The Times: Olena Zelenska: ‘I feel responsible for everything and everyone’
- exclusive -
Janice Turner meets Ukraine’s first lady in Kyiv, where she reveals her dismay at the Royal Opera House welcoming the soprano Anna Netrebko, her relationship with Melania Trump and why she rarely sees her husband, Volodymyr Zelensky
Janice Turner | Thursday September 25 2025, 5.00am BST, The Times
Past the antitank blocks to a checkpoint staffed by grave soldiers with Kalashnikovs who pore hard over our passports, we are escorted down a closed-off street into a courtyard, through a metal door into a lobby whose windows are half-boarded and lined with sandbags, where men in dress uniforms and fatigues briskly come and go. There is no question we are at the epicentre of government in a nation at war.
The Ukrainian presidential offices at Bankova Street, Soviet reproductions of the original 19th-century buildings, are cast in permanent half-light. We’re led along high-ceilinged corridors, up grand staircases to a vast sixth-floor room where, pulling aside thick blinds, I see the House of Chimeras, the incongruously quirky art nouveau masterpiece festooned in concrete mermaids and dolphins, once a Kyiv tourist must-see, now trapped within the ring of steel.
Military men watch as we set up our equipment, and even accompany me to the bathroom. Then finally she appears, Olena Zelenska, first lady of Ukraine, the TV scriptwriter who married a comedian and never wanted to be a president’s wife, let alone mother of the nation during a Russian invasion. Necessity forced her to overcome a fear of public speaking to address the US Congress and UK parliament, yet Zelenska, 47, still has the quiet reticence of a woman happier out of the spotlight.
Since February 24, 2022, her conventional first lady duties of good works and smiling beside the president at photo calls have assumed a mortal urgency. While Volodymyr Zelensky travels the world seeking armaments and sanctions, Zelenska addresses a myriad domestic problems created by war: the fight to recover Ukrainian children abducted and indoctrinated by Russia, the 150,000 people with life-changing injuries, including many amputees, the pupils who struggle to learn in shattered frontline schools. What is it like leading the home front in a conflict that grinds on with no end in sight? “We help our people to live with consequences of the war,” Zelenska says quietly. “I feel responsibility for everything, for everyone. And this feeling, this experience, is something that unfortunately never lets me relax or breathe freely.”
A siren wails. ‘Go immediately to the shelters’
As our train pulls into Kyiv station, the Air Alarm Ukraine app on my phone lets off a siren wail. “Go immediately to the shelters,” it orders. It is just a fortnight since Russia killed 23 people in the Kyiv suburbs with missiles and a swarm of Shahed drones, which overwhelmed the capital’s air defences. A week ago, a Russian cruise missile hit a key government building in the city’s heart. And just hours after I land at Rzeszow airport in Poland it is closed after Russian drones enter Polish airspace, causing a scrambling of Nato warplanes.
To visit Kyiv I had to undergo high-risk environment training, was schooled in cybersecurity, issued body armour and a helmet, learnt which Telegram channels to monitor during an attack. So as I follow the vast throng of passengers — the most common way into Ukraine, even if you’re Prince Harry, is by train — down an underpass, I expect people to remain here until the alarm ends. Instead, the crowd proceeds up into a broad street of traffic jams, dog walkers, shoppers, electric scooters, friends enjoying a drink outdoors on a warm evening.
In Kyiv, it quickly becomes clear that after three and a half years of war, people live in a mode of normalised abnormality. I should clarify this is not the eastern front line of Donetsk, where attacks are daily and devastating, or one of the safest cities such as Lviv, where they are relatively rare. Rather, Kyiv is a capital city of three million citizens who have each decided to play the odds.
An air raid alert sounds when anything is detected in the sky heading towards the capital. It could be a ballistic missile or a Russian drone — whether on reconnaissance or a hated Shahed laden with explosives — and the all clear doesn’t sound until that object is shot down or, most often, changes trajectory, perhaps swerving east instead. Alarms sound in the day too: they could last half an hour or half a day. If a Kyivan obeyed every single one they’d be constantly bobbing in and out of shelters, get no sleep, lose all pleasure in life and be driven mad, which clearly is Vladimir Putin’s intent.
At my hotel in the elegant diplomatic quarter, the receptionist runs through the location of the restaurant, gym, spa… and shelter. It is not in the basement as I’d expected, but is a repurposed windowless first-floor conference room. Ukrainians speak of “the rule of two walls”: you are safest in an internal space, like a corridor or hallway, away from shattering glass. My shelter is the most bougie of bunkers. Next to tea and coffee machines are gas masks, torches, medicines and a loud hailer. There are tables to sit around, and mattresses made up in crisp hotel linen.
Kyivans, of course, are seldom so fortunate. Those in the suburbs live mainly in tower blocks with terrifying grandstand views of explosions and air defences zapping drones. Each night as they scroll through Telegram they must decide whether to descend many floors to a shelter, which may be in a parking garage or 15 minutes’ walk away, perhaps in a Metro station. On winter nights of minus 10C, this means pulling on many layers of clothes, dragging sleepy children, provisions and blankets to some freezing concrete floor while risking injury from falling debris on the way.
Besides, maybe you have a big presentation at work tomorrow or just long to sleep. So each night that cursed app blares in Kyiv, people ask themselves Dirty Harry’s famous question: do you feel lucky?
People check loved ones survived the night
There are no sirens on my first night, yet I still sleep fitfully. Next morning I attend the Fifth Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen organised by Zelenska, who later will tell me she was “apprehensive” the recent attacks would mean “some of the guests could change their mind and not come”. But there is a solid turnout from that most exclusive of clubs: the first ladies of Germany, Austria, Finland, Estonia and Lithuania, plus Denmark’s first gent. This year’s theme is the global importance of education and presentations I hear have that glib Davos/TedX air. But words are not the point here. The summit is both a chance to foreground the struggles of Ukraine’s wartime education system and a major display of its soft power, signifying its place within Europe, a point President Zelensky himself makes in a blistering closing address.
We sit politely listening to Zoom messages from first ladies who can’t attend when Guatamala’s Lucrecia Peinado is interrupted by a siren. Foreigners present scoot straight out, but a group of young Ukrainian women journalists behind me don’t move. Are they going to the shelter? They smile and shrug, then over lunch tell me about their lives.
Every morning, the first thing they do when they wake is check Telegram to see if everyone they love has survived the night. This isn’t histrionic: all have friends serving on the front, relatives living in the east and know someone just like them who one night died in a random strike. All have lost big chunks of their social circle: neighbours, family friends, five or six close friends, boys they were at school with, many journalist colleagues. When they say goodbye on the phone, they always add, “You do know I love you?” Just in case. Diana, 35, says she and her husband no longer have petty rows: “There are bigger things to get upset about now — and we might lose each other any minute.”
Julia, 24, a delightful, effervescent TV journalist, says a colleague has lost his leg. “He jokes that at Halloween he will go as a pirate. We have a dark sense of humour, like the British, and right now it helps us cope.” Then she pulls out a ring on a ribbon from beneath her shirt: “It was my father’s.” He joined up straight after the invasion and was killed in December 2022, yet Julia still feels he is “like Schrödinger’s cat, dead and alive at the same time”.
They regard air raids both as terrifying and a banal hindrance. Diana describes a trip to the cinema where a Ukrainian comedy was stopped and started three times. Finally she gave up. But even after a major attack, friends don’t cancel the next evening’s plans or take a duvet day at work. “Just to be alive is a privilege,” says Anna, 28, a military journalist for whom explosions are “a sign I should wash my hair and go report on what they’ve hit”.
The women I meet in Kyiv look like any you’d see in a British coffee shop, wearing trainers and a cool frock, buying a flat white en route to work. They are ambitious, fashionable, highly online, worry about their weight or their love life. But they are also on antidepressants, see a therapist (if they can afford one), find little ways to escape ever present anxiety, from a jigsaw puzzle to taking a dance class.
What do they miss most? “Nights!” they all cry. Nights before the midnight curfew imposed by martial law. Nights that unspooled into adventures where they wandered the city, went clubbing, hung out on the banks of the Dnipro River, bought a McDonald’s at 2am on their way home. Nights with no sirens, no fear, just deep, gorgeous, uninterrupted sleep.
Yet Kyiv — a handsome, big-boned city — does its best to keep living. There have been no power cuts for over a year and although people fear winter, many now have EcoFlow mini-generators, which work for four or five hours. Down in Podil — the Covent Garden of Kyiv — families stroll in the early autumn sun. There are excellent restaurants, although your bill arrives around 10pm, so the staff can make curfew. There is theatre, opera, music and art exhibitions.
Ukrainian culture is not incidental to the war, but what is being defended as much as land. Everywhere I hear the same furious refrain: “The Russians say Ukraine has no poets, writers or composers, and when we name them, they claim them as Russian.” Now Ukrainian culture is not just patriotic but fashionable. Hipster girls wear traditional jewellery, and modern designer versions of vyshyvanka blouses with embroidered sleeves are sold in Kyiv’s top department store, Tsum.
On Saturday night in the outskirts of Kyiv I attend an annual music festival along with 4,000 people. That it happened at all is a miracle. A siren sounded during the 3pm soundcheck. It only lasted 30 minutes, but could have cancelled the whole event. Tickets sold well, despite the recent strikes: people are desperate to forget the war. Yet it permeates everything. Even the face glitter everyone is wearing was sold to raise money to free the Azovstal defenders captured by Russia defending Mariupol. The festival organiser Vlad Kiskov, 30, cannot hold back tears as he talks of Mykola, a key figure in his team, who was killed this year.
The top act is Ukrainian’s biggest rap band, the TNMK collective, whose lead singer, Oleg Mykhailiuta, 51, drinking whisky from a paper cup in a baseball cap, paraphrases Churchill: “The first line of our defence is soldiers on the front; the second line is Ukrainian culture,” he says. “If we don’t have the first line, we don’t have our culture. If we don’t have our culture, what are we fighting for?”
Three TNMK members are serving soldiers and tomorrow the guitarist will leave for Donbas. During their last number, a fan comes on stage to perform with the band a song he says kept him sane in a Russian PoW camp.
Each flag bears a name and a date. There are thousands
Stop anyone in Kyiv — and I mean anyone — and they will have suffered profound loss. Next morning, driving to Maidan Square, the photographer Julia Kochetova is telling me about a funeral, the latest of dozens she has helped organised, when my translator, Kateryna Malofieieva, asks her advice. Her friend’s brother died in an occupied region and, since his body is not yet released, the family can’t apply for a cemetery plot, now in short supply. Julia advises cremation, because it’s easier to find space in a nice columbarium. These women in their thirties are experts in the intricacies of death.
In Maidan Square it is clear why. A graveyard can only pack in so many bodies, but here the density of the dead is infinite. Each Ukrainian flag bears a name and date. There are untold thousands, because casualty figures are never released. Sometimes they are corralled into battalions or units, but most are haphazardly placed. The memorial goes on and on, and I’m poleaxed by the photos of young men like my sons with open, merry faces, or older guys, the dads who look too grizzled for war. Some from the earliest days are already faded. Julia points out a young female medic: “I took that picture.” Over 50 friends have asked her to photograph them before they were deployed, so they’ll look their best in Maidan Square.
Everyone loathes the sound of the drones
“Do you feel lucky?” is a different proposition for a parent. Iryna Mazuyina, 39, who has three-year-old twins, Taras and Marko, lives in an upmarket development near Kyiv international airport, closed to flights but now the site of air-defence systems and thus a magnet for drones. Everyone loathes the sound of the Shaheds, a cold, electronic insect whine. When the warnings sound, Iryna unrolls a mattress in her flat’s hallway, gently transfers her sleeping sons, then scrolls Telegram channels all night.
Her luck has held, but only just. We walk to an adjacent block where her friends were in bed when a Shahed hit and were only saved from a rain of glass by thick curtains. Their windows are still boarded up, as is her paediatrician’s office below, since with so many tradesmen in the army, it’s impossible to get anything fixed.
Iryna tells her sons the rumbling air defences are thunder, but wonders how long they’ll believe her. She’s only taken them to the shelter twice, when missiles were forecast, but their school has one dug out under the AstroTurf football pitch, and the kids are often in and out of it all day long. This summer she took her boys on holiday to Spain — her husband, like all men of serving age, can’t leave Ukraine — during a town’s fiesta. At the sound of fireworks, her sons began to tremble violently, and they all rushed back to their hotel in tears.
“It is a casino,” says a policeman, lighting a cigarette, beside the blackened cavity where a Shahed hit on Sunday night. The drone was seen buzzing a 16-storey block, hovering over a children’s playground, then abruptly changing trajectory and slamming into the fifth-floor flat of Viktoria Hregeniuk, who worked for an HIV charity, and was asleep beside her three-month-old son. The blast threw them out of the building, the policeman says, and, without warning, produces photos of their bodies on his phone.
I think of Viktoria, sleep deprived already with her newborn, the nearest shelter 15 minutes away. She spun the wheel in the war’s casino and somewhere in Russia a bored drone operator squeezed his console. The woman next door, who has come to retrieve her family’s possessions, is Ludmilla, 73, the wife of an atomic scientist who was relocated here from Chernobyl in 1986. “We have been joking,” she says, “this is not the first time we have survived.”
‘Any event could be halted by the need to take shelter’
All first ladies carry the burden of perfection: how they look, dress, comport themselves in public will be viciously judged. Olena Zelenska bears all this and more. Smile too much and she is frivolous; look miserable and she is unpatriotic and ungrateful for her relative privilege. Her marriage, given she and President Zelensky have been unable to live together since the war began, is the source of constant speculation. Meanwhile, any stray remark about global events or negotiations could cost Ukrainian lives.
Zelenska, unsurprisingly, wishes to stick to the safer ground of her first-ladies summit. Although her English is good, she speaks in Ukrainian, probably to avoid misinterpretation at home. When I mention air raids interrupting the sessions, she says in one sense it was useful that foreign visitors “could experience the pace of Ukrainian life, where any event may be halted when we must go down to the shelter and never know when we can reconvene”.
This constant uncertainty is sapping, she says, especially for children “who have to spend the day in the bomb shelter, where you can hardly expect lessons will be conducted in a fully fledged way”. In frontline towns, children attend school in shifts two days a week, then study online. Ukrainians have benefited hugely from Covid-era innovations and are the only people I’ve ever met wistful for the pandemic.
Yet the children most on Zelenska’s mind are those abducted by Russia in occupied territories, stolen from orphanages or parents, to be politically indoctrinated. It is a crime of Stalinist or Nazi magnitude that moved the US first lady, Melania Trump, to write a personal letter to Vladimir Putin raising their plight, which the US president passed on to him at the Alaska summit. In turn, Zelenska wrote a letter of thanks to Melania, which President Zelensky recently hand-delivered to Trump. Does Zelenska believe the first lady back channel is a useful diplomatic tool?
“I believe we need to use all the tools that are available,” she says. “The classic diplomatic tools, but also we need advocacy and we need to engage as many people as possible to bring back Ukrainian children. That’s the topic that I try to discuss with Melania Trump. And I hope that as soon as possible we will be able to discuss that, not by exchanging letters, but in some other format.”
Zelenska admits that despite many meetings, success is limited; some children have been away from Ukraine for three years, forgetting their families, country and language. “They have also this so-called military-patriotic training in Russia. Time is passing and this is terrible for the children’s mental health.” So far only a handful have been reclaimed.
Zelenska meets with the returned children and their parents. “Every child who comes back undergoes a re-adaptation process with psychological counselling. I have also talked to many grandmothers, since the children are often separated from parents during the ‘filtration’ process, when they tried to leave hostile areas. I know a boy whose grandmother found him but is still waiting for his mother.”
I wonder how Zelenska carries the weight of so much sadness. “Frankly, sometimes I do need some emotional time off, because one cannot keep speaking and thinking only about that. That is emotionally demanding, and sometimes I do need to be distracted with something positive. But unfortunately this is our normality.”
The happier moments are “when people return from hostilities, prisoners of war or civilians, and we see film of their loved ones waiting, the buses coming and their families looking out for them in the crowd”. But even amid these “profound emotions”, she still imagines what they have been through. “In war there is nothing good, nothing beautiful,” she says. “No patriotic romanticism as you might see in a movie. This is about pain and tears. There is the heroism of our defenders. But everyone wants this war to stop.”
‘Routine chores can help you feel more normal’
Sometimes she finds distraction in a film or a good book. At the start of the war, “I believe everyone realised how routine chores could help you feel more normal. Even doing dishes, cleaning the house. Now I have found a physical workout that makes me feel less exhausted. I have a small fitness corner with an Orbitrek [elliptical training] machine. I do some cardio exercise and lift some light weights. That helps me a lot.”
Her own children — her daughter, Oleksandra, 21, and son Kyrylo, 12 — are at university and school. “They would be more confident and relaxed without the war. But we are together. And that’s what gives me strength and inspiration and the hope that, later, everything will be fine.”
How do she and her husband support each other when they are so frequently apart? “We spend as much time together as possible, but that is very little right now. I would like to see him more often. I believe we can learn some lessons after the war, because we are not in a normal state, any of us, now. It is very busy, we have this adrenaline and we cannot stop to think about how to support each other. So we won’t be able, before the war ends, to come to any conclusions.”
The biography picture on Zelenska’s Instagram is of a fresh-faced, carefree couple. Does she ever reflect on the people they once were? She says that she changed little inside, but has learnt to endure the spotlight. “My first public speeches were so stressful. I felt so bad that I was not sure I could do it again. Now I feel more confident, simply through repetition. It’s part of my job.” But of herself and her husband she says, “Unfortunately, we have not changed for the better. We have learnt to be more resilient and to be stronger, I guess. But I never dreamt of learning this lesson. What I dream about, what I really miss, what I have not felt for a long period, is a state without anxiety, worries, a sense of looming danger, or some emotional burden. I believe the last time we could breathe freely and be happy was before 2014 [the Russian invasion of Crimea].”
Then I ask how Britain can help Ukraine, expecting another blandly diplomatic answer. But after giving profuse thanks for our hosting of Ukrainian refugees, military and economic support, she launches into a matter which has clearly incensed her. “I was negatively impressed,” she says, “when Anna Netrebko [the Russia-born soprano] was again invited to the Royal Opera House to perform. I know that many representatives of the cultural and artistic elite and politicians spoke against the decision. But it still happened.”
She says that just as a person’s health is physical and mental, a war is conducted both on the physical front line and via cultural soft power. “A country may lose impact somewhere, but gain a lot via sports, diplomacy, even cuisine. When people see a great performance with a beautiful voice, they think, ‘Wow, maybe the country that brought up such a wonderful singer is not that bad.’ ”
Russia, she says, expertly manipulates international bodies to promote its culture. She speaks of the “legend of the Russian ballet, although a great portion of it is Ukrainian. Cultural expropriation works, and unfortunately we let it happen.”
Does she feel betrayed by the Royal Opera House for welcoming Netrebko? Zelenska says that rather she feels “sad” and notes that New York’s Metropolitan Opera dropped Netrebko, despite financial penalties, and is being sued by her. “They did that out of principle. But we cannot take offence if everyone does not stand hand in hand with us.”
‘I often dream I’m driving. There’s a brake problem. I can’t stop’
Finally, I ask Zelenska what is the first thing she will do after the war ends. I expect her to say celebrate with her family, but instead she says, “I have always had a ritual that calmed me down in peaceful times. I really like driving alone in my car. Now I never have the chance either to drive or be alone. So I would like to go back to driving without any particular purpose, to the suburbs or the countryside. Maybe even switching off my phone for an hour.” She hasn’t driven since before the war and wonders if she’s forgotten how.
“By the way,” she adds, “I often have this dream where I am driving and there is a problem with my brake system. I cannot stop. But somehow I manage, magically,to resolve it. I never crash. But this feeling, that I do not control the car, is very scary in the dream. I believe it’s my unconscious looking for the control I don’t have.”
Then, as we pose for photos, a make-up artist and stylist flutter about fussing with her hair and making sure her deep purple trouser suit hangs right. “Getting ready takes so much time every day,” she murmurs in English, and picks a stray hair off my jacket. Then she holds my hand for a long time as we say goodbye, and I feel suddenly the deep loneliness of this woman trapped at the centre of this crushing war and, despite protocol and stern looks from watching soldiers, am compelled to give Mrs Zelenska a hug.
Article
