“Our son wants to be a soldier”: an interview with Ukraine’s first lady

By Oliver Carroll

The barbed wire, sandbags and sniper positions of Ukraine’s presidential compound make a dramatic backdrop for a photoshoot. But Olena Zelenska looks drained when she appears, wearing a flowing, electric-blue suit and clutching a pair of high heels to don for the photos. Ukraine’s first lady admits to being a reluctant interviewee.

The contrast with her media-hungry, jollier half is obvious. But her mood picks up when a familiar, husky voice roars from behind an open door: “I heard you were in the building.” The president smiles as he appears, then hardens at the sight of journalists, whom he seemingly wasn’t expecting. For five minutes, the photoshoot becomes the Volodymyr Zelensky show. “I wanted to see my wife, and now you’re making me work,” he quips to me, before turning for the camera. “You want our faces too, not only our backs?”

It was always going to be an adventure with Volodymyr, says Zelenska, from the moment he and two friends simultaneously proposed to Zelenska and two of her friends, when they were all travelling together in a white minibus as twenty-somethings. “Girls listen, we’ve had a chat, and this is what’s going to happen,” is how Zelenska, now 44, remembers his pitch. The high-school sweethearts had already been dating for eight years, but it wasn’t love at first sight, Zelenska says. She isn’t sure that she even liked him at the start: “He was just a boy I knew, someone I saw change from seventh grade to eleventh grade.” The two were united by their sense of humour (hers was better than his, she says) and a common group of friends who later formed Kvartal 95, the entertainment company that made Volodymyr famous. There was no question of Zelenska agreeing or not to the minibus proposal, let alone anyone getting on their knees: “It was fate, and all of that.” The three couples ended up getting married a week apart in the summer of 2003.

She was impressed by his daily videos – but thought they should have been half the length

They had grown up alongside each other in Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city in southern Ukraine, now near the front line of the war. She remembers romantic summers spent with Volodymyr and their friends, listening to music and hanging out by the river. Their choice of a career in comedy – she wrote the scripts, Volodymyr performed – later propelled them to the bright lights of Kyiv, which has since become their home. It was there that her husband, having played the part of a teacher-turned-president in a popular TV series, “Servant of the People”, launched his audacious bid to become the real president in 2019. They could never have expected what was going to happen to Ukraine. “We were naive,” she says. “We thought that we could win through honest work and graft. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than that.”

It was still dark when Zelenska woke up on February 24th 2022, thinking that she’d heard fireworks. Her husband was already in the room next door, fully clothed. “It’s started,” he said, and immediately left. It was Zelenska’s task to tell her nine-year-old son Kyrylo, and 17-year-old daughter Oleksandra, what was happening. She told herself she mustn’t cry as she walked down the corridor, quaking. But when she got to the kids’ rooms she realised they were already awake and “knew everything”.

She told them to get ready for a trip to the countryside: “I had to show that everything was just great, cool, that it was an adventure.” By that evening the three of them were in a secret location far from the capital; her cheeks hurt after a day of fake smiles.

The first lady says she survived the early days on a mix of adrenaline and Valerian before the latter ran out. She tried not to think about her husband being named as target number one for Russian hit squads – or about herself and her children being target number two. The “professionals” would do what was necessary to keep them all safe: “I understood that I understood nothing, but was responsible for the kids and needed to react to the situation.” Like Ukrainians across the country, the presidential family suddenly divided along gender lines. He donned military green and showed his battle face to the world. She kept her private vigil, tending to the home front.

Every time the sirens wailed Zelenska and her children would rush down to the bomb shelter; up and down, up and down again. She couldn’t sleep, and often watched her nine-year-old as he napped or played on his phone. One time she dozed off only to be woken by her son. “Mum,” he said, “time to go to the shelter.” Many of her friends – actors and writers – signed up for Ukraine’s army and territorial defence. When her husband introduced martial law, banning any man aged 18-60 from leaving the country, many women fled with their children; others, like her, found a wartime role away from the front.

“Civilisation is a thin film, torn very quickly. It’s frightening to realise that it’s not shared by people living alongside us, not shared by the monsters of Bucha”

Civilisation is a “thin film torn very quickly,” says Zelenska. Her immediate fear about what the Russians might do – to her family, to her country – turned into a dawning realisation of all that mankind is capable of. “We thought that everyone was the same, that the decades of humanity in Europe were the values we all lived by. That turned out not to be the case.” News of atrocities in Bucha, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol have unfolded like a bad film, she says. “It’s frightening to realise this thin enamel of civilisation is not shared by people living alongside us, not shared by the monsters of Bucha.” She goes on: “Mariupol can happen anywhere at any time in any country. Now I really think that anything is possible.”

As the world woke up to the horrors of war in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky became a figurehead of the free world. Many have remarked on his extraordinary evolution from showman to international statesman, but Zelenska says she has not been surprised by it. “Volodymyr was always someone I could rely on. That simply became more obvious to more people.” Before the war, she used to take it personally when Volodymyr was criticised. But he was always brave enough to be himself, she says. “It’s an illusion that an actor remains an actor. He’s as open as a human being can be. I can read his face like a book, and I’m sure you can too.”

The couple didn’t see each other for over two months. Like other Ukrainians, Zelenska watched her husband’s daily speeches to the nation on social media – she was impressed by them even if, she suggests, the finished product should have been half the length. “Volodymyr always says I criticise him too much, that I never praise him enough,” she allows herself a rare bellow of laughter. She also observed her husband’s blooming facial hair (trimmed back since she returned to Kyiv recently). His beard reminded her of happier times: summer holidays when filming was over and he could let himself go. In wartime, it meant something else.

The pair spoke regularly during their time apart, and he’d chat with the kids “about all sorts of things, even just nonsense”. But it was the first lady who sat with her son as he did his homework, and coaxed her daughter through her final year of school. She made the meals, not that that was a big change: her husband was always a weekend cook, a meat-on-sticks kind of man.

“Volodymyr always says I criticise him too much, that I never praise him enough”

When Volodymyr became president in 2019, Zelenska took on initiatives appropriate to a first lady: improving school meals, promoting Ukrainian culture, tackling gender inequality. To hold such a role during wartime has added a unique set of pressures. She talks of others experiencing trauma, but she too feels it. She wouldn’t wish the situation on anybody. “No one wants to be at the epicentre of these terrible events,” she says. She stopped writing scripts – this was no time for comedy – and diverted her energies into evacuating vulnerable children and rolling out psychological support. Last year she convened a network of first ladies – now she mobilised this group to help arrange treatment abroad for hundreds of ill and injured children. Jill Biden made a surprise visit to Ukraine in May; Brigitte Macron greeted a flight of evacuees arriving in Paris: “The plane was full of terrified mums and kids, and to see her climb on board was a wonderful gesture.”

Zelenska worries that, with the flight of so many Ukrainians abroad, much of the country’s potential has disappeared. But the future is almost too frightening to think about, she says. For now, every Ukrainian has to protect what they have, “to survive and live at any cost”. Like Zelenska herself, many have already returned from havens elsewhere and are now daring to live something of a normal life. Yet “the idea that it’s an ordinary summer is an illusion”. War rages in the east. Atrocities unfold. And everyone knows that life is on hold – including her own. She still does not see her husband more than once or twice a week.

Like other parents, Zelenska fears for the next generation. The most unfortunate ones are receiving their young in body bags. Zelenska knows she is lucky to have her children close by. Her daughter is about to turn 18, and will soon go to university in Kyiv. Her son has longer to go before reaching that milestone: “I really hope that when he’s 18, we will have had many years of living in a free and peaceful country,” says Zelenska. At present, life – and Ukraine – seem a long way from that. “The most frightening thing of all is that he tells everyone he wants to be a soldier.” ■

Oliver Carroll is a correspondent for The Economist in Ukraine. You can read the rest of our coverage of the war here

PHOTOGRAPHS: FRANCO PAGETTI / VII AGENCY