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.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.
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