Volodymyr Zelensky

Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky (born 25 January 1978 in Kryvyi Rih) is the sixth president of Ukraine. Before entering politics he built a career as an actor, comedian, and producer through the Kvartal 95 studio, and starred in the television series Servant of the People, in which he played a schoolteacher who becomes president. He founded a political party of the same name and, running as a political outsider on an anti-corruption and peace platform, won the 2019 presidential election in a runoff against incumbent Petro Poroshenko with roughly 73% of the vote.

His early presidency was marked by efforts to revive the Minsk process with Russia, judicial reform, and a controversial July 2019 phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump that triggered Trump's first impeachment in the United States.

Zelensky's international profile transformed after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. He refused offers of evacuation, remained in Kyiv, and used nightly video addresses, foreign parliamentary speeches, and travel to allied capitals to mobilize military and financial support. He addressed the U.S. Congress, the UK Parliament, the European Parliament, the UN General Assembly, and the G7, and pushed his 10-point peace formula first presented at the G20 in Bali in November 2022.

Under his leadership Ukraine applied for EU membership days after the invasion and was granted candidate status in June 2022; accession negotiations formally opened in 2024. He has also pressed for NATO membership, securing a G7 Joint Declaration of Support at the 2023 Vilnius summit, though not a membership invitation.

Domestically, his wartime tenure has involved martial law, postponed elections (originally due in 2024), centralized wartime governance, and continuing anti-corruption dismissals within his cabinet and military command, including the February 2024 replacement of armed forces chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi with Oleksandr Syrskyi.