Vadym Petrovych Hetman was born in the village of Snityn, located in Poltava Oblast (at the time in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic), in 1935.

Hetman's signature appears on the original banknotes of Ukraine's national currency, the hryvnia, which was introduced in September 1996.

He ran for a third term in the 1998 Ukrainian parliamentary election, but failed to get re-elected, receiving only 21.85% of the vote, 3.87% below the required percentage to win.

Hetman was shot by an apparently professional killer in the elevator of his own apartment block in Kyiv on 22 April 1998.

In early August 2005, the media reported that the convict filed an appeal to the Supreme Court of Ukraine on grounds that he had been forced to make a false confession.

Vadym Hetman was posthumously conferred the title of Hero of Ukraine by President Viktor Yushchenko on 11 July 2005.