The victory of the former comedian Volodymyr Zelensky in the presidential elections in Ukraine came as a surprise to many. At the same time, there were serious prerequisites for this.

When Zelensky appeared, many had the hope that he would become exactly the new word in politics. Allegedly, this is the blank slate from which you can start a new policy. Moreover, many watched the series `Servant of the People '' and saw in Zelensky’s character the image of an ideal president.

Many believed that Zelensky, who was not politically sophisticated, would not repeat the mistakes of his predecessors. Plus, voting for Zelensky in the second round was a protest. It was a verdict on Petro Poroshenko and his era. Zelensky was such an anti-Poroshenko. In general, there were many explanations.

You can read below more interesting facts.

1. As a child, he lived for 4 years in the city of Erdenet in Mongolia, where his mother worked as an engineer, and his father, a scientist, participated in the construction of a mining and processing plant. 

2. Zelensky's father, Alexander Semenovich, is a Doctor of Technical Sciences, since 1995 the head of the Department of Informatics and Information Technology of the Krivoy Rog Institute of Economics.

3. At the age of 16, Vladimir won a grant for free education in Israel, but did not go abroad because his father was against it. Zelensky received his higher education at the Faculty of Law of a branch of the Kiev National Economic University named after Hetman. He did not work in his specialty. 

4. He received his first widespread fame in the Club of the Cheerful and Resourceful (KVN) as a member of the student team. 

5. In 1997, Zelensky created the 95th Quarter team (named after one of the districts of Krivoy Rog). Zelensky was the captain and the author of most of the numbers.

6. In 1998-2003, the 95th Quarter team regularly performed in the Higher League of KVN and constantly toured in Russia and the CIS countries. After a conflict with the leadership of the Club in 2003, Zelensky and the team left KVN. 

7. For the first time the TV show "Evening Quarter" appeared in 2005 on the Ukrainian TV channel "Inter". During 2010-2012, Zelensky twice, intermittently, served as the general producer of Inter. 

8. He left his post, referring to the creative plans of Kvartal 95. To date, Vladimir Zelensky has starred, or was both an actor and producer, in more than 10 full-length feature films.

In 2017, the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine registered the Servant of the People party, which a year later nominated Volodymyr Zelensky as a presidential candidate. 

9. The name of the party repeats the name of the film in which the actor played the main role - the president of the country.

10. Previously, Zelensky had not played roles in Ukrainian. In 2017, in an interview, he said that he began to study the Ukrainian language with a tutor.

11. In 2016, during a festival in Jurmala (Latvia), in one of the performances of the Kvartal 95 band, Zelensky called Ukraine a “beggar”, as well as an “actress of a German film for adults”, who is “ready to accept any amount (credits - KR) with any sides." 

12. This caused outrage, and subsequently the showman explained in his post on Facebook that he meant power, and not the country as a whole. 

13. In January 2018, another scandal unfolded around the Kvartal 95 studio, during which the actors were accused of homophobia. 

14. This happened because of one of the humorous numbers in their New Year's concert, where sexual minorities were ridiculed. The number was shown in the New Year's edition of "Evening Quarter", aired on the Ukrainian TV channel "1 + 1" on December 31, 2017. 

15. Subsequently, the studio withdrew the video of the joke from public access and publicly apologized to representatives of sexual minorities for this joke, noting that the authors "did not intend to offend anyone."

16. On New Year's Eve from December 31, 2018 to January 1, 2019, instead of the traditional greeting of the President of Ukraine, Zelensky's greeting was first heard on the 1 + 1 TV channel, in which he announced his candidacy for the presidential election. 

17. Petro Poroshenko's greeting was broadcast already in the first minutes of January 1, 2019 after Zelensky's speech. Subsequently, Zelensky himself suggested that his statement of intent to run for president was shown instead of the traditional New Year's speech by the President of Ukraine due to a "technical error." However, later "1 + 1", responding to a request from Radio Liberty, reported that there were no technical errors on New Year's Eve.

18. Vladimir Zelensky was born in Krivoy Rog in a Jewish family. His father Alexander Zelensky is a doctor of technical sciences, since 1995 he has been the head of the Department of Informatics and Information Technologies of the Kryvyi Rih Economic Institute. Mother - Rimma Vladimirovna Zelenskaya - engineer.

19. In the senior year of the school, Vladimir won a grant for free education in Israel, but did not go abroad because his father was against it. Zelensky received his higher education at the Faculty of Law of a branch of the Kiev National Economic University named after Hetman. He did not work in his specialty.

20. In his student years, Zelensky became very interested in KVN, where he received his first popularity. In 1997, Zelensky created the 95th Quarter team (named after one of the districts of Krivoy Rog). Zelensky was the captain and the author of most of the numbers.

21. For the next five years, KVN became the main thing in Zelensky's life, he took part in the Major League games and actively toured the CIS. However, in 2003, after a scandal with the leadership of KVN, the Zelensky team stopped working with them.

22. In 2005, the author's program of Zelensky and his colleagues from Kvartal 95, Evening Quarter, appeared on the screens of Ukrainian television.

23. Also, Zelensky's production center begins to shoot films, where the comedian himself is actively filming. To date, Vladimir Zelensky has starred, or was both an actor and producer, in more than 10 full-length feature films.

24. In 2015, the series Servant of the People was released, in which Zelensky played the main role of the history teacher Vasily Goloborodok, who became the president of Ukraine. In 2017, Zelensky registered the political party of the same name with the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine.

25. On New Year's Eve 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky announces that he will run for President of Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on everyone to join in compiling his election program. “We will write my program together with you. We will write together with the people, the whole country, then we will find ways to solve all problems, and then we will bring them to life,” Zelensky promised in his video message.

26. On March 31, 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky won the most votes in the first round of the presidential election - 30.24%, getting into the second round together with the incumbent President Petro Poroshenko.

27. On April 21, 2019, in the second round of the presidential election, Vladimir Zelensky gained almost three times more votes than Petro Poroshenko.

28. Vladimir Zelensky is married and has two children: daughter Alexandra and son Kirill. His wife Olena Zelenskaya, the first lady of Ukraine, is active in public activities and popularizes Ukraine abroad. In Ukraine, she began to change the diet in school canteens. Zelenskaya also actively uses Ukrainian fashion as a way of cultural diplomacy.

29. Despite the growth of 166 centimeters, in his school years he was engaged in Greco-Roman wrestling and weightlifting and even earned the first category in the barbell.

30. He received a law degree at the Krivoy Rog Economic Institute, but did not work in his specialty, as he became interested in the stage early.

31. Vladimir Zelensky met his wife Elena at school. They started dating in high school, and legalized relations after 7 years.

32. At the turn of the nineties and zero, the Zelensky Kvartal-95 team actively participated in KVN. In 2003, Alexander Maslyakov invited Vladimir to stay in Moscow as the editor of KVN, but on the condition that he would leave his comrades for this. Then the future president of Ukraine decided to return to his homeland.

33. Kvartal-95 became more successful than Comedy Club

34. At the end of 2003, the Ukrainian channel 1 + 1 offered the 95th quarter to give concerts around the country with the brightest numbers of the team, and since 2005, the satirical show Evening Quarter started on the Inter channel, authored by Zelensky. It became so successful that it overtook Russian KVN and Comedy Club in terms of popularity among Ukrainian viewers.

35. The show with the participation of Zelensky overtook the President's New Year's address in ratings

36. By the time of participation in the show "Dancing with the Stars", Zelensky's rating in his homeland was simply going through the roof. The TV show gathered a record number of viewers at the screens - 87.57 percent of the total TV audience, and the final gala concert surpassed even the president's New Year's address in ratings.

37. In the series and feature film Servant of the People, Zelensky played a teacher who nominates himself for election and becomes the president of Ukraine. It should be noted that the lawyers of Kvartal-95 registered the political party Servant of the People back in 2017, Sputnik news agency reports.

38. Vladimir Zelensky is sometimes very distracted, often forgets where certain things are, and is constantly looking for them, his wife Elena Zelenskaya said in an interview with the Apostrophe portal.

39. “He does not know where everything is, he is constantly looking for everything. Previously, he didn’t have the keys to the apartment at all, and only last year we gave them to him ... Now he is looking for these keys every day, ”Zelenskaya admitted.

40. She also noted Volodymyr Zelensky's honesty, purposefulness, and decency. She does not imagine that a husband could offend a woman or yell at a child.

41. Ukrainian TV presenter Valery Zhidkov claims that Zelensky once helped save the life of his mother-in-law, who was refused hospitalization by an ambulance.

“He immediately connected, started calling someone, and finally got through to the person who eventually helped us,” says Zhidkov.

41. Zelensky supported Euromaidan and spoke to its participants. In the war in Donbass, he supported the actions of the Ukrainian army, donated one million hryvnias (about 2.41 million rubles) for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In his speeches, Kvartal-95 began to ridicule Russian politicians and residents of Russia, the DPR and the LPR.

42. At the same time, Zelensky began to have difficulties in Russia. The show “Evening Quarter” was canceled on Russian television, and in February 2015, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, at the request of the deputy of the Moscow municipal district of Yakimanka Dmitry Zakharov, began checking information about funding by Zelensky, as well as other Ukrainian cultural figures of the Ukrainian security forces.

43. At the same time, Zelensky opposed the ban on Russian cultural figures from entering Ukraine and sharply criticized the initiative of the SBU to ban the TV series “Matchmakers” (produced by “Kvartal-95”) on the territory of Ukraine.

44. At the end of 2018, he launched a flash mob in which he reacted to the actions of the MP from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, Oleg Barn. The latter obscenely sent a journalist in response to a question about button-pressing in the Verkhovna Rada. Zelensky "from representatives" of the media also sent a deputy.

45. In an interview with journalist Dmitry Gordon, the showman said that he had no business in Russia, and he stopped all business contacts with the Russian Federation in 2014. But already in mid-January 2019, journalists from the Scheme program of Radio Liberty found Zelensky’s film business in Russia.

46. Zelensky has two children.

47. He received a legal education at the Krivoy Rog Economic Institute of the Kiev National Economic University. Never worked in his specialty.

48. In 2006, Zelensky won the Ukrainian TV project Dancing with the Stars. In 2011, he became the co-host of Philip Kirkorov in the Russian version of the show "X-Factor" - "Factor A". In 2013, he hosted the musical show “I Want V VIA Gru”.

49. As a child, he had a rather low voice, because of which the boy was very worried, but at some point he realized that this feature was his trump card.

50. Zelensky's height is 166 centimeters. He was engaged in weightlifting, earned the first category in the barbell, but then he quit: he was afraid that he would not grow up.