📍Kryvyi Rih, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukraine
1978 – 2000“Volodymyr Zelenskyy was born in January 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, a sprawling iron-mining city in central Ukraine, to a Russian-speaking Jewish family. His father, Oleksandr, is a professor of computer science and cybernetics, and his mother, Rymma, trained as an engineer. When he was small the family spent about four years in Erdenet, Mongolia, where his father worked on a mining project, before he and his mother came home to Kryvyi Rih. It was a tough industrial city in the 1980s and 1990s, with steelworks, slag heaps, unemployment after the Soviet collapse and youth gangs on its estates, and his parents kept him busy partly to keep him off the streets. He went to School No. 95, which specialised in English, and filled his days with sport, music, ballroom dancing and amateur theatre. His grandfather, Semyon, had served in the Red Army in the Second World War, and family stories of the war and of relatives lost in the Holocaust were part of his upbringing. At seventeen he joined a local team in KVN, the hugely popular student comedy competition, and soon his group of friends from the city was performing on national television. In 1997 they formed their own team, naming it Kvartal 95 after the neighbourhood of Kryvyi Rih where they had grown up. He studied law at the local economics institute but chose comedy, and Kvartal 95 grew into a production company. In 2019 he was elected President of Ukraine, and many of his closest colleagues are still the friends he made in those Kryvyi Rih years.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today