He's the comic who went from satirical TV president to heroic wartime leader. Yet before the Russian invasion Ukrainians were falling out of love with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his biographer tells Peter Conradi.
He is the man with whom every politician wants to pose for a selfie. Habitually clad in a khaki T-shirt and sporting several days of beard, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become one of the world's most familiar figures since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February. His video messages to his compatriots have been viewed millions of times, boosting morale during the darkest hours of the conflict. Just as importantly, he has drummed up international support for his country's cause with virtual addresses to everything from the US Congress to Glastonbury, each tailored to its audience.
By now, the main outlines of the 44-year-old's career are well known: he owes his election in April 2019 to a television comedy series, Servant of the People, in which he played a schoolteacher who accidentally becomes president after his rant about corruption is filmed by a student and goes viral on social media. Before that he was the Ukrainian voice of Paddington Bear on the big screen and won the country's equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing.
Less well known is the embattled position in which Zelenskyy found himself on the eve of the war, in dramatic contrast to the hero status he has rightfully enjoyed since — as is revealed in a new book by Serhii Rudenko, a leading Ukrainian political journalist. As Rudenko writes, the president's attempts to make good on his main campaign promise to root out corruption had enjoyed only a mixed success, while his belief that it would be possible to sit down with Putin and negotiate an end to an 8-year-old uprising by pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas in the east had come to nothing.
Even more baffling were the mixed messages Zelenskyy was sending out to the Ukrainian people. By mid-February, despite the presence of 200,000 Russian troops on his border, he still insisted there would be no full-scale invasion; when American intelligence officials warned of a looming attack, Zelenskyy "didn't want to hear it", President Joe Biden said recently. It has been claimed the Ukrainian leader was slow to prepare both his military and the civilian population. So how did he get the run-up to the invasion so wrong but then bounce back to become such a formidable wartime leader? And why was someone with no political experience elected president in the first place?
The key to understanding Zelenskyy can be found 420km south of Kyiv in the sprawling industrial city of Kryvyi Rih. It was here, in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, that the future leader was born in January 1978 and spent his early life. The majority of the one million people who lived in the city, which stretches for 127km along a rich seam of iron ore, were Russian rather than Ukrainian speakers and so knew it by its Russian name of Krivoy Rog. Russian was also the language spoken by Zelenskyy's father, Oleksandr, a professor and head of the Department of Cybernetics and Computing Hardware at the Kryvyi Rih State University of Economics and Technology, and by his mother, Rymma, who worked as an engineer. Theirs was "an ordinary Soviet Jewish family", Zelenskyy told one interviewer. "Not Orthodox … Most Jewish families in the Soviet Union were not religious. You know, religion didn't exist in the Soviet state as such." They also suffered their share of tragedy: his great-grandparents were killed by Nazi troops in a blaze that consumed their entire village in Ukraine.
Kryvyi Rih was a grim place — "one of the most polluted cities in the former USSR, thanks to its iron-ore mining and metallurgy industry", Rudenko writes in his book. By the 1990s, following the end of the Soviet Union and the collapse of its network of sports clubs and social institutions, many of its young people fell into a network of gangs, known as beguny ("those who run"), organised around the city's different districts.
Zelenskyy nevertheless made it to the local university, where he trained to become a lawyer. His real passion, though, was comedy, and he began to take part in KVN (Club of the Funny and Inventive People), a hugely popular television show dating back to the Soviet era, in which teams from Russia and its neighbours competed to be judged the funniest. He graduated in 2000 but never practised law, instead captaining teams that competed in KVN's major league, making his name in Russia as much as in Ukraine. Then in 2003, along with friends from Kryvyi Rih who had moved with him to Kyiv, he co-founded a television production company, Studio Kvartal 95, which took its name from the district of the city in which they had grown up.
That September, aged 25, he married Olena Kiyashko, whom he had been dating for eight years. The pair had been in the same year but different classes at school, and got to know each other only after a mutual friend played matchmaker by borrowing a video cassette from her in order to have Zelenskyy return it. She later recalled she was not even sure she much liked him when they first met. But they shared a love of comedy: though the future first lady qualified as an architect, she too joined KVN and would later write his scripts. "Bit by bit, we got to know each other, began to chat with each other and then started dating," she later recalled. "At first I wasn't ready for a relationship, but he succeeded in winning me over."
Bizarrely, he and two pals proposed to Kiyashko and two of her friends at the same time, when they were all travelling together on a minibus. "Girls, listen, we've had a chat and this is what's going to happen," was how she recalled his pitch in a recent interview with The Economist's 1843 magazine. "It was fate, and all of that." The three couples married within a week of each other. The Zelenskyys' first child, Oleksandra, was born in 2004. She was followed in 2013 by a son, Kyrylo.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy's comedy career was beginning to take off — helped by his victory in 2006 in the first series of Dancing with the Stars, the Ukrainian version of Strictly, which was a huge hit, watched by a third of the Ukrainian population. Zelenskyy impressed not only with his slick dance moves but also with his costumes; especially memorable was the tight-fitting pink suit in which he danced to Elvis Presley's Blue Suede Shoes. Viewers also loved his quickfire humour. When it came to the final, the jury preferred another contestant, a singer called Natalia Mohylevska, who was the better dancer, but Zelenskyy was far more popular with the public, winning by 728,000 votes to just over 3300.
With fame came commercial success. In 2012 Forbes Ukraine estimated Studio Kvartal 95's income at US$15 million ($24 million) — a considerable sum in one of Europe's poorest countries, where GDP per head before the invasion was just under US$6000 a year, less than a tenth of Britain's. Much of the company's wealth, it was revealed last October by leaks from the so-called Pandora Papers, was held through offshore companies — a tactic defended by a spokesman for the president as a legitimate way of protecting assets, given the often arbitrary nature of the rule of law in Ukraine. Zelenskyy himself reportedly made use of such companies to buy a 4 million euro ($6.5 million) art deco villa in Forte dei Marmi, a chic Tuscan resort beloved of Russian oligarchs — Roman Abramovich and Oleg Deripaska also own homes there.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy was preparing for his next and most celebrated TV role — as Vasyl Holoborodko, a disgruntled history teacher who becomes president. The premise of Servant of the People was fantastical, but the problems Holoborodko faced and the shady characters he encountered in office were all too real. First screened in 2015, it ran for three series. So when did Zelenskyy decide to imitate his fictional alter ego and have a go at the presidency for real? Rudenko cannot point to a precise moment, but believes he had been mulling the idea of standing for several years — even though those around him were not sure how serious he was.
The idea of a President Zelenskyy went down well with a public who struggled to separate his real persona from that of his character: by late 2018 the political neophyte was already advancing up the opinion polls, though he had yet to announce his candidacy. He finally did so during his own television show late on December 31, moments before the traditional new year's address by the president, Petro Poroshenko, who had already declared his own intention to stand for a second term.
Among those taken by surprise was Zelenskyy's wife, Olena, with whom he had apparently not shared his plans. She was, Rudenko claims, "categorically opposed to her husband's participation in the election campaign", telling the Ukrainian edition of Vogue magazine several months after his victory: "I am not a public person … I feel better backstage. My husband is always centre stage, but I am more comfortable in the shadows." At that time she could not foresee quite how prominent he — and she — would become. Like it or not, as first lady she was to be forced into the public eye: among the causes she embraced was educating children about nutrition and trying to improve school meals.
The political contest Zelenskyy entered was a surprisingly open one. His country's experience of independence since 1991 had not been happy: its economy was mired in corruption and dominated by oligarchs. Politically it was almost equally divided between the Ukrainian-speaking north and west, which looked to Europe, and the Russian-speaking east and south, including the Donbas, whose people felt closer to Moscow. Such tensions came to the fore in the Orange Revolution of 2004-05 — a popular uprising that forced a rerun of a rigged presidential election initially won by Viktor Yanukovych, an easterner. The final result was victory for the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko. Putin was alarmed at the implications for relations with Russia but did nothing, hoping the pendulum would swing back Moscow's way.
The Russian leader received his reward six years later when Yanukovych was elected — this time fairly — after Yushchenko had proven ineffective. But in 2014, after Yanukovych backed out of a trade deal with the European Union under pressure from the Kremlin, he was ousted by another uprising centred on Kyiv's Maidan Square that was encouraged by a number of western politicians. This time Putin intervened, seizing Crimea and fomenting an uprising by pro-Moscow separatists in the Donbas, whose "mistreatment" by the government in Kyiv was cited by the Russian leader as a reason for this February's invasion.
Zelenskyy had played no part in the Maidan protests but was well positioned to benefit from the popular disenchantment that had begun to set in by 2019 with Poroshenko, a hugely wealthy confectionery magnate nicknamed the "Chocolate King", who had been elected president in May 2014.
The comic's style of campaigning was unusual, to put it mildly, as I found that spring when I travelled to Kyiv. Rather than hold regular political meetings, Zelenskyy, a genial, diminutive figure with something of Mr Bean about him, put on a cabaret show with songs, sketches and scantily clad dancing girls. In one bizarre turn (which later went viral on social media), he and a fellow member of his troupe appeared to play a piano duet using their genitals.
I watched one of his final election shows in a shopping centre on the outskirts of Kyiv where the audience seemed unfazed by the comedian's complete lack of political experience. In fact they considered it an advantage, such was their disenchantment with existing politicians.
"He is young. He has a different outlook and will have new ideas," Nadezhda, a book-keeper in her mid-60s, told me. "We all came into this world without any experience. We learn."
Zelenskyy's opponents blamed his reluctance to take part in normal political debate on his poor grasp of policy — a charge that continued after his victory. It did not stop him from topping the list of 39 candidates in the first round and pushing Poroshenko into second place.
The outgoing president was nevertheless convinced that he could expose his rival's lack of experience if they came face to face. Zelenskyy finally agreed to meet two days before their second-round run-off — but on his own terms: their encounter took the form of a duel in front of 20,000 people in Kyiv's Olympic stadium. "People were expecting a show and they got it," Rudenko writes. Quick-witted and funny, Zelenskyy was in his element in what seemed less a political debate and more like the KVN shows with which he had begun his career. Though sometimes vague on detail, he came across as sincere. His strong performance helped him to crush Poroshenko by 73 per cent to 24 per cent to win the presidency. He scored another victory that July, when his party — named Servant of the People after the television show — won an unprecedented absolute majority in parliamentary elections, removing all constraints on his power.
This enabled him to notch up some early policy successes — not least launching a "Big Construction" programme to restore Ukraine's crumbling Soviet-era infrastructure. During his first two years 14,000km of roads were built or upgraded — many of which have since been badly damaged by the war.
Yet the reality of running the country, and finding the right people to help him do so, proved a challenge for Zelenskyy. "In 2019 we witnessed an electoral revolution. People wanted new faces in politics and wanted to change the previous system," Rudenko says. "But once he became president he began to repeat the same mistakes as his predecessors: he began to bring relatives and friends into his team. They were not competent enough. They made a lot of mistakes." Addressing a crowd that autumn, Zelenskyy faced cries of "Shame!" and "Away with Zelya!"
The vow to end corruption, which had been at the centre of his campaign, proved especially difficult to honour. There were concerns in particular about a lack of transparency surrounding the awarding of all those new road-building contracts. Embarrassingly, 11 Members of Parliament from Zelenskyy's own party were that autumn accused of taking bribes and invited to take lie-detector tests. They passed them and were later cleared.
Questions were asked about Zelenskyy's links with Ihor Kolomoyskyi, one of Ukraine's richest men, who owned the TV channel on which many of Kvartal 95's shows were screened. The oligarch had been embroiled in a scandal over the enforced multibillion-dollar state rescue in 2016 of PrivatBank, the country's largest financial institution. Kolomoyskyi, who together with a partner held 98 per cent of its shares, denied any wrongdoing. One by one, the "Dream Team" who had helped Zelenskyy come to power were fired or resigned — many then publicly criticising the president's fitness for the job and lack of understanding of how government worked.
"Zelenskyy's main problem was not just his incompetence but also the fact that he did not recognise this," Serhiy Haidai, a Ukrainian governor and political scientist, told the author.
Crucially, Zelenskyy also made little progress in ending the separatist uprising in the Donbas, which by then had already killed more than 12,000 people; his one and only encounter with Putin, at a meeting in December 2019 at the Elysee Palace, refereed by France's President Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, the German leader, ended inconclusively.
"He was naive to think that his charm, his ability as an actor and a communicator, would be sufficient to find a negotiated solution with Putin," says Rudenko.
But the Russian leader had no real interest in ending the conflict, since it gave him leverage over his neighbour. Nor did Zelenskyy appear to take seriously Putin's questioning of Ukraine's very right to exist, which the Russian leader went on to set out in July 2021 in a rambling 5000-word essay.
rticular — also proved difficult: apparently influenced by Putin, President Trump declared Ukraine to be not a "real country", that it had always been a part of Russia and was "totally corrupt". Then, during a notorious phone call in July 2019 — in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential elections — Trump attempted to enlist Zelenskyy's help in exposing unsubstantiated corruption allegations against the Democratic frontrunner Biden and his son Hunter. Whistle-blower complaints about that call formed the basis of a first failed attempt to impeach Trump.
The elder Biden proved more supportive of Ukraine after he became President, but the new US administration shared the concern of Zelenskyy's domestic critics at his lack of progress in fighting corruption. It was this — as much as the fear of antagonising Russia — that was cited by American officials as a reason for their reluctance to admit Ukraine to Nato.
By the beginning of this year, Zelenskyy appeared in trouble: his ratings were falling, his enemies circling and his chances of re-election slim. Most serious, though, was the threat of a Russian invasion, which he seemed unwilling to acknowledge. He saw in the new year at a swanky ski resort in the Carpathian Mountains and, in a video posted to his official website in mid-January, told his citizens: "Take a breath … Calm down." He was also strangely upbeat during an appearance before Western leaders at the Munich Security Conference on February 19, just days before the invasion. Just 31.9 per cent of Ukrainians believed their president would be able to work effectively as a wartime leader, according to a poll conducted a month earlier by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
Ukrainian officials have since reacted angrily to Biden's suggestion that Zelenskyy "didn't want to hear" the warnings the Americans were sending and have suggested Washington was at fault for failing to heed calls for the West to impose pre-emptive sanctions on Russia.
"The phrase 'did not want to hear' probably needs clarification," sniffed a spokesman for Zelenskyy.
Rudenko nevertheless believes there is something to Biden's claims, even if the Ukrainian leader was far from alone in thinking it unlikely Putin would attempt a full-scale invasion. Perversely, Zelenskyy's own longstanding links with the Russian-speaking world may have played a part in his miscalculation: while Ukrainian nationalists had long seen their neighbour as the enemy, he had spent the early stages of his career in Russia. "Part of his personality was formed there," Rudenko says. "He thought they could be friends."
Yet in the early hours of February 24 the attack came — and on a colossal scale, as Russian troops poured over the border and missiles rained down on Kyiv and other cities.
Zelenskyy's misjudgment had consequences, critics say. While attention in the West has focused on the Russian army's initial tactical and logistical errors and the heroism of Ukraine's defenders, the government in Kyiv also appears to have been guilty of a serious lack of preparedness.
"How did Russian troops manage within just a few days to get so close to the outskirts of Kyiv and how did they manage to get so quickly from Crimea to mainland Russia?" Rudenko asks.
Similar questions must be asked about the lack of provision of air-raid shelters for civilians, who had been assured for weeks by Zelenskyy that all would be fine. "The bombing and missile strikes were terrifying for people who had never before experienced anything like it," he adds. "The first three or four days were a real shock."
In the months since, Zelenskyy's gift for showmanship has helped him to assume the mantle of a highly charismatic wartime leader. More unexpected has been his enormous personal courage: during the first hours of the conflict he reportedly rejected an offer by the American government to be evacuated, famously declaring: "I need ammunition, not a ride."
He has survived no fewer than 10 assassination attempts in Kyiv, according to one of his advisers.
In her Economist interview, Olena revealed being woken early on the morning of the attack by explosions that she first took for fireworks. She found her husband already dressed in the room next door. "It's started," he told her. She went with trepidation to break the news to Oleksandra, 17, and Kyrylo, 9, but they knew already. She told them to get ready for a trip to the countryside: "I had to show that everything was just great, cool, that it was an adventure." By that evening the three of them were in a secret location far from the capital; her cheeks hurt after a day of fake smiles, she told her interviewer.
The couple decided that Olena and the children should stay in Ukraine — even though Zelenskyy revealed that intelligence reports suggested his family had been marked by the enemy as "target No 2", after him. She did not see her husband for the first two months of the war, talking only on the phone — although, like the rest of the country, she watches his daily video messages on social media.
"Our family was torn apart, as every other Ukrainian family," she declared in May when she and Zelenskyy came together for a TV interview, adding: "Nobody takes my husband away from me, not even the war."
Despite the complex portrait he paints of Zelenskyy in his book, Rudenko does not want to dwell too much on the president's failings in the run-up to the conflict when we speak. "There are so many questions, but I would not bring them up during the war," he says. "Any discussion now about what Zelenskyy did or did not do could be damaging for Ukraine.
"I also think there was no alternative to war," he adds. "Whatever Zelenskyy had done and however much he had tried with Putin it would not have made a difference, because for the past 20 years Putin had been preparing for war with Ukraine. Now we can see his aim was not to come to an agreement with Zelenskyy or with Ukraine — it was to eliminate Ukraine as a country and to eliminate its people."
Zelensky: A Biography, by Serhii Rudenko, is published by Polity.
Written by: Peter Conradi
© The Times of London