Page 8 - Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Ukrainian President and Unlikely Hero

In 2020 Zelenskyy met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and shared that his family had joined the Soviet
ght against the Nazis during World War II. Zelenskyy is
pictured here (on the right) at a 2019 meeting with Netanyahu.

Youth and Education
The story told to Netanyahu about the four brothers in World
War II was only a sketchy summary of the larger, more
detailed saga of the Zelenskyy family. In the longer version, after
the war ended Semyon Zelenskyy got married and in 1947 had a
son named Oleksandr. The latter then met a well-educated young
woman named Rymma, and the two fell in love and married. They
settled in the small city of Kryvyy Rih, in central Ukraine.
It was there, on January 25, 1978, that Rymma gave birth to
the couple’s only child, Volodymyr. Both parents were employed
full time. Oleksandr was a professor of computer science at the
local college—Kryvyy Rih State University—and Rymma worked
as an engineer. In part because they were both highly educated,
they imparted to their son the importance of learning and en-
couraged him in his studies, including languages. Although he
initially grew up speaking Russian, young Volodymyr mastered
both Ukrainian and English in his early to mid-teens.
Although the young man considered Kryvyy Rih his home-
town, he did experience a brief break from its familiar surround-
ings. In the mid-1980s Oleksandr decided to do rsthand scien-

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