Volodymyr Zelensky’s transformation from a much-loved television comedian to Ukraine’s president and wartime leader is one of the strangest political journeys of our times. It began in 2015 with Servant of the People, a television comedy written by and starring Zelensky, who plays a young high-school teacher launching into a foul-mouthed rant against the corruption and venality of his country’s political class. ‘Why are all the honest people fools and the clever ones are thieves?’ shouts Zelensky’s character, a nerdy but honest history master. ‘What kind of people are we, that we keep voting for these mother–f***ing liars knowing that they are crooks?’ A pupil secretly films the rant through a window, the video goes viral and millions of Ukrainians crowdfund the honest teacher to stand in an upcoming presidential election, which he unexpectedly wins. Cue a two-season long comedy of errors wherein the fictional President Holoborodko struggles to take on entrenched corruption and break the stranglehold of shadowy oligarchs – with the help of his old schoolmates, whom he appoints as his ministers.

The idea of the then 41-year-old Zelensky actually standing for president went from a joke to deadly earnest reality in 2018, when the influential oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky threw his financial backing behind a real-world political run. Zelensky’s billboard campaign slogan, launched on New Year’s 2019, was ‘I’m not kidding!’

Zelensky’s inexperience was, paradoxically, the key to his popularity on the campaign trail. Then-incumbent President Petro Poroshenko was, in common with every one of his predecessors, mired in corruption scandals. Ukrainian voters were fed up with generations of lies and of seeing the same old faces on the political carousel. Zelensky was, in many ways, a liberal mirror-image of Donald Trump – a radical outsider with no political experience, familiar from the world of television, who vowed to drain the political swamp.

Paradoxically, given subsequent events, Zelensky was elected as the candidate most likely to reconcile with Russia and bridge some of the bitter divides that had split Ukraine since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the Russian-backed secession of Donetsk and Luhansk. Like many Ukrainian citizens, Zelensky spoke Russian at home rather than Ukrainian. Indeed, Servant of the People was made almost entirely in Russian on the grounds that almost all Ukrainian speakers know Russian but many Russian speakers don’t know Ukrainian. The imposition of Ukrainian as a national language, including in schools and universities, had been a major cause of resentment in the Russophone east of the country. And as far back as 2015, Zelensky spoke out against nationalists’ calls to ban Russian artists from performing in Ukraine – and though he supported Ukraine’s ambition to join Nato and the EU, he resisted Poroshenko’s inflammatory anti-Russian rhetoric.

In one of the most remarkable platform-transfers ever – in this case, from fiction to reality – Zelensky won a landslide victory in the May 2019 presidential elections with over 70 per cent of the vote. Later that summer, his party (also named ‘Servant of the People’) won an equally sweeping 254 out of 450 seats in parliamentary elections. Like his fictional character, Zelensky installed his oldest and most loyal friends, colleagues and business partners from his television production company, Kvartal 95, in positions of power. Over 30 members of the Kvartal 95 team moved to head the Presidential Administration, the Security Service of Ukraine, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the National Security and Defence Council, and the Department of Strategic Intelligence at the Ministry of Defence. At least 50 more associates and hangers-on of Kvartal 95 and its live music arm Kvartal-Concert – including stylists, photographers, restauranteurs, comic actors, screenwriters, marketing managers and PR staff – were drafted in as members of parliament after Servant of the People’s unexpectedly large election win. It was the first ever case of a major European state being taken over by a showbusiness company.

Sadly, there was one area in which real life failed to imitate art. Despite Servant of the People’s radical anti-corruption platform, accusations of graft soon began to bring down members of parliament and Kvartal 95-affiliated officials. More consequentially, though, for the future, Zelensky failed to push through a referendum in the breakaway rebel republics of the Donbas in October 2019 that would have brought them back inside Ukraine with a new federal status. Ultranationalists, led by the volunteer Azov Battalion, which had been fighting separatists since 2014, massed in Kyiv and Azov’s leader publicly threatened to murder Zelensky if he went ahead with the ‘betrayal’ of Ukraine by doing a deal with the Moscow-backed rebels. It was probably the last moment when the split between the Russian-speaking Donbas and the Kyiv government could have been amicably healed. A disastrous meeting with Putin in Paris in December 2019 followed, and Zelensky’s dream of reconciling Moscow and Kyiv fell by the wayside, wrecked by Kremlin arrogance and Ukrainian ultranationalist intransigence.

Russia’s invasion in February 2022 brought out the best in Zelensky and his team. Defying Kremlin assumptions that he would flee the country, Zelensky stood with his chief of staff Andriy Yermak – a Kvartal 95 veteran – and other key ministers outside the blacked-out Presidential Administration and filmed a memorable selfie video assuring Ukrainians that they were staying put and defying the Russians. Parliament voted to give Zelensky sweeping wartime executive powers, and the small group of old Kvartal business partners were given a free hand to run the state and the economy as they saw fit.

That has not worked out well. Ukraine has been shaken with the biggest corruption scandal of Zelensky’s presidency with many members of the president’s inner circle implicated. Ukraine’s independent anti-corruption bureau NABU has accused Kvartal-95 co-founder and close Zelensky friend Timur Mindich of a $100 million war-profiteering scheme. NABU alleges that Mindich and his associates skimmed off 15 per cent from contracts to build air-raid defences around the critical infrastructure of Energoatom, Ukraine’s nuclear energy body. While 60 of state-owned electricity utility Ukrenergo’s stations were protected with highly effective concrete defences, the same work at Energoatom was never carried out, leaving them defenceless against Russian attacks. Mindich, who has both Ukrainian and Israeli citizenship, fled Ukraine just hours before NABU raided his apartment, leaving behind packs of cash and a golden toilet. Clearly tipped off, Mindich is now reportedly in Israel, which does not extradite its citizens. Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko – another former Kvartal 95 producer – also named as a suspect by NABU, has been dismissed but not charged. And though Andriy Yermak has not been charged or accused of wrongdoing, his voice reportedly appears on many of the 1,000-plus hours of surveillance recordings that form the basis of NABU’s case.

It’s hard to overstate the anger of ordinary Ukrainians – even former loyal supporters of Zelensky’s – at the implications of this case. ‘Every day people are killed, their homes burned to ashes, families give their last hryvnia to support the troops, yet the state cannot even guarantee basic, decent financial stability,’ says Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s Press Secretary from 2019-21. ‘Then, out of nowhere, hundreds of millions vanish into private pockets. During wartime. The pain is unbearable… Corruption is one of the key reasons why our heroic army suffers such catastrophic losses on the front lines. And it’s long past time to admit the uncomfortable reality: graft has become a convenient excuse to prolong the war under the banner of a “just peace” that never arrives.’

In the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, a major rebellion against the government is under way, involving many members of the Servant of the People Party. Many are calling for Yermak’s resignation. More disturbingly, senior members of the Azov movement, now integrated into senior positions in Ukraine’s army, but who still maintain the unit’s basic political and military cohesion, have called for blood. ‘Corrupt officials are enemies and traitors,’ stormed Dmytro Yarosh, a nationalist firebrand who threatened to hang Zelensky in 2019. ‘If you steal from the nation during a war you deserve liquidation.’

It is a supreme irony – indeed, a tragedy – that Zelensky began his political career as a passionate opponent of corruption, only to become mired in serious allegations of war profiteering of the most cynical sort among his closest and most trusted associates. Yet, in a further irony, just such a scenario was anticipated years before Zelensky’s political career became a reality by the screenwriters of Servant of the People. The vested interests that the fictional President Holoborodko tackles are all perfectly accurate: from corrupt army generals and spy chiefs who double as mafia bosses to oligarch puppet-masters who control the media and buy politicians like watches. But the writers are equally clear-eyed about the temptations of power to the good guys who come to office claiming to be on the side of the angels. In the show, the venal family of president-elect Holoborodko immediately go on a shopping tour, collecting bagfuls of free clothes from fawning retailers and filling their apartment with expensive art. The wife of the president’s new defence minister leaves him when he refuses a fridge-sized cardboard box filled with cash that is delivered to his doorstep.

In the world of television comedy, the idealistic young reformer sticks to his principles and wins the day. But in the real, cut-throat world of Ukrainian politics, the outcome is not guaranteed.