The Rise-and-Fall of Zelensky’s Oligarch Patron

And the American Who Died in Silence Along the Way

When Volodymyr Zelensky first entered politics, it looked like a fairytale — a comedian with no political experience ascending to the presidency in a country ravaged by war, corruption, and fatigue with its elites.

The Western press styled him as a populist outsider, the accidental president.

But the fairytale had a producer: oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky.

The Oligarch’s Stage

Zelensky’s fame was made by Servant of the People, the television satire in which he played a humble schoolteacher elevated to the presidency. The program ran on 1+1, Kolomoisky’s flagship channel.

That exposure mattered in a nation where media is carved up among tycoons who wield it as a political weapon. For Zelensky, the role blurred fiction and reality — an everyman actor rehearsing for the presidency before an audience of millions.

When Zelensky launched his actual presidential campaign in 2019, he borrowed not only the name of the show (Servant of the People) but also its core theme: he would be the ordinary man who takes on the corrupt system.

Critics immediately pointed to his proximity to Kolomoisky. Zelensky’s campaign staff included figures long tied to the oligarch. His first chief of staff, Andriy Bohdan, had been Kolomoisky’s lawyer in litigation over PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest financial institution. The optics weren’t subtle.

Western analysts asked the obvious question: was this a president, or a proxy?

PrivatBank: A Black Hole

To understand the bond — and the break — between Zelensky and Kolomoisky, you have to understand PrivatBank. By the mid-2010s, PrivatBank was the country’s largest commercial lender, controlling over one-third of retail deposits.

In 2016, auditors discovered a black hole: billions missing through what regulators called “coordinated fraud.” The losses topped $5.5 billion. The government nationalised the bank, effectively socialising the debt while shielding depositors from collapse.

The forensic trail — laid out by the U.S. firm Kroll — painted a damning picture: loans repeatedly recycled through shell companies tied to Kolomoisky and his partner Hennadiy Boholyubov, money exported abroad, luxury real estate purchased in Cleveland and Miami. Suddenly, PrivatBank wasn’t a domestic scandal; it was an international case study in kleptocracy.

For the IMF, EU, and Washington, PrivatBank became the litmus test of reform. Bailouts would continue only if Kyiv pursued accountability. And that meant Kolomoisky, once untouchable, had to be cut loose.

From Ally to Liability

When Zelensky won the presidency in 2019, skeptics assumed Kolomoisky would reassert himself. Instead, the opposite happened. In 2021, the U.S. State Department sanctioned Kolomoisky for “significant corruption,” barring him and his family from entering the United States.

That same year, Zelensky signed an “anti-oligarch law” designed — at least on paper — to reduce the influence of men like Kolomoisky in politics and media.

Then, in 2023, Ukraine’s security services arrested Kolomoisky on fraud and money-laundering charges linked to PrivatBank. He was placed under pre-trial detention.

A year later, the UK High Court delivered the final blow: a ruling that Kolomoisky and Boholyubov were liable for nearly $1.9 billion in damages over what the judge called a “highly complex loan-recycling scheme.”

The arc was complete. The man who had put Zelensky on air, broadcast his persona into the homes of Ukrainians, and once looked like the power behind the throne was now in a cell, legally disgraced, and financially crippled.

For Zelensky, it was the clearest signal yet: survival required foreign money, and foreign money required sacrificing the oligarchs who made him. Kolomoisky’s fall was not proof of Zelensky’s independence — it was proof of his pragmatism.

The Case of Gonzalo Lira

That same pragmatism helps explain the quieter, darker story of Gonzalo Lira.

Lira was a U.S.–Chilean journalist and filmmaker who had lived in Kharkiv since 2010. He was no establishment figure: online he styled himself as “Coach Red Pill,” a blunt commentator who courted controversy.

After Russia’s invasion in 2022, he criticized Zelensky’s government, calling the war unwinnable and Western media coverage dishonest. He highlighted cases of dissidents who had “disappeared” and accused Ukraine of authoritarianism masked as democracy.

For this, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) arrested him under Article 436-2, which criminalises the “justification of Russian aggression.” First detained in May 2023, he was released on bail, then re-arrested in July after allegedly attempting to flee to Hungary on a motorbike. He remained in pre-trial detention.

By October, Lira was gravely ill — pneumonia, a collapsed lung. According to a note smuggled to his family, he begged for medical treatment. Authorities delayed. He deteriorated through the winter, and on January 12, 2024, he died in custody.

The U.S. State Department, pressed for answers, gave boilerplate responses about “privacy concerns.” Only later, in its annual human rights report, did it concede that Lira died of an illness that “could have resulted from neglect or improper treatment.” His father was blunt: his son had been tortured, and abandoned.

Silence from Washington

The case drew rare attention from Elon Musk, who in December 2023 publicly challenged Biden and Zelensky on X, asking how an American could be imprisoned in a country receiving over $100 billion in U.S. aid.

But Washington refused to escalate. There was no diplomatic crisis, no sanctions, no public outcry from the administration.

Lira’s only sustained advocacy came from Chile, which pressed for his treatment. The U.S., his own country, left him to die.

Here the same logic applied: survival first. Zelensky’s government deemed him expendable, a foreigner spreading dangerous narratives in wartime. Washington, desperate to preserve the broader Ukraine project, calculated that one dead dissident was not worth jeopardizing the flow of weapons and money.

Patterns of Power

The two stories — Kolomoisky’s downfall and Lira’s death — are not disconnected. They reveal the same political pattern: Zelensky’s government has consistently acted to neutralize whatever jeopardizes its survival.

Early patron oligarch? Cut him loose.

Foreign dissident? Let him rot.

For Zelensky, the lesson of PrivatBank was clear: foreign backers would tolerate almost anything so long as he demonstrated progress against corruption. Turning on Kolomoisky secured Western confidence.

For Washington, the lesson of Lira was equally clear: a single American citizen’s life was expendable compared to the strategic priority of sustaining Kyiv.

It is a grim calculus, but a coherent one.

Beyond the Myth

Strip away the mythology and two images remain. One is of Zelensky, boosted by an oligarch’s media empire, later overseeing his prosecution and watching as international courts dismantle his fortune. The other is of Gonzalo Lira, sick and dying in a Kharkiv jail while both the Ukrainian and American governments looked away.

Zelensky is not the heroic democrat portrayed in Western press releases. Nor is he the billionaire puppet imagined by his detractors. He is a politician navigating survival in a war-torn state, making ruthless choices about whom to protect and whom to abandon.

Kolomoisky learned that loyalty has an expiry date. Lira paid with his life. And in both cases, the logic was the same: survival first, truth and loyalty last.