How did Volodymyr Zelensky rise from a comedian acting as President in a TV show to becoming the President of Ukraine?  Who is behind his rise? These are legitimate questions particularly when Zelensky became a household name in the US for the key role he played in the first impeachment of President Trump, which was also attached to the Trump-Russia hoax and the discredited Steele Dossier.

Aristophanes Tragedy, a self-declared former heavily armed parking lot attendant, did a little digging on this rise of Volodymyr Zelensky and wrote his findings in a twitter thread.

This article is, in part, based on this thread.  To preserve it in the event it is removed from twitter we have attached a copy of it below.

Zelensky the Comedian

Zelensky first became known as an actor and comedian, then created a production company, Kvartal 95 founded in 1997, which, among others, produced a TV show called Servant of the People, in which Zelensky acted as the President of Ukraine.

Beginning October 2015, the show ran for 3.5 years and is apparently immensely popular, regardless of the quality of the show.  “I get the distinct impression it was astroturfed,” tweeted Aristophanes. Astroturfing is when an impression of widespread grassroots support is created where little support exists.

The Servant of the People aired on the 1+1 TV channel which has the second largest geographic reach of any channel in Ukraine and of which 70 percent is owned by  Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who is also the founder of Privatbank.

Kolomoyskyi the Corrupt

Ihor Kolomoyskyi was ranked, two years ago by Forbes, as the 1941st richest person in the world. He was a close ally of Ukraine’s former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and former President, and central banker, Victor Yushchenko. Although according to RIA Novosti, the relationship with Tymoshenko took an ugly turn when Kolomoisky refused to finance her election campaign in 2010.

Kolomoyskyi also, reportedly, has a controlling interest in Burisma, the Ukrainian oil and gas company which put Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, on its board of directors in 2014. In 2016, at a time when top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was investigating the notoriously corrupt Burisma Holdings, Joe Biden acknowledged on camera that, when he was vice president and spearheading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin.

As he gives a good synopsis of Kolomoyskyi’s background, in the main from Kolomoyskyi’s Wikipedia page, rather than re-write it we have simply copied the text from Aristophanes’ twitter thread below.

Kolomoyskyi is an interesting character, and there’s a lot to unpack here. He was appointed governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, very close to Donetsk, after the war with the separatists started, he helped fund several of the volunteer battalions, including the neo-Nazi Azov Bat.

This is despite him being very much extremely Jewish – he has Ukrainian and Israeli citizenship, as well as Cypriot citizenship – who used his money to take over the Jewish community organisation of Ukraine by force.

He couldn’t maintain popular support after this move, and like any good billionaire, just said “F**k it, I’ll build my own nationwide Jewish organisation and fill it with people who won’t dissent”

Let’s talk about what an absolute crook this dude is.

Kolomoyskyi stole billions of dollars from Ukrainian banks and transferred it to the US under the pretence of funding a steel company, only for the money to go underground and another rust belt industry to shutter its doors.

He is also under investigation in Israel for buying 20 million dollars in coal, selling it to someone else, and shutting his company down before the check could bounce from the original seller of the coal, who was a Belarussian Oligarch.

This guy got on Putin’s s**t list for defrauding a Russian oligarch of several billion dollars, and even got on Poroshenko’s (Zelensky’s predecessor) s**t list for intimidating state officials with his own militia.

This man is pretty obviously just a grifter and a mobster, who rips off eastern European oligarchs with contract fraud, and hides behind the Western dislike for those same oligarchs to prevent his prosecution. But we did mention he was on Poroshenko’s s**t list, right?

He was dismissed as governor of the Dnipro area oblast in 2014, and immediately turned around and helped ensure that “Servant of the People“, the show where Zelensky acted as president, was aired on his 1+1 network in Ukraine, of which he owns 70 percent.

This sounds an awful lot like some petty billionaire revenge, doesn’t it? Dismissed from your gubernatorial duties by a president who was your ally because your corruption was too blatant and obvious, so you literally create a president to replace him with?

If you want an American analogue, this would be like if JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, was ousted by Joe Biden despite being a financier of his, and in some vicious long game funded a reboot of the West Wing and had some Colbert/Trudeau type play president and run later.

(I am aware presidents can’t fire governors; it works different here but I’m just making a comparison)

This is the power behind Zelensky though, a grifter and mobster who has been ripping off Belarussian and Russian oligarchs for billions, and look what’s happening to his puppet …

Just saying

Pandora Papers

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rode to power on pledges to clean up the Eastern European country, but the Pandora Papers reveal he and his close circle were the beneficiaries of a network of offshore companies, including some that owned expensive London property, The Pandora Papers website states.

“In the heat of the campaign, a political ally of President Poroshenko published a chart purporting that Zelensky and his television production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms that allegedly received $41 million in funds from Kolomoisky’s Privatbank.”

“Zelensky has repeatedly pledged to rein in oligarchs. The day after the attack on Shefir, the country’s parliament passed a bill that would create a register of oligarchs and bar them from financing political parties or taking part in privatisations.”

Why would they set up offshore bank accounts at the same time that Kolomoisky was simply setting up an allegedly benign TV production deal with Kvartal? Unless the entire point of the show was to astroturf Zelensky into the *real* presidency all along…?

It’s pretty obvious that Zelensky is his puppet, and more disturbingly, his “role” in Servant of The People was intended from the very start, to be “life imitating art” in a wag the dog fashion.

And the expensive properties owned by Zelensky and his associates are not limited to London.  George Webb, investigative journalist, tweeted a video report with the description: “Breaking down Ukraine – let’s start with Zelensky’s $35M mansion in Sunny Isles, FL built by Kolomoisky and Pinchuk. $1.3B in the bank!!”

World Economic Forum

While there are no obvious ties between Kolomoisky and the World Economic Forum (“WEF”), there are obvious ties with Zelensky. For starters, he has a profile on WEF’s website.

It is no surprise then that the World Economic Forum (WEF) have thrown their support behind Ukraine, vowing to do “whatever is possible to help” the country. As RT reported: on Sunday, Schwab and WEF President Borge Brende said they “deeply condemn the aggression by Russia against Ukraine” and “the attacks and atrocities.” 

But could there be more to WEF’s intervention than simply networking with one of its members? Could their Ukraine stance be because WEF, or rather the select financial institutions, corporations and individuals it represents, has vested interests in Ukraine?

During a February 2020 speech to the World Economic Forum, which took place just a few months before the WEF’s controversial “Great Reset” meeting, the newly “elected” Ukrainian President Zelensky said:

“I would like to note the projects of the Forum for Ukraine, and namely: Scenarios of the Future for Ukraine; Geneva initiative for Ukraine; the new economic vision for Ukraine. And I thank you for what has already been done and I count on the further fruitful cooperation.

Looking at the projects Zelensky thanked WEF for, it makes one wonder who is actually running Ukraine and who is actually to blame for Ukrainian people now finding themselves at the center of what Boris Johnson calls “the biggest war in Europe since 1945.”

Scenarios for Ukraine is where 300 decision-makers, government, business and civil society leaders as well as leading experts sketched out different pathways for Ukraine’s future economic development. These WEF “decision-makers” published their report on 11 April 2014.

Geneva Ukraine Initiative is where business leaders from Ukraine, the Russian Federation, Europe and the United States gathered in Geneva, on 14 September 2014, and worked out 10 proposals, to help resolve the conflict. “The group [of business leaders] calls for a summit of top political leaders as soon as possible,” the WEF announced.

It’s worth noting, at this time, while business leaders mapped out the future for Ukraine, Zelensky was prancing his way to fame.**

Zelensky’s speech at Davos 2020 continued:

“The topics which are debated here in Davos always focus on the state of the modern world and elucidate the challenges facing humanity. And this year for united the leaders to discuss extremely important topic the cohesive and sustainable world.”

The biggest threat to a cohesive and sustainable world was security, Zelensky told Davos.  He also called for “western investors” to become “the stakeholders, shareholders of the success of a new Ukraine,” and said Ukraine was “a place where miracles come true.”

There seems to be an obvious starting point for world peace: do not allow the WEF, or those it represents, to interfere with or make decisions for any country.  Because, as is clearly the case in Ukraine, just as it has been with the Covid Scandal worldwide, it is self-styled “businessmen” and their interests that have caused the strife.

**Article edited since originally published – added video of Zelensky’s previous career. According to Newsweek this video appears to have been released in 2014.