.

He won the election with 73% of the vote in the second round, defeating Poroshenko.

He has positioned himself as an anti-establishment and anti-corruption figure.

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.

His communication style makes extensive use of social media, particularly Instagram.

His party won a landslide victory in the snap legislative election held shortly after his inauguration as president.

During the first two years of his administration, Zelenskyy oversaw the lifting of legal immunity for members of parliament (the Verkhovna Rada), the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic recession, and some limited progress in tackling corruption in Ukraine.

During his presidential campaign, Zelenskyy promised to end Ukraine's protracted conflict with Russia, and he has attempted to engage in dialogue with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

His 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'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.

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.

After the start of the invasion, Zelenskyy declared martial law across Ukraine and a general mobilisation of the armed forces.

Zelenskyy was named the Time Person of the Year for 2022.