Studying in Kryvyi Rih in the 1990s, Ukraine’s wartime leader often skipped class to focus on his standup
he university has a modern vibe. Teenage programmers sit on bean bags and wander up and down an external staircase built for a recent hackathon. Only one item of furniture is incongruous amid the bright colours and glass cubicles at the institute of economics and technology: an old turquoise-painted desk.
His home was in one of the city’s middle-class districts. Back then, Kryvyi Rih was known for its criminal associations. Young men who returned from the Soviet war in Afghanistan drifted into lives of crime and drug dealing. “As a teenager, Volodymyr had two alternatives: he could succeed, or he could become a member of a criminal gang,” Shaikan recalled.
The president’s former teachers described Zelenskiy as an intellectually capable undergraduate, who sometimes missed classes because he was busy on stage. Afterwards, he would apologise and hand in his assignments, they said. He drew other people to him, they added, and won an Olympiad competition for his mastery of English.
A bridge in a village between Mikolaiv and Kryvyi Rih that was destroyed to slow the Russian advance.In spring, Russian forces came close to seizing Zelenskiy’s home town, which was built in the 19th century along a series of mines. The city in south-east Ukraine is Europe’s longest at 75 miles and is dotted with chimney stacks and 20th-century foundries. When the enemy advanced, Shaikan said he and his colleagues made molotov cocktails and dug ditches.
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