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Ukraine invasion — explained

The roots of Russia's invasion of Ukraine go back decades and run deep. The current conflict is more than one country fighting to take over another; it is — in the words of one U.S. official — a shift in "the world order." Here are some helpful stories to make sense of it all.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy went from comedian to icon of democracy. This is how he did it

Frank Langfitt

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivers a virtual address to Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 16, 2022, less than a month after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Drew Angerer/Getty Images hide caption

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivers a virtual address to Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 16, 2022, less than a month after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

KYIV, Ukraine — Over the past year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has undergone one of the most dramatic political transformations in modern history.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Zelenskyy was polling around 25%. Today, some compare him to Winston Churchill.

But as Ukraine marks the first anniversary of Russia's invasion this week, some Ukrainians still have doubts about the president's leadership.

Zelenskyy's turnaround began the morning of Feb. 24, 2022, as Russian soldiers headed toward Kyiv, intent on capturing or killing him. The president decided to stay put.

Oleksiy Arestovych, a former adviser to the office of the president, was with Zelenskyy at the beginning of the war. He says he and others urged the president to move somewhere safer.

"We said, 'What about cruise missiles?'" Arestovych recalled. "He said, 'I'll stay here.'" Arestovych says he raised the specter of Russian saboteurs and assassins. He says Zelenskyy again refused.

"Give me a machine gun," he recalled the president saying at last. "I stay here.'"

Arestovych says the military was just trying to do its job and protect the leader of the country, but Zelenskyy was thinking more broadly.

"He understood if we left Kyiv, it would put great stress on the defenders of Ukraine," Arestovych says. "He's thinking like the head of the nation."

On the second day of the war, Zelenskyy stood with his chief of staff as well as Ukraine's prime minister, next to a baroque building in the heart of Kyiv that all Ukrainians would recognize. Recording on his iPhone, Zelenskyy sent a defiant message.

"We are all here," he said. "Our soldiers are here. The citizens are here. We defend our independence."

People had wondered if Zelenskyy would flee. Daria Kaleniuk, who runs the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a public watchdog group, pointed out that Zelenskyy had downplayed the threat of war and seemed unprepared. That he stood his ground in Kyiv, she says, "honestly, it was a surprise for me."

Zelenskyy's career began in the business of entertainment

Zelenskyy became a household name in Ukraine as a comedic actor, TV star, film producer and entertainment mogul. He ran for office in 2019 based on a character he'd created for a TV show called Servant of the People .

It's about an earnest high school history teacher who rails against Ukraine's corruption and corrosive politics. When a student captures the rant on video and posts it on social media, Zelenskyy's character becomes a sensation and is swept into office.

As a real-life candidate, Zelenskyy was also a sensation, winning in a landslide with 73% of the vote. He named his political party Servant of the People.

During the campaign, Zelenskyy pledged to end the war with Russia in the east of the country, boost the economy and attack corruption. He did not govern as many had hoped.

As president, he placed friends from his entertainment career into key government posts for which they had no experience.

Critics say he embraced oligarchs and undermined government oversight. People became disillusioned.

Before he became Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a comedian and is seen here performing during the 95th Quarter comedy show, in Brovary, Ukraine. Pavlo Conchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images hide caption

Before he became Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a comedian and is seen here performing during the 95th Quarter comedy show, in Brovary, Ukraine.

"Zelenskyy has a controversial reputation," says Kaleniuk. "He is a good visionary, but not a very good manager. He surrounds himself with 'yes men.'"

But his decision to stay in Kyiv in the early days of the war quickly turned public opinion around. By August, about 90% of Ukrainians said they approved of his job performance. The character actor understood what the Ukrainian people needed in a time of crisis.

As if taking on a new role, Zelenskyy dressed the part. He began wearing military olive green.

"There was a transformation," says Volodymyr Yermolenko, a philosopher and journalist who runs the website Ukraine World . "Zelenskyy is a person who has this capacity of empathy. He creates this image that I'm one of you. The war only enhanced this feeling."

Yermolenko also remarks on the president's physical changes.

"He became much more mature. He has a beard right now. He's doing physical exercise. He's really trying to look like a warrior," he says.

Zelenskyy rallied international support. Six days into the invasion, he addressed the European parliament by video and brought the English interpreter to tears.

Zelenskyy's team tailored each address to its audience.

Speaking to the U.S. Congress in December, this time in English, he quoted another wartime leader, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, drawing huge rounds of applause.

The relentless, carefully crafted messages paid off. NATO allies have sent more than $40 billion in weapons to Ukraine.

Zelenskyy's start as a wartime president was faltering

To appreciate how much Zelenskyy's image and stature have changed in the past year, consider his performance leading up to the war.

I saw him in the Kherson region less than two weeks before the invasion. He was there to observe drills to defend against Russian sabotage. Afterward, Zelenskyy gave an impromptu news conference in which he was defensive and confusing. U.S. officials had warned Russia would launch a massive invasion, but Zelenskyy downplayed it.

"I believe that today in the information space there is too much information about a full-scale war," said the president, standing in the middle of a street before a table stacked with microphones.

Then, he told the assembled foreign reporters that if they knew something he didn't, they should provide him with intelligence.

"Please give us this information," he said.

In a later interview with the Washington Post , Zelenskyy acknowledged he had known an invasion was coming. He said he didn't tell the Ukrainian people to prevent panic and damage to the country's economy.

Many in Ukraine seem to accept his explanation, but they also say Zelenskyy's government failed to prepare the country to defend itself. That has made a lot of people angry, including Tetiana Chornovol.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrives for a press conference on April 23, 2022, in Kyiv, Ukraine. John Moore/Getty Images hide caption

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrives for a press conference on April 23, 2022, in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Chornovol served in Ukraine's parliament from 2014 to 2019. Later, she joined the military. I met her in the Kherson region last fall, where her job was to fire small missiles at Russian armor.

Chornovol says that – before the war – the Ukrainian army left the route north of Kyiv open to invasion, even failing to mine bridges to stop a Russian advance.

"What was done was simply criminal," said Chornovol, who proudly showed me her missile launcher which was camouflaged with Astroturf. "There was no preparation for the invasion. Kyiv was not fortified in any way."

Collaborators helped Russia in the early days of the war

The situation was even worse in the south, where the Russians rolled into Kherson almost unimpeded.

Jack Watling, senior researcher in land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in London, says a brigade and a half of troops were supposed to be deployed to the area, but weren't. Ukrainian officers warned higher-ups the south was vulnerable to a Russian attack.

"Certainly in the south, the level of collaboration with the Russians was higher than in other areas," says Watling.

Former leaders in the region also say an area near the border with Crimea was de-mined before the Russians invaded.

Because Ukraine remains at war, parliamentarians are careful not to launch domestic political attacks. But Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, a Ukrainian lawmaker with the opposition European Solidarity party, says she and others will be asking tough questions about what happened in the south as soon as — she says — Ukraine defeats Russia.

People here blame the swift loss of the region on the SBU, Ukraine's intelligence service. In July, Zelenskyy fired the head of the SBU, Ivan Bakanov, a longtime friend who had no security experience.

Kaleniuk says the episode illustrates Zelenskyy's limitations.

"He's a good president during war," she says. "He's not a very good president during a non-war period. His largest weakness is that he trusts people who are his friends and he is not tolerating different opinions."

As a young adult, Zelenskyy focused on show business, not politics

Zelenskyy grew up in the southern industrial city of Kryvyi Rih.

Alina Fialko-Smal was an actor there at the time. She says Zelenskyy used to watch her troupe perform and sought advice on becoming a dramatic actor. She discouraged Zelenskyy, who is under 5-foot-6.

"You are small, you have a hoarse voice, you are useless," she recalls telling him. "Go in some other direction."

She says she suggested comedy.

Zelenskyy studied law at Kryvyi Rih Economic Institute, where his father is a renowned educator. Natalya Voloshanyuk, a finance professor, recalls Volodymyr as clever, funny and self-confident.

One day, she says, another professor confronted him in a hallway over behavior she didn't like.

"She said, 'You should be proud that you study at this university,' " Voloshanyuk recalls, "to which he replied, 'One day you will be proud that you taught me.' "

Zelenskyy's career path has been audacious and inventive, moving from entertainment to his improbable role as global symbol of democracy. Yermolenko, the philosopher, thinks Zelenskyy's shape-shifting nature is a way to understand him and to understand Ukraine since it became an independent country some three decades ago.

"The Soviet Union collapsed and out of this anarchy, you can create something new," Yermolenko says. "I think Zelenskyy's one of one of those people. The good thing is that these people think that impossible is nothing and you can create anything."

The bad thing, he says, is that amateurs can end up in crucial positions. Yermolenko didn't vote for Zelenskyy.

He's not sure he will vote for him in the next election, whenever that is.

But he says this of Ukraine's president:

"People really recognize themselves in him, identify themselves with him, or he identifies himself with the people. And I think this is the most important thing."

Kateryna Malofieieva, Ross Pelekh and NPR London producer Morgan Ayre contributed to this story.

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How did Volodymyr Zelensky become president of Ukraine?

Who is Ukraine’s president? And can he handle this crisis?

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As Russia moves ahead with its invasion of Ukraine , world leaders and the public have turned to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for on-the-ground information and signals of what may happen next.

The former comedy sketch artist, who won a shocking landslide victory as a political outsider in 2019, has now been forced to declare martial law in his embattled nation and is encouraging his compatriots to take up arms.

And many are starting to wonder whether their 44-year-old president has the smarts and strength to lead through such a perilous moment .

Here’s what we know:

Who is the president of Ukraine?

Before Zelensky made a name for himself in politics, the Russian-speaking entertainer found fame with his comedy troupe, Kvartal 95. He starred in “Servant of the People,” a popular sitcom about a history teacher who gets elected president after a viral video depicts his rant about corruption.

Life imitated art, with Zelensky becoming Ukraine’s real-life president in 2019.

During his presidential bid, Zelensky positioned himself as a political outsider, eager and willing to shake up the establishment. His platform was primarily focused on two goals: breaking up unscrupulous oligarchs’ economic power and ending the war in the east.

Though the specifics of his plans were unclear, the former comedian handily defeated President Petro Poroshenko, who made his fortune in the candy business as Ukraine’s so-called “chocolate king.”

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How do the Ukrainians feel about him?

Despite his landslide victory and a year and a half of relative popularity, the faith of the Ukrainian people in their president largely disappeared after Russia’s first troop buildup began last spring. Recent polls indicate that twice as many Ukrainians don’t trust him as those who do.

Some point fingers at Zelensky’s inner circle, many of them with more experience in the comedy industry than in government.

“Since the beginning of the current tensions last year, Zelensky lost the public’s trust,” Maria Zolkina, a political analyst with the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a Kyiv-based think tank, told The Times.

In the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Zelensky urged Ukranians to remain calm and demanded proof of an impending Russian attack, as the U.S. and NATO insisted a crisis could explode at any time.

As Russia unleashes war in Ukraine, world leaders condemn attack

As Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashes war in Ukraine, world leaders in Europe and beyond condemn Russia’s aggression.

Feb. 25, 2022

Now, Russia has moved forward with its assault on Ukraine, with airstrikes targeting the country’s defenses, explosions echoing across cities and troops crossing the border by land and sea.

On Thursday, a presidential adviser said Russian forces succeeded in taking control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident in April 1986.

“Our defenders are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 will not be repeated,” Zelensky said on Twitter . “This is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe.”

What’s next?

As Zelensky deals with attacks on his home soil, President Biden on Thursday said he was imposing severe sanctions on Russia for its “premeditated attack” on Ukraine.

The sanctions are meant to “limit the ability of Russia to do business in dollars, euros, pounds and yen,” Biden said. “We are going to stunt the ability of [Moscow] to finance and grow the Russian military.”

The U.S. also will deploy approximately 7,000 additional service members to Europe. The move is meant to reassure NATO Allies and discourage further aggression from Russia.

Meanwhile, the U.N announced it is freeing $20 million for humanitarian needs in Ukraine.

“Stop the military operation. Bring the troops back to Russia,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged at U.N. headquarters in New York.

“It’s not too late to save this generation from the scourge of war,” Guterres said.

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Rachel Schnalzer Stewart is a former audience engagement editor for the Los Angeles Times. In addition to overseeing daily news engagement for the Business and World Nation sections, she managed promotion for projects such as Global California, Repowering the West and the Great SoCal House Hunt. Schnalzer Stewart has also served as the lead writer for the Times’ travel newsletter, Escapes, and Business newsletter. Schnalzer Stewart graduated from Johns Hopkins University and worked at BuzzFeed and Snap before joining The Times in 2019.

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3 years ago Zelenskyy was a TV comedian. Now he’s standing up to Putin’s army.

Three years ago, he was playing a president in a popular television comedy. Today, he is Ukraine’s president, confronting Russia’s fearsome military might .

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is leading his country during an invasion that threatens to explode into the worst conflict in Europe’s post-World War II history.

On Friday, as Russian troops reached Kyiv , he posted a defiant handheld video to social media showing him next to the presidential palace in the heart of the Ukrainian capital, surrounded by members of his Cabinet. 

“We are all here,” he said. “We are defending our independence, our country.” 

The message capped a head-spinning transformation of a man whose job used to be making jokes on television into a wartime leader. Who is this man at the helm as Ukraine faces the gravest of challenges? 

Zelenskyy, 44, who was elected president in 2019, was educated as a lawyer, but found his true calling as an entertainer.

Married to Olena Zelenska, with whom he has two children, he was born in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih in the then-Soviet Union to Jewish parents. 

His family’s story tracks his homeland’s and the continent’s bloody history: He has said three of his grandfather’s brothers were killed by Nazi occupiers, while his grandfather survived WWII.

Raised during communism, Zelenskyy went into politics months before the 2019 election with no prior experience or solid policies. Instead, he ran on a promise to inject integrity into his country’s leadership.

Unlike many of his counterparts in the region, his past did not turn him into a dour politician in the Soviet mold. On the contrary, his public persona is encapsulated by one of his best-known quips: “You don’t need experience to be president. You just need to be a decent human being.”

As a product of the entertainment industry, he is known for his personable style and his ability to speak to people of all kinds. 

“He is quite empathetic as a person. He finds good connections with people,” said Orysia Lutsevych, a research fellow at the London think tank Chatham House. “That’s why he’s successful in politics.” 

A native Russian speaker, Zelenskyy used his charisma and immense popularity to win a landslide victory , supported by voters in Ukraine’s south and east — where millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians felt disenfranchised by previous administrations. It is this alienation that Russia has tried to capitalize on by supporting separatists who have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years. 

This week’s invasion, which came after months of Russia massing troops on Ukraine’s borders and demands from President Vladimir Putin that NATO bar Ukraine from joining the military alliance, is not the first time Zelenskyy has been thrust into the spotlight. 

Just months into his presidency, a phone conversation in which then-President Donald Trump pressed him to investigate corruption allegations against Joe Biden garnered international attention. The scandal led to the first impeachment of Trump, who was acquitted in early 2020.

By this time, Zelenskyy had already disrupted the Ukrainian political system, bringing into the government people who wanted to modernize the country, Lutsevych said. 

He tried to rein in Ukraine’s rampant corruption and disrupt the existing pillars of power, but “didn’t muster enough political power to crack the bone of Ukrainian corruption within the system,” she added. 

At the same time, he’s been praised by many in Ukraine for keeping the country of 44 million firmly on a pro-Western path. Russia and Ukraine stayed aligned after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, but began drifting apart in the 2000s as Kyiv sought deeper integration with Europe. 

In 2014, pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych was swept from power after refusing to sign an association agreement with the European Union. 

The mere fact that Ukraine is a democracy has been threatening to the Kremlin, and Russian officials accuse Zelenskyy of being a Western “marionette.” He is often mocked by the Kremlin’s propagandists as being incapable. 

Zelenskyy has also been criticized for not delivering on his biggest campaign promise — to end the long-simmering war between government forces and the Moscow-backed separatists in Ukraine’s east. The conflict that has left 14,000 dead became a flashpoint last week after Russia officially recognized the breakaway territories, Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic. The move paved the way for the invasion days later. 

While rallying support for Ukraine as tensions rose in the run-up to the invasion, Zelenskyy chose to play down dire warnings coming out of Washington that Moscow was about to attack, saying it was hurting Ukraine’s already fragile economy and morale.

He spooked the markets and sent the foreign media into a frenzy earlier this month when — in his characteristically sarcastic style — he appeared to say in a speech that Russia would attack on Feb. 16, later clarifying he was only referring to media reports of an invasion on this date. 

Many questioned his calm tone as being too relaxed, even making him the butt of a joke for American late night show hosts. 

But as it became clear last week, Ukraine was running out of diplomatic options to appease Putin, and while Zelenskyy still preached calm, he took on a more serious tone. He insisted Ukraine was ready for any threat while calling for peace.

Assessing Zelenskyy’s performance in the lead-up to the invasion and as commander in chief, Valentyn Gladkykh, a Kyiv-based political analyst, told NBC News that the Ukrainian president had managed to morph into a wartime leader and, for now, Ukrainian society, including his peacetime opponents, seem to be supporting him.

“No Ukrainian president has ever dealt with a full-on invasion on his territory,” Gladkykh said. “Having encountered the unprecedented threat, Zelenskyy has shown his best side.” 

But his best side may not be enough — he and Ukraine are trapped in a true David and Goliath contest. Vast nuclear-powered Russia spans 11 time zones and its army counts as one of the largest in the world, leaving the army of Texas-size Ukraine outnumbered and outgunned. 

The contrast isn’t only down to size and military might. Within hours of Russia’s first strikes, the difference between Zelenskyy and his counterpart in the Kremlin could not have been more stark.

In his address to justify an incursion into Ukraine late Wednesday, a typically expressionless Putin spoke in his stern ex-KGB officer tone, invoking Russia’s nuclear arsenal and warning anyone who tries to stop him. 

“No one should have any doubts that a direct attack on our country will lead to defeat and dire consequences for any potential aggressor,” he said. 

A few hours earlier, a visibly exhausted Zelenskyy delivered an impassioned, last-minute plea for peace, appealing to Russian citizens directly — in Russian . 

“The people of Ukraine want peace,” he said, warning about the devastation that the war would bring to both people.

“If the Russian leaders don’t want to sit with us behind the table for the sake of peace, maybe they will sit behind the table with you,” Zelenskyy pleaded . “Do Russians want war? I would like to know the answer. But the answer depends only on you.”

Even as Putin’s bombs started falling on Ukrainian soil, Zelenskyy urged Russians to speak up against the war. He thanked those who did Friday, saying “keep fighting for us.”

There is widespread speculation among observers that Putin’s endgame in Ukraine might be to topple Zelenskyy and to install a president more willing to bend before Moscow. Last month, ​​Britain said the Kremlin was seeking to install a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as part of its plans for an invasion . 

“They want to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying its head of state,” Zelenskyy said Thursday, saying he was now “target No. 1” for the Russian forces, but vowed to remain in the capital. 

Later Friday, Putin urged Ukrainian soldiers to overthrow their government, even as he suggested he might be willing to enter talks while his forces continued their advance across the country .

But Zelenskyy is left with few options as the Russian offensive intensifies. He could concede ground to Moscow, a move that is likely to be unpopular with many Ukrainians, or hold his position and face the full wrath of the Russian army.

For now, he remains defiant. 

“It will continue like this,” he said in the video posted Friday. “Glory to our defenders, glory to Ukraine.” 

Yuliya Talmazan is a reporter for NBC News Digital, based in London.

Where Zelensky Comes From

V olodymyr Zelensky was already a celebrity when his first child was born in 2004. Back then, he and his wife Olena Zelenska often lived apart. He spent his days touring and promoting his comedy troupe in Kyiv, while she often stayed with her parents in their hometown of Kryvyi Rih, the city that Zelensky would later credit with forging his character. “My big soul, my big heart,” he once called it. “Everything I have I got from there.”

The name of the town translates as “Crooked Horn,” and in conversation Zelensky and his wife tend to refer to it in Russian as Krivoy—“the crooked place,” where both of them were born in the winter of 1978, about two weeks apart.

Few if any places in Ukraine had a worse reputation in those years for violence and urban decay. The main employer in the city was the metallurgical plant, whose gargantuan blast furnaces churned out more hot steel than any other facility in the Soviet Union. During World War II, the plant was leveled by the Luftwaffe as the Nazis began their occupation of Ukraine. It was rebuilt in the 1950s and ’60s, and many thousands of veterans went to work there. So did convicts released from Soviet labor camps .

Read More: How Volodymyr Zelensky Defended Ukraine and United the World

Most of them settled into blocks of industrial housing, hives of reinforced concrete that offered almost nothing in the way of leisure, culture, or self-development. There were not nearly enough theaters, gyms, or sports facilities to occupy the local kids. By the late 1980s, when the population peaked at over 750,000, the city devolved into what Zelensky would later describe as a “banditsky gorod” —a city of bandits.

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Olena remembers it more fondly than that. “It wasn’t full of bandits in my eyes,” she told me. “Maybe boys and girls run in different circles when they’re growing up. But yes, it’s true. There was a period in the ’90s when there was a lot of crime, especially among young people. There were gangs.”

The boys who joined these gangs, mostly teenagers, were known as beguny —literally, “runners”—because groups of them would run through the streets, beating and stabbing their rivals, flipping over cars, and smashing windows. Some of the gangs were known for using homemade explosives and improvised firearms, which they learned to fashion out of metal pipes stuffed with gunpowder and fishhooks. “Some of them got killed,” Olena said. According to local news reports, the death toll reached into the dozens by the mid-1990s.

Many more runners were maimed, beaten with clubs, or blinded with shrapnel from their homemade bombs. “Every neighborhood was in on it,” the First Lady said. “When kids of a certain age wandered into the wrong neighborhood, they could run up against a question: What part of town you from? And then the problems could start.” It was nearly impossible, she said, for teenage boys to avoid joining one of the gangs. “You could even be walking home in your own part of town, and they’d come up and ask what gang you’re with, what are you doing here. Just being on your own was scary. It wasn’t done.”

The gangs had their heyday in the late 1980s, when there were dozens of them around the city, with thousands of runners in all. Many of those who survived into the 1990s graduated into organized crime, which flourished in Kryvyi Rih during the sudden transition from communism to capitalism. Parts of the city turned into wastelands of racketeers and alcoholics. But Zelensky, thanks in large part to his family, avoided the pull of the streets.

His paternal grandfather, Semyon Zelensky, served as a senior officer in the city’s police force, investigating organized crime or, as his grandson later put it, “catching bad guys.” Stories of his service in the Second World War made a profound impression on the young Zelensky, as did the traumas of the Holocaust. Both sides of his family are Jewish, and they lost many of their own during the war.

Read More: Historians on What Putin Gets Wrong About ‘Denazification’ in Ukraine

His mother’s side of the family survived in large part because they were evacuated to Central Asia as the German occupation began in 1941. The following year, when he was still a teenager, Semyon Zelensky went to fight in the Red Army and wound up in command of a mortar platoon. All three of his brothers fought in the war, and none of them survived. Neither did their parents, Zelensky’s great-grandparents, who were killed during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine , along with over a million other Ukrainian Jews, in what became known as the “Holocaust by Bullets.”

Around their kitchen table, Zelensky’s relatives often brought up these tragedies and the crimes of the German occupiers. But little was ever said about the torments that Joseph Stalin inflicted on Ukraine. As a child, Zelensky remembers his grandmothers talking in vague terms about the years when Soviet soldiers came to confiscate the food grown in Ukraine, its vast harvests of grain and wheat all carted away at gunpoint. It was part of Stalin’s attempt in the early 1930s to remake Soviet society, and it led to a catastrophic famine known as the Holodomor —“murder by hunger”—that killed at least 3 million people in Ukraine.

In Soviet schools, the topic was taboo, including the schools where both of Zelensky’s grandmothers worked as teachers; one taught the Ukrainian language, the other taught Russian. When it came to the famine, Zelensky said, “They talked about it very carefully, that there was this period when the state took away everything, all the food.”

If they harbored any ill will toward Soviet authorities, Zelensky’s family knew better than to voice it in public. But his father Oleksandr, a stocky man of stubborn principles, refused throughout his life to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. “He was categorically against it,” Zelensky told me, “even though that definitely hurt his career.” As a professor of cybernetics, Oleksandr Zelensky worked most of his life in the fields of mining and geology. Zelensky’s mother Rymma, an engineer by training, was closer to their only son and gentler toward him, doting on the boy much more often than she punished him.

In 1982, when Zelensky was 4 years old, his father accepted a prestigious job at a mining development in northern Mongolia, and the family moved to the town of Erdenet, which had been founded only eight years earlier to exploit one of the world’s largest deposits of copper. (The name of the town in Mongolian means “with treasure.”) The job was well paid by Soviet standards, but it forced the family to endure the pollution around the mines and the hardships of life in a frontier town. The food was bland and unfamiliar. Fermented horse milk was a local staple, and the family’s diet was heavy on mutton, with the occasional summer watermelon for which Zelensky and his mother had to stand in line for hours.

Read More: How Ukraine is Pioneering New Ways to Prosecute War Crimes

Rymma, who was slender and frail, with a long nose and beautiful features, found her health deteriorating in the harsh climate, and she soon decided to move back to Ukraine. Zelensky was a first-grader in a Mongolian school, just beginning to pick up the local language, when they traveled home in 1987. His father stayed behind, and for the next 15 years—virtually all of Zelensky’s childhood—he split his time between Erdenet, where he continued to develop his automated system for managing the mines, and Kryvyi Rih, where he taught computer science at a local university. Zelensky’s parents were often separated in those years by five time zones and around 6,000 kilometers. Even at that distance, his father continued to be a dominant presence in Zelensky’s life.

“My parents gave me no free time,” he later said. “They were always signing me up for something.” His father enrolled Zelensky in one of his math courses at the university and began to prime the boy for a career in computer science. His mother sent him to piano lessons, ballroom-dance classes, and gymnastics. To make sure he could hold his own against the local toughs, Zelensky’s parents also got him into a class for Greco-Roman wrestling.

None of these activities were really his choice, but he went along with them out of a sense of duty to his parents. “They were always quick with the discipline,” he said. The approach his father took to education was particularly severe. Zelensky called it “maximalist.” But it was typical of Jewish families in the Soviet Union, who often felt that overachievement was the only way to get a fair shake in a system rigged against them. “You have to be better than everyone else,” Zelensky said in summarizing his parents’ approach to education. “Then there might be a space for you left among the best.”

Zelensky was the product of an era of change. He was too young to experience the Soviet Union as the stagnant, repressive gerontocracy his parents had known. By the time he returned to Ukraine with his mother, the stage was set for the empire’s collapse. Moscow was broke. Its grand experiment in socialism had failed. Mikhail Gorbachev , the reluctant reformer with the soft southern accent, had already begun his doomed attempts to reform the system without breaking it apart.

Even for someone Zelensky’s age, these changes were hard to miss. He could see them in the empty grocery shelves, the endless lines for basic goods, like sausage and toilet paper. And he saw them, clear as day, on television. Under Gorbachev, the censors on Soviet TV became a lot more permissive, reflecting the wider push to relax the state’s control over the media. One of the most popular TV shows of the era was known as KVN, which stands for “The Club of the Funny and Inventive.”

It was a comedy show, but not the kind that most people in the U.S. and Europe would associate with that term. This was not the stand-up of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. There was no minimalism here, no lonely cynic at the microphone, breaking taboos. KVN was more like a sports league for young comedians. It involved competing troupes of performers, often made up of college students, doing sketch acts and improv in front of a panel of judges, who decided at the end of the show which team was the funniest.

By the mid-1990s, the average university and many high schools in the Russian-speaking world had at least one KVN team. Many big cities had a dozen or more, all facing off in local competitions and vying for a place in the championship league. The material was mostly wooden, with a lot of knee slappers and humdingers. The teams were also expected to sing and dance. Still, in its own hokey way, KVN could be fun to watch. For Zelensky and his friends, it was an obsession.

Read More: Inside Zelensky’s World

Most of them went to School No. 95, about a block from the central bazaar in their hometown, and not far from the university where Zelensky’s father worked as a professor. Between classes and after school, they rehearsed sketches and comedy routines, riffing off the ones they saw in the professional league on TV. “We loved it all, the KVN, the humor, and we just did it for the soul, for the fun of it,” said Vadym Pereverzev, who met Zelensky in their seventh-grade English class.

The top KVN competitions in Moscow also offered a ticket to stardom that seemed a lot more accessible to them than Hollywood, and a lot more fun than the careers available to kids in a dead-end town like theirs. “It was a rough, working-class place, and you just wanted to escape,” Pereverzev told me. “I think that was one of our main motivations.”

Their amateur shows in the school auditorium soon got the attention of a local comedy troupe that performed at a theater for college students. One of them, Oleksandr Pikalov, a handsome kid with an infectious, dimply smile, came down to School No. 95 to scout the talent. He happened upon a rehearsal in which Zelensky played a fried egg, with something stuffed under his shirt to represent the yolk. The act impressed Pikalov, and they soon began performing together.

Two years older and already in college, Pikalov introduced Zelensky to a few of the movers and shakers from the local comedy scene, including the Shefir brothers, Boris and Serhiy, who were both around 30 years old at the time. They saw Zelensky’s potential, and they became his lifelong friends, mentors, producers, and, eventually, political advisers.

Around their neighborhood in the 1990s, Zelensky’s crew stood out from the start. Instead of the track pants and leather jackets that local hoodlums wore to school, their look was a kind of ’50s retro: plaid blazers and polka-dot ties, slacks with suspenders, pressed white shirts, long hair slicked back with too much gel. Zelensky wore a ring in his ear. At a time when Nirvana was on the radio, he and his friends sang Beatles songs and listened to old-timey rock ’n’ roll.

To them this felt like a form of rebellion, mostly because it was their own. Nobody acted like that in their city, and it didn’t always go over well. Once, in his late teens, Zelensky wanted to try busking in an underpass with his guitar. He had seen people do it in the movies. It looked romantic. But Pikalov warned him that he wouldn’t make it past the second song before somebody came over to kick his ass.

“Sure enough, half an hour goes by,” Pikalov told me. “Somebody comes over and busts the guitar.” But Zelensky was laughing. He had won the bet. “He said he made it through the third song.”

Soon his performances caught the attention of his future wife, Olena. The two of them had crossed paths in the hallways of School No. 95 in Kryvyi Rih. But their homeroom classes were rivals—“like the Montagues and the Capulets,” she once told the Guardian. It was only after graduation, when Zelensky was on his way to becoming a local celebrity, that they took a liking to each other.

Olena was also involved in the KVN scene. To make the connection, Pikalov, their mutual friend, borrowed a videocassette from her, a copy of Basic Instinct, and Zelensky used it as an excuse to visit her at home and return the tape. “Then we became more than friends,” she later told me. “We were also creative colleagues.” Their performances began winning competitions around Kryvyi Rih and in other parts of Ukraine. “We were together all the time,” Olena said. “And everything sort of developed in parallel.”

Their big break came at the end of 1997, when they performed at an international KVN contest in Moscow. More than 200 teams took part from around the former Soviet Union, and Zelensky’s team, then called Transit, tied for first place with a rival team from Armenia. It was a remarkable debut for Zelensky, but he felt robbed. A video survives of him in that period, a teenage heartthrob with a raspy voice, wiping his palms against his knees as he explains his anger to the camera: the show-runner had cheated, he said, by refusing to let the judges break the tie.

Though he catalogued such gripes with an endearing smile, Zelensky was clearly unwilling to share the crown with anyone. He needed to win. Years later, when he recalled these competitions from his childhood, Zelensky admitted that, for him, “Losing is worse than death.”

Read More: TIME’s Interview with Volodymyr Zelensky

Even if the championship in Moscow did not end in an outright victory for Zelensky, it put him within reach of stardom. One of his team members, Olena Kravets, said they could hardly imagine getting that kind of opportunity. To young comedians from a place like Kryvyi Rih, she said, the major league of KVN “was not just the foot of Mount Parnassus”—the home of the muses in Greek mythology—“this was Parnassus itself.”

Its summit stood in the northern part of Moscow, in the studios and greenrooms around the Ostankino television tower, home to the biggest broadcasters in the Russian-speaking world. The major league of KVN had its main production headquarters there, and Zelensky soon made it inside. The year after their breakout performance in Moscow, they competed for the first time under the name Kvartal 95—or District 95, a nod to the neighborhood where they grew up.

Along with the Shefir brothers, who served as the team’s lead writers and producers, Zelensky soon rented an apartment in the north of Moscow and devoted himself to -becoming the champion. For all KVN teams, that required winning the favor of the league’s perennial master of ceremonies, Alexander Maslyakov. A dapper old man with a Cheshire smile, Maslyakov owned the rights to the KVN brand and hosted all the biggest competitions. His nickname among the performers was the Baron, and he and his wife, the Baroness, ran the league like a family business.

“ KVN was their empire,” Pereverzev told me. “It was their show.” At first, the Baron took a liking to Zelensky and his crew, granting them admission to the biggest stage in Moscow and the touches of fame that it brought. But there were hundreds of other teams vying for his attention, and the competition among them was vicious. “Everyone there lived with this constant emotional tension,” Olena Zelenska told me. “You were always told to know your place. The whole time we were performing in Moscow, they always told us: ‘Remember where you came from. Learn to hold a microphone. This is Central Television. You should feel lucky.’ And that’s how all the teams lived, though not so much the lucky ones from Moscow. They were loved.”

In the major league of KVN, Zelensky came face-to-face with a brand of Russian chauvinism that would, in far uglier form, manifest itself about two decades later in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As Zelenska put it when we talked about the KVN league, “Those who were not from Moscow were always treated like slaves.”

The informal hierarchy, she said, corresponded to Moscow’s vision of itself as an imperial capital. “Teams from Ukraine were of course even farther down the ladder than all the Russian cities. They could, for instance, put up with Ryazan”—a city in western Russia—“but a place like Kryvyi Rih was something else. They’d never even seen it on a map. So we always needed to prove ourselves.”

The unwritten rules within the league reflected the role KVN played in the Russian-speaking world. Amid the ruins of the Soviet Union, it stood out as a rare institution of culture that still bound Moscow to its former vassal states. It gave kids a reason to stay within Russia’s cultural matrix rather than gravitating westward, toward Hollywood. The league had outposts in every corner of the former empire, from Moldova to Tajikistan, and all of them performed in the Russian language.

Even teams from the Baltic states, the first countries to break away from Moscow’s rule in 1990 and 1991, took part in the KVN league; its biggest annual gathering was held in Latvia, on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Viewed in a generous light, these contests could be seen as a vehicle for Russian soft power in much the same way that American movies defined what good guys and bad guys are supposed to look like for viewers around the world. To be less generous, the league could be construed as a Kremlin-backed program of cultural colonialism.

In either case, the center of gravity for KVN was always Moscow, and nostalgia for the Soviet Union was a touchstone for every team that hoped to win. Zelensky’s team was no exception, especially since their best shot at victory in the early 2000s coincided with a change of power in the Kremlin. With the election of Vladimir Putin in 2000, the Russian state embraced the symbols and icons of its imperial past, and it encouraged its people to stop being ashamed of the Soviet Union. One of Putin’s first acts in office was to change the melody of the Russian national anthem back to the Soviet one.

When it came to KVN, Putin was always an ardent supporter. He often attended KVN championships, and he liked to take the stage and offer pep talks to the performers. In return, they made him the occasional subject of jokes, though none were ever very pointed. One of the first, when he was still the Prime Minister in 1999, made fun of his soaring poll numbers after the Russian bombing campaign of Chechnya began that summer: “His popularity has already outpaced that of Mickey Mouse,” said the performer, “and is approaching that of Beavis and Butt-Head.”

Seated in the hall next to his bodyguard, Putin snickered and slumped in his chair. Less than a year later, he made clear that sharper jokes in his direction would not be tolerated. In February 2000, during Putin’s first presidential campaign, a satirical TV show called Kukly, or Puppets, depicted him as a gnome whose evil spell makes people believe he is a beautiful princess. Several of Putin’s campaign surrogates called for the Russian authors of the sketch to be imprisoned. The show soon got canceled, and the network that aired it was taken over by a state-run firm.

Read More: Column: How Putin Cannibalizes Russian Economy to Survive Personally

Zelensky, living and working in Moscow at the time, watched the turn toward authoritarianism in Russia with the same concern as all his peers in show business, and, like everyone else, he adapted. To stay on top, his team understood it would not be wise to make fun of Russia’s new leader. During one sketch in 2001, Zelensky’s character appealed to Putin as the decider “not only of my fate, but that of all Ukraine.” A year later, in a performance that brimmed with nostalgia for the Soviet Union, a member of Zelensky’s team said Putin “turned out to be a decent guy.”

But such direct references to the Russian President were rare in Zelensky’s early comedy. More often he joked about the fraught relationship between Ukraine and Russia , as in his most famous sketch from 2001, performed during the Ukrainian KVN championships. Titled “Man Born to Dance,” it cast Zelensky in the role of a Russian who can’t stop dancing as he tells a Ukrainian about his life. The script is bland and the humor juvenile. Zelensky grabs his crotch like Michael Jackson and borrows the mime-in-a-box routine from Bip the Clown.

At the end of the scene, the Russian and the Ukrainian take turns humping each other from behind. “Ukraine is always screwing Russia,” says Zelensky. “And Russia always screws Ukraine.” The punch line did not come close to the kind of satire Putin’s Russia needed and deserved. But as a piece of physical comedy, the sketch is memorable, even brilliant. Zelensky’s movements, much more than his words, seem to infect the audience with a kind of wide-mouthed glee as he shimmies and high-kicks his way through the lines in a pair of skintight leather pants.

The most magnetic thing about the sketch is him, the grin on his face, the obvious pleasure he gets from every second on the stage. The judges loved it, and that night, before a TV audience of millions, Zelensky’s team became the undisputed champions of the league in their native Ukraine. But, on the biggest stages in Moscow, victory would continue to elude them, and their troupe did not last long in the major leagues of KVN.

After competing and losing in the international championships three years in a row, they gathered up their props and left Moscow in 2003. Members of Zelensky's team agree their departure was far from amicable, though they all seem to remember it a little differently. One of them told me the breaking point with KVN was an antisemitic slur. During a rehearsal, a Russian producer stood on the stage and said loudly, in reference to Zelensky, “Where’s that little yid?”

In Zelensky’s version of the story, the management in Moscow offered him a job as a producer and writer on Russian television. It would require him to disband his troupe and send them back to Ukraine without him. Zelensky refused, and they all went home together. Halfway through their 20s, they were now successful showmen and celebrities across Ukraine. But it was still difficult for Zelensky’s parents to accept comedy as his career.

“Without a doubt,” his father said years later, “we advised him to do something different, and we thought the interest in KVN was temporary, that he would change, that he would choose a profession. After all, he’s a lawyer. He finished our institute.” Indeed, Zelensky had completed his studies and earned a law degree while performing in KVN. But he had no intention of practicing law. He found it boring.

When he got back home to Ukraine, Zelensky and his friends staged a series of weddings in their hometown of Kryvyi Rih, three Saturdays in a row. Olena Kiyashko married Volodymyr Zelensky on Sept. 6, 2003, and Pikalov and Pereverzev married their respective girlfriends. By the end of the year, when Olena was pregnant with their daughter, Zelensky moved to Kyiv to build up his new production company, Studio Kvartal 95.

Even at this early stage in his career, Zelensky’s confidence went beyond the typical swagger of a young man smitten with success. He betrayed no doubts in his team’s ability to make it big, and if he felt any fear he hid it from everyone, including his wife. For an expectant father in his mid-20s, the job offered to him in Moscow must have been more tempting than he let on. Apart from the money, it would have placed him among the glitterati, the producers and showrunners in the biggest market in the Russian-speaking world.

Read More: Inside Zelensky’s Plan to Beat Putin’s Propaganda in Russian-Occupied Ukrain e

Instead he took a risk and struck out in a much smaller pond, relying on the team of friends who looked to him for leadership and made him feel at home wherever he went. Upon arriving in Kyiv, Zelensky scored a meeting with one of the country’s biggest media executives, Alexander Rodnyansky, the head of the network that produced and broadcast the KVN league in Ukraine. The executive knew Zelensky from that circuit as a “bright young Jewish kid,” he told me. But he didn’t expect the kid to stride into his office with a risky business proposition.

Accompanied by the Shefir brothers, who were a decade older and more experienced in the industry, Zelensky did the talking. He wanted to appear with his troupe on the biggest stage in Kyiv for a nationally televised performance, and he needed Rodnyansky to give him the airtime and bankroll part of the production, marketing, and other costs. “The chutzpah on this guy, that’s what I remember,” the executive told me. “He had this bulletproof belief in himself, with these burning eyes.”

Many years later, Rodnyansky would come to see the danger hidden in that quality. It would lead Zelensky to the false belief that in the role of President , he could outmaneuver Putin and negotiate his way out of a full-scale war. “I think that confidence of his betrayed him in the end,” he said. But at the time, Zelensky’s charm won out in the negotiations with Rodnyansky, who agreed to take a risk on the performance.

It proved to be such a success that, shortly after, the team at Kvartal 95 reached a deal to make a series of variety shows that would air in Russia and Ukraine. Their tone departed from the more wholesome, aw-shucks style of KVN. The jokes took on a harder edge, and they became much more overtly political. Pereverzev, who was a writer on the shows, told me their aim was to make a version of Saturday Night Live with elements of Monty Python.

It was an untested concept on Ukrainian TV. There was no way to tell whether the audience was ready. “That was Green’s style,” he said, using Zelensky’s nickname. (The word for “green” in Ukrainian and Russian is the same: zeleny. ) “That was his main quality as a leader. He’d just say, ‘Let’s do it.’ Then we’d all get scared, and he would just tell us to trust him. All our lives it was like that. And at some point we just started to trust him, because when he said it would work out, it did.”

Excerpted from THE SHOWMAN: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster, to be published January 23 by William Morrow. Copyright © 2024 by Simon Shuster. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

Correction, Jan. 5: The original version of this story misstated when Zelensky's first child was born. It was 2004, not 2003.

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What to know about Volodymyr Zelensky, former comedian turned Ukraine's wartime president

By Christopher Brito

February 28, 2022 / 2:06 PM EST / CBS News

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has become the face of his country's spirited defense against  Russian aggression . Throughout the conflict, he has sought to reassure his people by providing selfie-style  video updates in Ukraine and even offering words of encouragement during dire moments. 

"The world saw: Ukrainians are strong," he said Friday after the second day of Russian attacks. "Ukrainians are brave. Ukrainians are on their native land and [they] will never give it to anyone." 

"Strong...powerful...brave": In a video address on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated that Ukraine's citizens will not back down from Russian aggression. https://t.co/PQqwJkzgsp pic.twitter.com/0ccj89uPfT — CBS News (@CBSNews) February 27, 2022

In spite of his calming presence, CBS News foreign correspondent Holly Williams reported Monday there are "grave fears" for Zelensky's safety. Zelensky himself said he and his family are Russia's top targets. Yet, even in the face of danger, he reportedly told U.S. officials,  "I need ammunition, not a ride" after they offered to transport him to safety – and it has become a signature tagline associated with the president. 

As anti-war protests worldwide popped up in many major cities, he has become a resistance symbol against Russian President Vladimir Putin at those rallies. But before he got into politics, Zelensky was used to the spotlight in the homes of Ukrainians.  

From TV president to real president 

Zelensky was a popular actor and comedian before leading the country of 44 million people . He was known for his role on the TV comedy "Servant of the People" where he played a foul-mouthed teacher who unexpectedly becomes president after a video of his rant against corruption in the government went viral. 

He ran on a similar platform while running for office, embraced the name of his show for his party's name and defeated former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko in a runoff in 2019, with more than 70% of the vote. 

Ukraine's "Dancing with Stars" winner

More than a decade before he became president, Zelensky won the first season of Ukraine's version of "Dancing with the Stars" in 2006. A clip of his different dances on the show went viral over the weekend. 

so apparently Zelenskyy won the Ukrainian version of Dancing with the Stars in 2006 and the tape is even better than whatever you're imagining pic.twitter.com/L1gnKD2ISr — Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) February 27, 2022

Zelensky's origins

The 44-year-old father of two children grew up in Kryvyi Rih, which is located in southeastern Ukraine. The wartime president speaks Russian fluently and partly ran on platform that he could negotiate peace with Russia. 

He is also Jewish and had family members die in the Holocaust. His grandfather fought in the Soviet Army against Nazi Germany.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aides have accused the Ukrainian government of being "neo-Nazis, " which some believe was as a way for Putin to justify its attacks on the country. Zelensky fought back against those claims. 

"The Ukraine on your news and Ukraine in real life are two completely different countries — and the main difference between them is: Ours is real. You are told we are Nazis. But could a people who lost more than 8 million lives in the battle against Nazism support Nazism?" he said in a video Thursday addressed to the Russian public, according to Politico.  

"How can I be a Nazi? Explain it to my grandfather, who went through the entire war in the infantry of the Soviet army, and died a colonel in an independent Ukraine," he said. 

As attacks against Ukraine continue, Zelensky called on the European Union to urgently consider admitting his country as a member of the bloc on Monday while talks came and went between Ukrainian and Russian officials. 

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Christopher Brito is a social media manager and trending content writer for CBS News.

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The Zelensky Story

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The story of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, charting his journey from young actor and entertainer to president of Ukraine, governing a nation at war with Vladimir Putin's Russia. The story of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, charting his journey from young actor and entertainer to president of Ukraine, governing a nation at war with Vladimir Putin's Russia. The story of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, charting his journey from young actor and entertainer to president of Ukraine, governing a nation at war with Vladimir Putin's Russia.

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Zelensky: A Biography of Ukraine's War Leader Hardcover – August 4, 2022

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Ukraine Names Candidates for Its New Cabinet in Major Overhaul

President Volodymyr Zelensky said that he was acting to bring a “new energy” to state institutions at an important diplomatic juncture.

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By Marc Santora and Maria Varenikova

Marc Santora reported from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Maria Varenikova from Poltava, Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed ahead with his sweeping overhaul of the senior government ranks as the head of Ukraine’s ruling party released a slate of nine candidates for top cabinet positions Wednesday evening.

If Parliament approves the new candidates, which is expected, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, who resigned earlier Wednesday, will be replaced by Andrii Sybiha, the first deputy foreign minister, according to the party head, David Arakhamia.

The political upheaval came after a series of blistering Russian missile attacks and battlefield gains in recent weeks and before a vital trip by Mr. Zelensky to Washington, where he plans to reveal a “victory plan” for the war.

Mr. Zelensky said Wednesday that he was acting to bring a “new energy” to state institutions, hours after rescue workers pulled bodies from the wreckage of an overnight missile attack that killed seven people in the historic city center of Lviv, near the Polish border.

In one heart-wrenching scene, Yaroslav Bazylevych stood on the ancient cobblestone streets, covered in dust and blood, being stitched up by paramedics as rescue workers pulled the lifeless bodies of his wife and three daughters from the ruins.

“I don’t know what words to use to support the father,” the mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, said in a statement.

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