Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Why Ukraine's 'brave and anti-nationalist' president is a nightmare for Moscow

He was a multimillionaire comedian, the voice of Paddington Bear and won Dancing with the Stars.

After his TV series based around a man who accidentally becomes president became a hit, he founded his own party and was elected president in real life.

Now, he's leading a country being invaded by the second most powerful military in the world.

Those who support the way Volodymyr Zelenskyy is helming the country in the midst of an invasion forget that Ukraine was already at war for years when he took office in a surprising landslide victory in 2019. He pledged, like many other Ukrainian politicians, that he would put an end to it.

"He was trying to do everything to achieve peace," Iuliia Mendel, a journalist and former spokeswoman for Zelenskyy, told Euronews.

"He promised to finish the war soon," Mendel explained.

The negotiations with Russia over the breakaway Kremlin-backed territories in Donbas led to successful ceasefire agreements, and Zelenskyy managed to bring home around 150 prisoners of war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin grew increasingly irritated by his Ukrainian counterpart, who practically predicted his political trajectory with his Sluga narodu or Servant of the People hit TV show, where he played an idealistic, unpretentious history teacher know-it-all forced to slug his way through a system riddled with corrupt bureaucrats.

Putin might have also become concerned by Zelenskyy's growing popularity in Russia, according to Mendel.

After purchasing the entire series in 2019, Russian channel TNT only ran one episode before pulling the show from the air, claiming it only aired it as a marketing ploy.

It also censored a joke in the episode in which Putin is said to be wearing a Hublot watch — a reference to a racy