Dnipro of the volunteer "Dnipro Guard" (Варти Дніпра, Varty Dnipra), first formed in 2014 with Kolomoyskyi support in response to the war in Donbas. Mayor of Dnipro, Borys Filatov has dismissed suggestions that the group is Kolomoyskyi's "private army". The Ukrainian billionaire, according to Filatov, helped with some equipment purchases, but the volunteer guard performs defence and law and order functions under the leadership of the national police. Relationship with Volodymyr Zelenskyy As of 2019, Kolomoyskyi owned 70% of the 1+1 Media Group whose TV channel 1+1 aired Servant of the People, a comedy series in which Volodymyr Zelenskyy plays a school teacher who, defying all expectations (including his own), becomes president of Ukraine on an anti-corruption platform. In March 2018, members of Zelenskyy's production company Kvartal 95 registered a new political party called "Servant of the People." Twelve months later, they succeeded in getting their candidate past Yulia Tymoshenko in the first round of the presidential election, and on 21 April 2019 to defeat President Poroshenko in the second round with 73 per cent of the vote. Zelenskyy was viewed by opponents, and not least by the incumbent Poroshenko, as Kolomoyskyi's candidate. Zelenskyy appointed Kolomoyskyi's personal lawyer as a key campaign advisor; travelled to Geneva and Tel Aviv to confer with the then-exiled Kolomoyskyi on multiple occasions; and benefited from the endorsement of Kolomoyskyi's media empire. Once in office, Zelenskyy appeared to remove officials deemed a threat to Kolomoyskyi's interests, among them the Prosecutor General, Ruslan Ryaboshapka and the Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), Yakiv Smolii, and Zelenskyy's first prime minister, Oleksiy Honcharuk, who tried to loosen Kolomoyskyi's control of a state-owned electricity company. Following the opening of U.S. criminal investigations of Kolomoyskyi and his associates, the oligarch appeared to lose influence with Zelenskyy. In 2020, Zelenskyy sponsored a law that banned former owners from recovering nationalized assets. On 1 February 2021, Oleksandr Dubinsky, a former 1+1 journalist who had actively opposed this so-called "anti-Kolomoyskyi law", was expelled from Zelenskyy's Servant of the People parliamentary faction. Claiming he was part of a "Russia-linked foreign influence network" associated with fellow People's Deputy Andrii Derkach, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control had placed Dubinsky on its sanction list . As had Rabinovich as co-founder of the Opposition Platform, Kolomoyskyi had begun to call for a new partnership between Ukraine and Russia. When that