section_path: Early life
section_name: Early life
paragraph_text: Early life
  
  Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy was born to Jewish parents on 25 January 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, then in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. His father, Oleksandr Zelenskyy, is a professor and computer scientist and the head of the Department of Cybernetics and Computing Hardware at the Kryvyi Rih State University of Economics and Technology; his mother, Rymma Zelenska, is a retired engineer. His grandfather, Semyon Zelenskyy, served as an infantryman, reaching the rank of colonel in the Red Army (in the 57th Guards Motor Rifle Division) during World War II; Semyon's father and three brothers were killed in the Holocaust. In March 2022, Zelenskyy said that his great-grandparents had been killed after German troops burned their home to the ground during a massacre. His grandmother survived World War II after leaving Kryvyi Rih in an evacuation of Jews to Almaty, Kazakhstan, and returned to Ukraine after the war.
  
  Before starting elementary school, Zelenskyy lived for four years in the Mongolian city of Erdenet, where his father worked as a mining engineer from the mid-1970s to help build a copper mine, applying his abilities in computer science to mining. Zelenskyy grew up speaking Russian. At the age of 16 he took the Test of English as a Foreign Language and received an education grant to study in Israel, but his father did not allow him to go. He later earned a law degree from the Kryvyi Rih Institute of Economics, then a department of Kyiv National Economic University and now part of Kryvyi Rih National University, but never worked in the legal field.