Portrait of Bravery

As the war in Ukraine drags on, first lady Olena Zelenska has become a key player—a frontline diplomat and the face of her nation’s emotional toll. Rachel Donadio travels to Kyiv to meet her. 

- Rachel Donadio

There is no script for first ladies in wartime, and so Olena Zelenska is writing her own. The wife of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a longtime comedy writer, always preferred to stay behind the scenes, while her husband, a comedian turned politician whose presidency may yet determine the fate of the free world, glowed in the limelight. But ever since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Zelenska has found herself center stage in a tragedy. When I met her on a rainy summer afternoon in Kyiv, where cafés were busy even amid frequent air-raid sirens, her luminous face and green-brown eyes seemed to capture the range of emotions coursing through Ukraine today: deep sadness, flashes of dark humor, recollections of a safer, happier past, and a steely core of national pride.

“These have been the most horrible months of my life, and the lives of every Ukrainian,” she said, speaking her country’s language through a translator. “Frankly I don’t think anyone is aware of how we have managed emotionally.” What inspires her, she told me, is her fellow Ukrainians. “We’re looking forward to victory. We have no doubt we will prevail. And this is what keeps us going.”

I met Zelenska—surnames are gendered in Slavic languages—deep inside the presidential office compound, a heavily guarded place I had traveled long hours to reach. With Ukraine’s airspace closed to flights, I took a train from Poland, through landscapes that have seen some of the 20th century’s worst horrors. Once inside the compound, I passed security checkpoints and a labyrinth of blacked-out corridors full of sandbags and soldiers. Life in wartime.