Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy (born 25 January 1978) is a Ukrainian politician and former entertainer who has served as the sixth president of Ukraine since 2019. He took office five years after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war with Russia's annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas, and has continued to serve during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has been ongoing since February 2022.

Born in Kryvyi Rih into a Russian-speaking Jewish family, Zelenskyy obtained a law degree at the city's Institute of Economics, but instead pursued a career in comedy and entertainment. Zelenskyy co-founded the production company Kvartal 95, which produced films, cartoons, and television shows including the television series Servant of the People, in which he played a fictional Ukrainian president. The series aired from 2015 to 2019 and was immensely popular. A political party with the same name as the television show was founded in March 2018 by Zelenskyy and other associates of Kvartal 95. During his campaign in the 2019 presidential election, Zelenskyy positioned himself as anti-establishment and anti-corruption, and had already been a frontrunner in opinion polls months before he declared his candidacy. He won the election with 73.23 percent of the vote in the second round, defeating incumbent president Petro Poroshenko in the biggest landslide in the history of Ukrainian presidential elections. His party won a landslide victory in the snap parliamentary election held shortly after his inauguration.

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. He makes extensive use of social media. During the first two years of his presidency, Zelenskyy oversaw some limited progress in tackling corruption in Ukraine, the ending of legal immunity for members of parliament (the Verkhovna Rada), as well as the country's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent economic recession.