April 21, 2019

KIEV, Ukraine — A comedian best known for playing the role of an accidental president on television easily won the real-life election for president in Ukraine on Sunday, exit polls indicated, putting a political neophyte at the helm of a country at the center of the West’s geopolitical struggle with Moscow.

Volodymyr Zelensky, a 41-year-old comic actor who has never held public office, won more than 70 percent of the vote, a decisive victory over the incumbent president, Petro O. Poroshenko, according to exit polling by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation.

Mr. Zelensky’s victory, if confirmed by official results, would give Ukraine its first Jewish leader and deliver a stinging rebuke to a political and business establishment represented by Mr. Poroshenko, a billionaire candy tycoon who campaigned on the nationalist slogan “Army, language, faith.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/world/europe/ukraine-elections-zelenskiy.html