Volodymyr Zelensky was already a star when his first youngster was born in 2004. Again then, he and his spouse Olena Zelenska usually lived aside. He spent his days touring and selling his comedy troupe in Kyiv, whereas she usually stayed together with her dad and mom of their hometown of Kryvyi Rih, the town that Zelensky would later credit score with forging his character. My massive soul, my massive coronary heart, he as soon as known as it. All the pieces I’ve I received from there.
The title of the city interprets as Crooked Horn, and in dialog Zelensky and his spouse are likely to check with it in Russian as Krivoythe crooked place, the place each of them had been born within the winter of 1978, about two weeks aside.
Few if any locations in Ukraine had a worse fame in these years for violence and concrete decay. The primary employer within the metropolis was the metallurgical plant, whose gargantuan blast furnaces churned out extra scorching metal than another facility within the Soviet Union. Throughout World Battle II, the plant was leveled by the Luftwaffe because the Nazis started their occupation of Ukraine. It was rebuilt within the Fifties and 60s, and lots of hundreds of veterans went to work there. So did convicts launched from Soviet labor camps.
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Most of them settled into blocks of business housing, hives of strengthened concrete that supplied virtually nothing in the best way of leisure, tradition, or self-development. There weren’t almost sufficient theaters, gyms, or sports activities services to occupy the native youngsters. By the late Nineteen Eighties, when the inhabitants peaked at over 750,000, the town devolved into what Zelensky would later describe as a banditsky goroda metropolis of bandits.
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Olena remembers it extra fondly than that. It wasnt filled with bandits in my eyes, she instructed me. Possibly girls and boys run in several circles when theyre rising up. However sure, its true. There was a interval within the 90s when there was plenty of crime, particularly amongst younger folks. There have been gangs.
The boys who joined these gangs, largely youngsters, had been referred to as begunyactually, runnersbecause teams of them would run via the streets, beating and stabbing their rivals, flipping over vehicles, and smashing home windows. A number of the gangs had been recognized for utilizing home made explosives and improvised firearms, which they realized to vogue out of steel pipes full of gunpowder and fishhooks. A few of them received killed, Olena stated. In response to native information experiences, the loss of life toll reached into the handfuls by the mid-Nineteen Nineties.
Many extra runners had been maimed, crushed with golf equipment, or blinded with shrapnel from their home made bombs. Each neighborhood was in on it, the First Girl stated. When youngsters of a sure age wandered into the fallacious neighborhood, they may run up towards a query: What a part of city you from? After which the issues may begin. It was almost unattainable, she stated, for teenage boys to keep away from becoming a member of one of many gangs. You can even be strolling house in your individual a part of city, and theyd come up and ask what gang youre with, what are you doing right here. Simply being by yourself was scary. It wasnt finished.
The gangs had their heyday within the late Nineteen Eighties, when there have been dozens of them across the metropolis, with hundreds of runners in all. A lot of those that survived into the Nineteen Nineties graduated into organized crime, which flourished in Kryvyi Rih throughout the sudden transition from communism to capitalism. Components of the town become wastelands of racketeers and alcoholics. However Zelensky, thanks largely to his household, prevented the pull of the streets.
His paternal grandfather, Semyon Zelensky, served as a senior officer within the citys police drive, investigating organized crime or, as his grandson later put it, catching dangerous guys. Tales of his service within the Second World Battle made a profound impression on the younger Zelensky, as did the traumas of the Holocaust. Either side of his household are Jewish, they usually misplaced a lot of their very own throughout the battle.
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His moms facet of the household survived largely as a result of they had been evacuated to Central Asia because the German occupation started in 1941. The next yr, when he was nonetheless a young person, Semyon Zelensky went to combat within the Pink Military and wound up in charge of a mortar platoon. All three of his brothers fought within the battle, and none of them survived. Neither did their dad and mom, Zelenskys great-grandparents, who had been killed throughout the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, together with over 1,000,000 different Ukrainian Jews, in what turned referred to as the Holocaust by Bullets.
Round their kitchen desk, Zelenskys family usually introduced up these tragedies and the crimes of the German occupiers. However little was ever stated in regards to the torments that Joseph Stalin inflicted on Ukraine. As a toddler, Zelensky remembers his grandmothers speaking in obscure phrases in regards to the years when Soviet troopers got here to confiscate the meals grown in Ukraine, its huge harvests of grain and wheat all carted away at gunpoint. It was a part of Stalins try within the early Thirties to remake Soviet society, and it led to a catastrophic famine referred to as the Holodomormurder by hungerthat killed no less than 3 million folks in Ukraine.
In Soviet faculties, the subject was taboo, together with the colleges the place each of Zelenskys grandmothers labored as academics; one taught the Ukrainian language, the opposite taught Russian. When it got here to the famine, Zelensky stated, They talked about it very rigorously, that there was this era when the state took away every part, all of the meals.
In the event that they harbored any unwell will towards Soviet authorities, Zelenskys household knew higher than to voice it in public. However his father Oleksandr, a stocky man of cussed ideas, refused all through his life to hitch the Communist Celebration of the Soviet Union. He was categorically towards it, Zelensky instructed me, regardless that that undoubtedly damage his profession. As a professor of cybernetics, Oleksandr Zelensky labored most of his life within the fields of mining and geology. Zelenskys mom Rymma, an engineer by coaching, was nearer to their solely son and gentler towards him, doting on the boy way more usually than she punished him.
In 1982, when Zelensky was 4 years outdated, his father accepted a prestigious job at a mining growth in northern Mongolia, and the household moved to the city of Erdenet, which had been based solely eight years earlier to take advantage of one of many worlds largest deposits of copper. (The title of the city in Mongolian means with treasure.) The job was nicely paid by Soviet requirements, but it surely compelled the household to endure the air pollution across the mines and the hardships of life in a frontier city. The meals was bland and unfamiliar. Fermented horse milk was an area staple, and the familys eating regimen was heavy on mutton, with the occasional summer season watermelon for which Zelensky and his mom needed to stand in line for hours.
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Rymma, who was slender and frail, with an extended nostril and delightful options, discovered her well being deteriorating within the harsh local weather, and he or she quickly determined to maneuver again to Ukraine. Zelensky was a first-grader in a Mongolian college, simply starting to choose up the native language, once they traveled house in 1987. His father stayed behind, and for the following 15 yearsvirtually all of Zelenskys childhoodhe break up his time between Erdenet, the place he continued to develop his automated system for managing the mines, and Kryvyi Rih, the place he taught pc science at an area college. Zelenskys dad and mom had been usually separated in these years by 5 time zones and round 6,000 kilometers. Even at that distance, his father continued to be a dominant presence in Zelenskys life.
My dad and mom gave me no free time, he later stated. They had been at all times signing me up for one thing. His father enrolled Zelensky in certainly one of his math programs on the college and commenced to prime the boy for a profession in pc science. His mom despatched him to piano classes, ballroom-dance lessons, and gymnastics. To verify he may maintain his personal towards the native toughs, Zelenskys dad and mom additionally received him into a category for Greco-Roman wrestling.
None of those actions had been actually his alternative, however he went together with them out of a way of responsibility to his dad and mom. They had been at all times fast with the self-discipline, he stated. The method his father took to schooling was notably extreme. Zelensky known as it maximalist. However it was typical of Jewish households within the Soviet Union, who usually felt that overachievement was the one technique to get a good shake in a system rigged towards them. It’s a must to be higher than everybody else, Zelensky stated in summarizing his dad and mom method to schooling. Then there could be an area for you left among the many finest.
Zelensky was the product of an period of change. He was too younger to expertise the Soviet Union because the stagnant, repressive gerontocracy his dad and mom had recognized. By the point he returned to Ukraine along with his mom, the stage was set for the empires collapse. Moscow was broke. Its grand experiment in socialism had failed. Mikhail Gorbachev, the reluctant reformer with the gentle southern accent, had already begun his doomed makes an attempt to reform the system with out breaking it aside.
Even for somebody Zelenskys age, these modifications had been arduous to overlook. He may see them within the empty grocery cabinets, the limitless traces for fundamental items, like sausage and bathroom paper. And he noticed them, clear as day, on tv. Underneath Gorbachev, the censors on Soviet TV turned much more permissive, reflecting the broader push to calm down the states management over the media. Some of the standard TV exhibits of the period was referred to as KVN, which stands for The Membership of the Humorous and Creative.
It was a comedy present, however not the sort that most individuals within the U.S. and Europe would affiliate with that time period. This was not the stand-up of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy. There was no minimalism right here, no lonely cynic on the microphone, breaking taboos. KVN was extra like a sports activities league for younger comedians. It concerned competing troupes of performers, usually made up of school college students, doing sketch acts and improv in entrance of a panel of judges, who determined on the finish of the present which crew was the funniest.
By the mid-Nineteen Nineties, the common college and lots of excessive faculties within the Russian-speaking world had no less than one KVN crew. Many massive cities had a dozen or extra, all going through off in native competitions and vying for a spot within the championship league. The fabric was largely wood, with plenty of knee slappers and humdingers. The groups had been additionally anticipated to sing and dance. Nonetheless, in its personal hokey method, KVN may very well be enjoyable to observe. For Zelensky and his mates, it was an obsession.
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Most of them went to Faculty No. 95, a few block from the central bazaar of their hometown, and never removed from the college the place Zelenskys father labored as a professor. Between lessons and after college, they rehearsed sketches and comedy routines, riffing off those they noticed within the skilled league on TV. We cherished all of it, the KVN, the humor, and we simply did it for the soul, for the enjoyable of it, stated Vadym Pereverzev, who met Zelensky of their seventh-grade English class.
The highest KVN competitions in Moscow additionally supplied a ticket to stardom that appeared much more accessible to them than Hollywood, and much more enjoyable than the careers obtainable to youngsters in a dead-end city like theirs. It was a tough, working-class place, and also you simply needed to flee, Pereverzev instructed me. I feel that was certainly one of our major motivations.
Their novice exhibits within the college auditorium quickly received the eye of an area comedy troupe that carried out at a theater for school college students. Certainly one of them, Oleksandr Pikalov, a good-looking child with an infectious, dimply smile, got here right down to Faculty No. 95 to scout the expertise. He occurred upon a rehearsal during which Zelensky performed a fried egg, with one thing stuffed beneath his shirt to symbolize the yolk. The act impressed Pikalov, they usually quickly started performing collectively.
Two years older and already in school, Pikalov launched Zelensky to some of the movers and shakers from the native comedy scene, together with the Shefir brothers, Boris and Serhiy, who had been each round 30 years outdated on the time. They noticed Zelenskys potential, they usually turned his lifelong mates, mentors, producers, and, finally, political advisers.
Round their neighborhood within the Nineteen Nineties, Zelenskys crew stood out from the beginning. As a substitute of the monitor pants and leather-based jackets that native hoodlums wore to highschool, their look was a form of 50s retro: plaid blazers and polka-dot ties, slacks with suspenders, pressed white shirts, lengthy hair slicked again with an excessive amount of gel. Zelensky wore a hoop in his ear. At a time when Nirvana was on the radio, he and his mates sang Beatles songs and listened to old-timey rock n roll.
To them this felt like a type of insurrection, largely as a result of it was their very own. No person acted like that of their metropolis, and it didnt at all times go over nicely. As soon as, in his late teenagers, Zelensky needed to attempt busking in an underpass along with his guitar. He had seen folks do it within the motion pictures. It seemed romantic. However Pikalov warned him that he wouldnt make it previous the second music earlier than any person came to visit to kick his ass.
Positive sufficient, half an hour goes by, Pikalov instructed me. Any individual comes over and busts the guitar. However Zelensky was laughing. He had gained the wager. He stated he made it via the third music.
Quickly his performances caught the eye of his future spouse, Olena. The 2 of them had crossed paths within the hallways of Faculty No. 95 in Kryvyi Rih. However their homeroom lessons had been rivalslike the Montagues and the Capulets, she as soon as instructed the Guardian. It was solely after commencement, when Zelensky was on his technique to turning into an area celeb, that they took a liking to one another.
Olena was additionally concerned within the KVN scene. To make the connection, Pikalov, their mutual pal, borrowed a videocassette from her, a duplicate of Primary Intuition, and Zelensky used it as an excuse to go to her at house and return the tape. Then we turned greater than mates, she later instructed me. We had been additionally inventive colleagues. Their performances started profitable competitions round Kryvyi Rih and in different elements of Ukraine. We had been collectively on a regular basis, Olena stated. And every part type of developed in parallel.
Their massive break got here on the finish of 1997, once they carried out at a world KVN contest in Moscow. Greater than 200 groups took half from across the former Soviet Union, and Zelenskys crew, then known as Transit, tied for first place with a rival crew from Armenia. It was a outstanding debut for Zelensky, however he felt robbed. A video survives of him in that interval, a teenage heartthrob with a raspy voice, wiping his palms towards his knees as he explains his anger to the digicam: the show-runner had cheated, he stated, by refusing to let the judges break the tie.
Although he catalogued such gripes with an endearing smile, Zelensky was clearly unwilling to share the crown with anybody. He wanted to win. Years later, when he recalled these competitions from his childhood, Zelensky admitted that, for him, Shedding is worse than loss of life.
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Even when the championship in Moscow didn’t finish in an outright victory for Zelensky, it put him inside attain of stardom. Certainly one of his crew members, Olena Kravets, stated they may hardly think about getting that form of alternative. To younger comedians from a spot like Kryvyi Rih, she stated, the key league of KVN was not simply the foot of Mount Parnassusthe house of the muses in Greek mythologythis was Parnassus itself.
Its summit stood within the northern a part of Moscow, within the studios and greenrooms across the Ostankino tv tower, house to the largest broadcasters within the Russian-speaking world. The main league of KVN had its major manufacturing headquarters there, and Zelensky quickly made it inside. The yr after their breakout efficiency in Moscow, they competed for the primary time beneath the title Kvartal 95or District 95, a nod to the neighborhood the place they grew up.
Together with the Shefir brothers, who served because the groups lead writers and producers, Zelensky quickly rented an condo within the north of Moscow and devoted himself to -becoming the champion. For all KVN groups, that required profitable the favor of the leagues perennial grasp of ceremonies, Alexander Maslyakov. A dapper outdated man with a Cheshire smile, Maslyakov owned the rights to the KVN model and hosted all the largest competitions. His nickname among the many performers was the Baron, and he and his spouse, the Baroness, ran the league like a household enterprise.
KVN was their empire, Pereverzev instructed me. It was their present. At first, the Baron took a liking to Zelensky and his crew, granting them admission to the largest stage in Moscow and the touches of fame that it introduced. However there have been lots of of different groups vying for his consideration, and the competitors amongst them was vicious. Everybody there lived with this fixed emotional pressure, Olena Zelenska instructed me. You had been at all times instructed to know your house. The entire time we had been performing in Moscow, they at all times instructed us: Bear in mind the place you got here from. Be taught to carry a microphone. That is Central Tv. You need to really feel fortunate. And thats how all of the groups lived, although not a lot the fortunate ones from Moscow. They had been cherished.
Within the main league of KVN, Zelensky got here face-to-face with a model of Russian chauvinism that will, in far uglier type, present itself about 20 years later within the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As Zelenska put it after we talked in regards to the KVN league, Those that weren’t from Moscow had been at all times handled like slaves.
The casual hierarchy, she stated, corresponded to Moscows imaginative and prescient of itself as an imperial capital. Groups from Ukraine had been in fact even farther down the ladder than all of the Russian cities. They might, for example, put up with Ryazana metropolis in western Russiabut a spot like Kryvyi Rih was one thing else. Theyd by no means even seen it on a map. So we at all times wanted to show ourselves.
The unwritten guidelines inside the league mirrored the position KVN performed within the Russian-speaking world. Amid the ruins of the Soviet Union, it stood out as a uncommon establishment of tradition that also certain Moscow to its former vassal states. It gave youngsters a cause to remain inside Russias cultural matrix relatively than gravitating westward, towards Hollywood. The league had outposts in each nook of the previous empire, from Moldova to Tajikistan, and all of them carried out within the Russian language.
Even groups from the Baltic states, the primary nations to interrupt away from Moscows rule in 1990 and 1991, took half within the KVN league; its greatest annual gathering was held in Latvia, on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Seen in a beneficiant gentle, these contests may very well be seen as a car for Russian gentle energy in a lot the identical method that American motion pictures outlined what good guys and dangerous guys are imagined to appear to be for viewers world wide. To be much less beneficiant, the league may very well be construed as a Kremlin-backed program of cultural colonialism.
In both case, the middle of gravity for KVN was at all times Moscow, and nostalgia for the Soviet Union was a touchstone for each crew that hoped to win. Zelenskys crew was no exception, particularly since their finest shot at victory within the early 2000s coincided with a change of energy within the Kremlin. With the election of Vladimir Putin in 2000, the Russian state embraced the symbols and icons of its imperial previous, and it inspired its folks to cease being ashamed of the Soviet Union. Certainly one of Putins first acts in workplace was to vary the melody of the Russian nationwide anthem again to the Soviet one.
When it got here to KVN, Putin was at all times an ardent supporter. He usually attended KVN championships, and he preferred to take the stage and supply pep talks to the performers. In return, they made him the occasional topic of jokes, although none had been ever very pointed. One of many first, when he was nonetheless the Prime Minister in 1999, made enjoyable of his hovering ballot numbers after the Russian bombing marketing campaign of Chechnya started that summer season: His recognition has already outpaced that of Mickey Mouse, stated the performer, and is approaching that of Beavis and Butt-Head.
Seated within the corridor subsequent to his bodyguard, Putin snickered and slumped in his chair. Lower than a yr later, he made clear that sharper jokes in his course wouldn’t be tolerated. In February 2000, throughout Putins first presidential marketing campaign, a satirical TV present known as Kukly, or Puppets, depicted him as a gnome whose evil spell makes folks imagine he’s a phenomenal princess. A number of of Putins marketing campaign surrogates known as for the Russian authors of the sketch to be imprisoned. The present quickly received canceled, and the community that aired it was taken over by a state-run agency.
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Zelensky, dwelling and dealing in Moscow on the time, watched the flip towards authoritarianism in Russia with the identical concern as all his friends in present enterprise, and, like everybody else, he tailored. To remain on high, his crew understood it might not be smart to make enjoyable of Russias new chief. Throughout one sketch in 2001, Zelenskys character appealed to Putin because the decider not solely of my destiny, however that of all Ukraine. A yr later, in a efficiency that brimmed with nostalgia for the Soviet Union, a member of Zelenskys crew stated Putin turned out to be an honest man.
However such direct references to the Russian President had been uncommon in Zelenskys early comedy. Extra usually he joked in regards to the fraught relationship between Ukraine and Russia, as in his most well-known sketch from 2001, carried out throughout the Ukrainian KVN championships. Titled Man Born to Dance, it solid Zelensky within the position of a Russian who cant cease 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.
On the finish of the scene, the Russian and the Ukrainian take turns humping one another from behind. Ukraine is at all times screwing Russia, says Zelensky. And Russia at all times screws Ukraine. The punch line didn’t come near the form of satire Putins Russia wanted and deserved. However as a chunk of bodily comedy, the sketch is memorable, even sensible. Zelenskys actions, way more than his phrases, appear to contaminate the viewers with a form of wide-mouthed glee as he shimmies and high-kicks his method via the traces in a pair of skintight leather-based pants.
Probably the most magnetic factor in regards to the sketch is him, the grin on his face, the plain pleasure he will get from each second on the stage. The judges cherished it, and that night time, earlier than a TV viewers of tens of millions, Zelenskys crew turned the undisputed champions of the league of their native Ukraine. However, on the largest levels in Moscow, victory would proceed to elude them, and their troupe didn’t final lengthy within the main leagues of KVN.
After competing and dropping within the worldwide championships three years in a row, they gathered up their props and left Moscow in 2003. Members of Zelensky’s crew agree their departure was removed from amicable, although all of them appear to recollect it just a little in another way. Certainly one of them instructed me the breaking level with KVN was an antisemitic slur. Throughout a rehearsal, a Russian producer stood on the stage and stated loudly, in reference to Zelensky, Wheres that little yid?
In Zelenskys model of the story, the administration in Moscow supplied him a job as a producer and author on Russian tv. It might require him to disband his troupe and ship them again to Ukraine with out him. Zelensky refused, they usually all went house collectively. Midway via their 20s, they had been now profitable showmen and celebrities throughout Ukraine. However it was nonetheless troublesome for Zelenskys dad and mom to simply accept comedy as his profession.
No doubt, his father stated years later, we suggested him to do one thing totally different, and we thought the curiosity in KVN was non permanent, that he would change, that he would select a career. In spite of everything, hes a lawyer. He completed our institute. Certainly, Zelensky had accomplished his research and earned a regulation diploma whereas performing in KVN. However he had no intention of practising regulation. He discovered it boring.
When he received again house to Ukraine, Zelensky and his mates staged a sequence of weddings of 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 top of the yr, when Olena was pregnant with their daughter, Zelensky moved to Kyiv to construct up his new manufacturing firm, Studio Kvartal 95.
Even at this early stage in his profession, Zelenskys confidence went past the everyday swagger of a younger man smitten with success. He betrayed no doubts in his groups capability to make it massive, and if he felt any concern he hid it from everybody, together with his spouse. For an expectant father in his mid-20s, the job supplied to him in Moscow should have been extra tempting than he let on. Aside from the cash, it might have positioned him among the many glitterati, the producers and showrunners within the greatest market within the Russian-speaking world.
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As a substitute he took a danger and struck out in a a lot smaller pond, counting on the crew of mates who seemed to him for management and made him really feel at house wherever he went. Upon arriving in Kyiv, Zelensky scored a gathering with one of many countrys greatest media executives, Alexander Rodnyansky, the pinnacle of the community that produced and broadcast the KVN league in Ukraine. The chief knew Zelensky from that circuit as a brilliant younger Jewish child, he instructed me. However he didnt anticipate the child to stride into his workplace with a dangerous enterprise proposition.
Accompanied by the Shefir brothers, who had been a decade older and extra skilled within the business, Zelensky did the speaking. He needed to look along with his troupe on the largest stage in Kyiv for a nationally televised efficiency, and he wanted Rodnyansky to present him the airtime and bankroll a part of the manufacturing, advertising and marketing, and different prices. The chutzpah on this man, thats what I keep in mind, the manager instructed me. He had this bulletproof perception in himself, with these burning eyes.
A few years later, Rodnyansky would come to see the hazard hidden in that high quality. It might lead Zelensky to the false perception that within the position of President, he may outmaneuver Putin and negotiate his method out of a full-scale battle. I feel that confidence of his betrayed him in the long run, he stated. However on the time, Zelenskys attraction gained out within the negotiations with Rodnyansky, who agreed to take a danger on the efficiency.
It proved to be so successful that, shortly after, the crew at Kvartal 95 reached a deal to make a sequence of selection exhibits that will air in Russia and Ukraine. Their tone departed from the extra healthful, aw-shucks type of KVN. The jokes took on a tougher edge, they usually turned way more overtly political. Pereverzev, who was a author on the exhibits, instructed me their goal was to make a model of Saturday Night time Stay with components of Monty Python.
It was an untested idea on Ukrainian TV. There was no technique to inform whether or not the viewers was prepared. That was Greens type, he stated, utilizing Zelenskys nickname. (The phrase for inexperienced in Ukrainian and Russian is identical: zeleny.) That was his major high quality as a frontrunner. Hed simply say, Lets do it. Then wed all get scared, and he would simply inform us to belief him. All our lives it was like that. And in some unspecified time in the future we simply began to belief him, as a result of when he stated it might work out, it did.
Excerpted from THE SHOWMAN: Contained in the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Chief of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster, to be revealed January 23 by William Morrow. Copyright 2024 by Simon Shuster. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
Correction, Jan. 5: The unique model of this story misstated when Zelensky’s first youngster was born. It was 2004, not 2003.
