Meanwhile, journalists and diplomats in Ukraine were becoming newly concerned about Zelensky’s relationship with Kolomoisky. Just before the inauguration, Kolomoisky had made a triumphant return to Ukraine on a private jet. In April, a district court in Kiev had declared the nationalization of PrivatBank illegal, inviting the possibility that the bank could be returned to him. In May, Kolomoisky told the Financial Times that Ukraine should simply default on its foreign debt. “We should treat our creditors the way Greece does,” he said. “How many times has Argentina defaulted?” Defaulting would throw into turmoil loan negotiations with the I.M.F., and Zelensky said that Ukraine had no such plans. But, as a source familiar with the country’s discussions with the I.M.F. said, “the reaction could have been stronger.” Yulia Mostova, the editor of the Kiev-based Mirror Weekly, told me, “When the President wields personal control over law enforcement and the courts, it’s terrible. But when the President doesn’t have any influence on the judicial system, and these bodies use that freedom to spit on the law, it’s no better.”

In May, in a Holoborodko-esque gesture, Zelensky walked to his inauguration ceremony, giving high fives en route. In his speech, he spoke of how he wanted bureaucrats to remove portraits of the President from their offices. “Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision,” he said—an echo of Holoborodko’s declaration, in his inaugural address, that his only promise was to “act in such a way that I won’t be ashamed to look children in the eye.” Then, in a surprise move, Zelensky announced the dissolution of parliament and called for new elections.

In July, the Servant of the People Party came in first in the parliamentary elections, gaining enough seats to rule on its own, without forming a coalition. None of its M.P.s had held office before. In one race, a twenty-nine-year-old wedding photographer defeated the millionaire owner of a local aerospace factory, a four-term incumbent. In another, a former elections-commission official, who had been in parliament since the nineties, was ousted by the owner of a regional chain of pizzerias.

Volodymyr Fesenko, a veteran political analyst and the head of the Penta Center, a think tank in Kiev, explained that, whereas the two Maidan revolutions brought into power a “contra-élite”—a long-standing opposition that had experience in politics and government—Zelensky and the Servant of the People Party marked the first time that the country would be run by a “proto-élite” of outsiders. With a popularity rating above seventy per cent and an overwhelming majority in parliament, Zelensky had assembled more power than any Ukrainian leader in modern history.

He began to enact a series of sweeping changes. He cancelled legal immunity for parliamentary deputies, a move long sought by anti-corruption activists. He called for the private sale of farmland in the country, which the World Bank estimates could add fifteen billion dollars a year to the economy. On September 7th, after weeks of negotiations, he welcomed home thirty-five Ukrainians who had been held as prisoners by Russia, including the film director Oleg Sentsov, who had become a cause célèbre.

Zelensky hired a half-dozen writers and producers from Kvartal 95 to join him as Presidential advisers. They struck me as approachable and intelligent, if a bit intoxicated by their success. Tymoshenko, the producer, who now serves as a top communications adviser to Zelensky, told me that the administration had conducted research that it says shows that people are less interested in watching press conferences than in hearing the President himself. “They want the President to sit in front of a camera and speak with them directly, like, ‘Hey, guys, so here’s what happened last week,’ ” he said. Bohdan, Zelensky’s chief of staff, put it more bluntly: “We talk to the people without go-betweens, without journalists.” A hundred days into Zelensky’s Presidency, his first in-depth interview—with an actor from the Kvartal 95 troupe who played Holoborodko’s Prime Minister on “Servant of the People”—was far from hard-hitting.

During the campaign, Natalie Sedletska, the head of an investigative-news program called “Schemes,” had tried to ask Zelensky about production contracts that Kvartal 95 had with Russian partners; he declined to comment. (A spokesperson for Zelensky said he does not remember receiving Sedletska’s inquiry.) In January, reporters from “Schemes” waited for Zelensky outside his office, but he brushed past them, saying, “I don’t owe you anything.” Sedletska told me that she didn’t necessarily believe that Zelensky was hiding explosive secrets, but did think that he might not be ready for his “collision with reality.” She went on, “You’re no longer just the darling of the people but the object of real scrutiny, and of real questions.”

I recently spoke with Alexey Kiryushchenko, who directed all three seasons of “Servant of the People” and has adapted many American sitcoms for Ukrainian and Russian audiences. (Local versions of “The Nanny” and “Who’s the Boss?” are among his biggest hits.) Kiryushchenko told me that he often gets stopped on the street: “People grab me to ask, ‘Will there be a new season?’ I tell them they’ve already missed it.” That season, he explained, had begun with Zelensky’s campaign and unlikely victory: “It’s come to life, it’s happening in real time.”

In retrospect, what was unfolding looked less like a comedy than a geopolitical psychodrama. William Taylor testified that Trump, having promised Zelensky a White House meeting in a congratulatory letter on May 29th, declined to set a date for weeks. In the days before the July 25th phone call, Taylor said, Gordon Sondland, the Ambassador to the E.U., recommended to Zelensky that he use the phrase “I will leave no stone unturned” when he spoke to Trump. The morning of the call, Kurt Volker wrote a message to Andriy Yermak, a lawyer and a longtime friend of Zelensky’s, who was acting as an emissary to the Trump Administration. Volker told Yermak that, if Zelensky managed to convince Trump that he would take action on the various issues of political interest to the U.S. President, “we will nail down date for visit to Washington.”

Zelensky and his advisers, few of whom had experience in foreign diplomacy, spent much of the summer looking for a way out of their predicament. The Western diplomat in Kiev described for me the nature of his conversations with the Zelensky administration: “The Ukrainians would ask us, ‘Is there a person we can talk to in the U.S.?’ They were looking for a magic solution, a person who could fix this and make it go away.” But U.S. policy toward Ukraine was split into what Taylor described as “two channels of U.S. policy-making and implementation, one regular and one highly irregular.” John Bolton, then Trump’s national-security adviser, “wanted to talk about security, energy, and reform” with Ukrainian officials, Taylor said, but Sondland “wanted to talk about the connection between a White House meeting and Ukrainian investigations.” One thing was clear, the Zelensky policy adviser said: “We were trying not to upset Trump, even as we knew we could not answer this question in a way that would satisfy all sides.”

In early August, Yermak and Giuliani decided to meet in Madrid. “Why should we rely on speculation and secondhand conversations?” Yermak recalled thinking. But their conversation seems to have led to further confusion: Giuliani left the meeting with the impression that Ukraine would pursue the investigations into the Bidens and Ukraine’s role in the 2016 U.S. election, while Yermak believed that he had made only general assurances that the new administration would look into a range of cases, as part of its over-all anti-corruption agenda. The Zelensky policy adviser wondered, in hindsight, whether engaging with unofficial emissaries like Giuliani under any circumstances had been a mistake. “People wanted to bring the President good news—‘I met Giuliani, I resolved everything,’ ” the policy adviser said. But it was never going to be so simple. “We should have stayed away.”

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Taylor, who had learned about the freezing of military aid to Ukraine on July 18th, said that, after a visit later that month to the front lines in the Donbass, he had become grimly aware that “more Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the U.S. assistance.” He stated that Sondland had told Zelensky that, if he did not “clear things up” by issuing a public statement about the investigations, the two countries would be at a “stalemate.” Taylor took this to mean that Ukraine would not receive the military aid. He summarized the message he heard from Sondland and Volker: “When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check.”