Last month, many around the world didn’t even know who Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was. Now, after leading his country against an invasion from Russia, he has become a beloved hero all around the world.
Despite this, though, there is still much about this unconventional president that the average person doesn’t know. This includes everything from his raunchy early career to battlefield decisions that come straight out of a Hollywood movie.
So, who is the real President Volodymyr Zelensky? Here are the surprising facts you need to know!
Comedian before politician
While Volodymyr Zelensky may be a relatively new celebrity to most of the Western World, that is not the case in Ukraine. In fact, he was a beloved television celebrity in Ukraine for years!
The most surreal aspect of his previous career, though, is that Zelensky actually played the president of Ukraine on the TV show Servant of the People.
In the show, he is initially a history teacher, but his righteous rants against politicians help him win the presidency. Interestingly, the show ran from 2015 until 2019, which is the exact year that Zelensky became the Ukrainian president in real life!
Landslide election victory
Remember when we said that Zelensky’s fictional president became popular for railing against traditional politicians? That was actually the key to his 2019 presidential victory. As he said in an interview with BBC News, his people “want to get a person with a human face,” which was a thinly veiled dig at billionaire Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko who had been ruling the country since 2014.
At the time, Poroshenko and many others felt Zelensky didn’t have enough political experience to be a world leader. But he ended up scoring a staggering 73% of the vote, which showcased the public confidence in Zelensky’s abilities.
While many were surprised by Zelensky’s heroic words and actions when the Russian invasion began in February 2022, he spelled his intentions out very clearly in his 2019 inauguration speech. “Every one of us bears responsibility for Ukraine,” he said. “This is our shared dream. But we have shared pains.” Now, nobody leads by example more than Zelensky when it comes to taking responsibility for his country.
Jewish heritage
One of Vladamir Putin’s stranger claims is that his invasion of Ukraine was meant to drive the Nazis out of the country. And part of what makes that claim so absurd is that Zelensky himself is a very proud Jew!
In a 2020 interview with The Times of Israel, he describes his family growing up as an “ordinary Soviet Jewish family.” In the interview, he also described that “On my father’s side, my grandfather and his three brothers were all on the front in World War II, and only he returned. My grandmother was living in Kryvi Rih, in a part of south Ukraine which was occupied by the fascists. They killed all the Jews who remained.”
His grandmother escaped, and Zelensky grew up with conflicted feelings about his heritage. “Most Jewish families in the Soviet Union were not religious,” he said. “You know religion didn’t exist in the Soviet state as such.” This hasn’t kept him from having his own relationship with God, though. “Of course, I believe in God,” he said. “But I speak with him only in those moments which are personal for me.”
His wife wanted him out of politics
While most of the world has been supporting President Zelensky, no one has offered more stalwart support than his wife, Olena Zelenska. What makes this support so bittersweet is that she never really wanted her husband to be a politician at all!
In an interview with Vogue Ukraine, she explained, “I am a non-public person. I am not the life of the party, I do not like to tell jokes. It’s not in my character.” She disliked her husband’s political ambition and its resulting spotlight on their family, she decided to redirect that spotlight to important matters. “I found reasons for myself in favor of publicity,” she said. “One of them is the opportunity to attract people’s attention to important social issues.”
These days, she isn’t afraid to tell the world how much she supports both her husband and her country. As she wrote on Instagram recently, “Today I will not have panic and tears. I will be calm and confident. My children are looking at me, I will be next to them and next to my husband and with you. I love you! I love Ukraine!”
The Trump/Zelensky connection
While Zelensky didn’t become a household name until recently, he did garner some international attention back in 2019. That is because he was at the center of Donald Trump’s first impeachment over allegations Trump improperly sought help from Ukraine to boost his chances of re-election.
In 2019, Donald Trump was very interested in digging up dirt about Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. He wanted to discover what Hunter had to do with the Ukrainian-owned Burisma Holdings. And, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, Trump called Zelensky and threatened to withhold $391 million of aid to Ukraine if Zelensky didn’t cooperate.
Publicly, Zelensky demurred when asked about this. But the subject has come up frequently because the aid Trump threatened to withhold was intended to help the Ukraine fight off the same Russian expansionism the country is currently facing.
The unlikely war hero
Speaking of Trump, it’s difficult not to make comparisons between him and Zelensky. After all, each of them transformed a successful media career into a presidency.
However, the comparison really ends there. Before and throughout the Russian invasion, Zelensky has proven himself a very unlikely hero. When the U.S. offered to evacuate Zelensky from Ukraine for his own safety, the AP News reports that Zelensky had a simple response: he didn’t need “a ride,” he needed “anti-tank ammunition.” Furthermore, he refused to abandon his country because “the fight is here.”
Whether intentional or not, statements about how he needs ammo rather than a ride made Zelensky into an online hero. And Zelensky kept this momentum going by posting inspiring updates to social media. For example, he took to Instagram on March 3 to write, “They wanted to destroy us so many times. They failed. We’ve been through so much! And if someone thinks that, having overcome all this, Ukrainians will be frightened, broken or surrender, he knows nothing about Ukraine. And he has nothing to do in Ukraine. Go home.”
It’s also fair to say that Zelensky’s inspiring words and actions transformed how Europe responded to Russia. As the Washington Post reports, he told the European Union in a short teleconference call that his people “are here dying for European ideals” and that this call could very well be “the last time they saw him alive.”
Ultimately, he was very persuasive in leading Europe and the rest of the world to take harsh sanctions and other actions against Russia. And when he addressed the European Parliament in early March, he received a standing ovation. He concluded his speech to them with a bit of hope and inspiration: “Life will win over death and light will win over darkness. Glory be to Ukraine.”