WARSAW, Poland— When Volodymyr Zelenskyy was growing up in southeastern Ukraine, his Jewish family spoke Russian and his father once forbade the younger Zelenskyy from going abroad to study in Israel. Instead, Zelenskyy studied law at home. Upon graduation, he found a new home in movie acting and comedy — rocketing in the 2010s to become one of Ukraine’s top entertainers with the TV series “Servant of the People.”
In it, he portrayed a lovable high school teacher fed up with corrupt politicians who accidentally becomes president.
Fast forward just a few years, and Zelenskyy is the president of Ukraine for real — and as Russian troops bear down on his country and Moscow’s rockets shatter the peace of beautiful, ancient Kyiv, as much of the world looks on in horror, his new role is playing an unlikely hero for the 21st century.
With courage, good humor and grace under fire that has rallied his people and impressed his Western counterparts, the compact, dark-haired, 44-year-old former actor has refused to leave Kyiv even though he says he has a target on his back from the Russian invaders.
In one display of grit, after an offer from the United States to transport him to safety, Zelenskyy shot back on Friday: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
Russian forces on Saturday were encircling Kyiv in the third day of the war, and the chief objective, say military observers, is to reach the capital to depose Zelenskyy and his government and install someone more compliant to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In the runup to the Russian invasion, Zelenskyy had been critical of President Joe Biden’s open and detailed warnings about Putin’s intentions, saying they were premature and could cause panic. But after the war began, he has criticized Washington for not doing more to protect Ukraine, including defending it militarily or accelerating its bid to join NATO.
The boldness of Zelenskyy’s stand for Ukraine’s sovereignty might not have been expected from a comedian, whose biggest political liability for many years was the feeling that he was too apt to seek compromise with Moscow. He ran for office in part on a platform that he could negotiate peace with Russia, which had seized Crimea from Ukraine and propped up two pro-Russian separatist regions in 2014, leading to a frozen conflict that had killed an estimated 15,000.
Although Zelenskyy managed a prisoner exchange, the efforts for reconciliation faltered as Putin’s insistence that Ukraine back away from the West became ever more intense, painting the Kyiv government as a nest of extremism run by Washington.
In spite of Ukraine’s dark history of antisemitism, reaching back centuries to Cossack pogroms and the collaboration of some anti-Soviet nationalists with Nazi genocide during World War II, Ukraine after Zelenskyy’s election in 2019 became the only country outside of Israel with both a president and prime minister who were Jewish. (Zelenskyy’s grandfather fought in the Soviet
