18WT 047: On this episode we talked about our upcoming game night Sunday night @4pm Arizona Time on March 13, 2022. Yes this is the day the Nation sets the clocks ahead for the Springtime. We are going to play the game Cards Against Humanity (a party game for horrible people). We talked about our NEW Facebook Page for the podcast show and invited everyone to go LIKE the page and join the podcast Group while they were there liking the page. We also talked about the War between Russia and Ukraine. And how the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, came to be president. From his beginning in stand-up comedy to playing the president on television. Then running his campaign to becoming the President of the Ukraine in three to four months almost entirely on line.

Entertainment career

At age 17, he joined the local KVN[26] (a comedy competition) team and was soon invited to join the united Ukrainian team "Zaporizhia-Kryvyi Rih-Transit" which performed in the KVN's Major League and eventually won in 1997.  That same year, he created and headed the Kvartal 95 team which later transformed into the comedy outfit Kvartal 95. From 1998 to 2003, Kvartal 95 performed in the Major League and the highest open Ukrainian league of KVN, the team members spent a lot of the time in Moscow and constantly toured around post-Soviet countries. In 2003, Kvartal 95 started producing TV shows for the Ukrainian TV channel 1+1, and in 2005, the team moved to fellow Ukrainian TV channel Inter.

In 2008, he starred in the feature film Love in the Big City, and its sequel, Love in the Big City 2. Zelenskyy continued his movie career with the film Office Romance. Our Time in 2011 and with Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon in 2012. Love in the Big City 3 was released in January 2014. Zelenskyy also played the leading role in the 2012 film 8 First Dates and in sequels which were produced in 2015 and 2016. He recorded the voice of Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian dubbing of Paddington (2014) and Paddington 2 (2017).

Zelenskyy was a member of the board and the general producer of the TV channel Inter from 2010 to 2012.

In August 2014, Zelenskyy spoke out against the intention of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture to ban Russian artists from Ukraine. Since 2015, Ukraine has banned Russian artists and other Russian works of culture from entering Ukraine. In 2018, the romantic comedy Love in the Big City 2 starring Zelenskyy was banned in Ukraine.

After the Ukrainian media had reported that during the war in Donbas Zelenskyy's Kvartal 95 had donated 1 million hryvnias to the Ukrainian army, some Russian politicians and artists petitioned for a ban on his works in Russia. Once again, Zelenskyy spoke out against the intention of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture to ban Russian artists from Ukraine.

In 2015, Zelenskyy became the star of the television series Servant of the People, where he played the role of the president of Ukraine. In the series, Zelenskyy's character was a high-school history teacher in his 30s who won the presidential election after a viral video showed him ranting against government corruption in Ukraine.

The comedy series Svaty ("In-laws"), in which Zelenskyy appeared, was banned in Ukraine in 2017, but unbanned in March 2019.

Zelenskyy worked mostly in Russian language productions. His first role in the Ukrainian language was the romantic comedy I, You, He, She, which appeared on the screens of Ukraine in December 2018. The first version of the script was written in Ukrainian but was translated into Russian for the Lithuanian actress Agnė Grudytė. Then the movie was dubbed into Ukrainian.

POLITICS

In a March 2019 interview with Der Spiegel, Zelenskyy stated he went into politics to restore trust in politicians and that he wanted "to bring professional, decent people to power" and "would really like to change the mood and timbre of the political establishment, as much as possible".

Starting 31 December 2018, Zelenskyy led a successful, almost entirely virtual, presidential campaign to unseat incumbent President of the Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, in just three to four months. Zelenskyy clearly won both the first round of elections on 31 March, and the run-off election on 21 April 2019. One of Zelenskyy's presidential campaign promises was that he would serve only one term in office (i.e., five years).

On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of the Ukraine, one of its neighbors to the southwest. Early reports declared it the largest conventional warfare operation in Europe since World War II.