page_title: Volodymyr Zelensky
section_title: Presidency
hierarchical_section_title: Volodymyr Zelensky / Political career / Presidency
caption_attribution_description: English: Official visit to Germany
context_page_description: Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky, officially Zelenskyy, is the 6th and current president of Ukraine. Before entering politics, he was a comedian, actor, screenwriter, film producer, and director.
  Prior to his political career, he obtained a degree in law and created a production company, Kvartal 95, which produces films, cartoons and TV comedy shows, including Servant of the People, in which Zelensky played the role of President of Ukraine. The series aired from 2015 to 2019. A namesake political party bearing the same name as the television show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.
  Zelensky announced his candidacy for the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election on the evening of 31 December 2018, alongside the New Year's Eve address of President Petro Poroshenko on 1+1 TV Channel. At the time, Zelensky had already been one of the frontrunners in opinion polls for the election. Zelensky won the election with 73.22% of the vote in the second round, defeating Poroshenko.
context_section_description: Zelensky was inaugurated on 20 May 2019. Various foreign officials attended the ceremony in Ukraine's parliament (Verkhovna Rada), including Salome Zourabichvili (Georgia), Kersti Kaljulaid (Estonia), Raimonds Vējonis (Latvia), Dalia Grybauskaitė (Lithuania), János Áder (Hungary), Maroš Šefčovič (European Union), and Rick Perry (United States). In his swearing-in speech he dissolved the then Ukrainian parliament as his first act as president, in spite of pre-emptive attempts to block this move by the People's Front, which withdrew from the ruling coalition a few days prior to his inauguration. Zelensky was noted to have been the first Jewish President of Ukraine and with Volodymyr Groysman as Prime Minister, Ukraine was the second country to have both a Jewish President and Prime Minister.
  As one of the first acts of his presidency, Zelensky appointed Andriy Bohdan as head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine. Prior to this, Bohdan was the lawyer of Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi. Under the rules of Lustration in Ukraine, introduced in 2014 following Euromaidan, Bohdan is not entitled to hold any state office until 2024 (because of his government post during the Second Azarov Government). Bohdan, however, claims that according to the law, heading the presidential administration is not considered to be civil service work and therefore lustration does not apply to him. Bohdan suspended his juridical career after becoming head of the presidential administration. Following his appointment Bohdan claimed that "the oligarchs already want the same rules of the game as other citizens". The other deputy heads of the Presidential Administration Zelensky appointed were mostly leading figures of Kvartal 95. The head of Kvartal 95, and a childhood friend of Zelensky, Ivan Bakanov, was appointed deputy head of the Ukrainian Secret Service.
  Under a presidential decree signed on 21 May 2019, Zelensky appointed Deputy Foreign Minister Olena Zerkal as deputy head of the presidential administration. However, a few hours later the text of the decree disappeared from the site of the president. According to Ukrayinska Pravda, Zerkal did agree to be the sole authorized representative of the international courts of Ukraine concerning Russia, but not to be a deputy head of the administration. On 28 May, Zelensky restored the Ukrainian citizenship of Mikheil Saakashvili.
  The day before, he visited the front line, where he examined positions around Luhansk and received reports from military commanders. On 3 June, Zelensky appointed former president Leonid Kuchma as the representative of Ukraine in the Tripartite Contact Group for a settlement in the Donbass Conflict. The next day, he arrived in Brussels on his first official foreign visit as president, meeting with European Union and NATO officials, including Jens Stoltenberg, Jean Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk.
  Zelensky's first major proposal to change the electoral system was rejected by the Ukrainian parliament.
  The parliament also refused to approve Zelensky's dismissal of the country's Foreign Minister, Minister of Defence and head of the SBU. In addition, on 6 June, lawmakers refused to include Zelensky's key initiative on reintroducing criminal liability for illegal enrichment in the parliament's agenda, and instead included a similar bill proposed by a group of deputies. In June 2019 it was announced that the president's third major initiative, which seeks to remove immunity from lawmakers, diplomats and judges, would be submitted after the July 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election.
  On 11 June 2019, Zelensky dismissed the heads of 15 of Ukraine's oblasts (provinces) and the heads of the SBU (secret service) departments of five oblasts and asked parliament to remove the country's Prosecutor General from office. On July 8, Zelensky ordered the cancellation of the annual Kiev Independence Day Parade on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, citing costs. Despite this, Zelensky highlighted that the day would "honor heroes" on Independence Day, however the "format will be new". He also proposed 
caption: Zelensky with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Federal Chancellery Complex in Berlin, June 2019.
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