Ukraine's First Lady Becomes Powerful Voice in Battle Against Putin

Zelenska has played an active role on social media, inspiring her people and supporting resistance to Russian forces.

Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, posted an open letter addressed to the world’s media, detailing what she described as the “mass murder of Ukrainian civilians”. Over the past few weeks, Zelenska has repeatedly used social media to highlight her nation’s plight, but none has been as direct as her recent post, which ends with the rallying cry: “We will win. Because of our unity. Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine!”

As her husband, President Volodymyr Zelensky, emerged as the face of the Ukrainian challenge to the Russian invasion, Zelenska became increasingly vociferous online as a means of supporting him and raising international awareness of her country’s plight.

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When Russia first invaded Ukraine on February 24, Zelensky stated in a video that he believed “enemy sabotage groups” had entered Kiev and that he was their number one target and his family was the second target.

The whereabouts of his wife and two children are secret for security reasons. However, Zelenska has been playing an active role on social media, inspiring her people and supporting the resistance to Russian forces, while also gaining support from the rest of the world. On Instagram alone, she has 2.4 million followers.

The 44-year-old posted the open letter Tuesday on her various social media platforms, as well as the president’s official website, in response to what she said was the “overwhelming number of media outlets around the world.” the world” who requested an interview with her.

She began by remembering the events of February 24th. “Tanks crossed the Ukrainian border, planes entered our airspace, missile launchers surrounded our cities,” she wrote. “Despite assurances from Kremlin-backed propaganda outlets that they call this a ‘special operation’ – it is, in fact, the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians.”

Zelenska highlighted the “terrifying and devastating” victims of children, while also describing the horror of babies born in bomb shelters and roads “flooded” by refugees.

According to the website of Ukrainian Women’s Congress, a public platform lobbying for gender equality in the Ukrainian government and society at large, Zelenska was born in February 1978 and met her husband at the Kryvyi Rih Gymnasium №95 high school in Kryvyi Rih, the city in southern Ukraine where both grew up. Her biography on the website says that she majored in architecture at the Kryvyi Rih Economic Institute, graduating in 2000. The two were married in 2003 and had daughter Oleksandra a year later. Their son Kyrylo was born in 2013.

Like her husband, who has a law degree, Zelenska has moved away from her academic field of interest and into showbusiness.

She helped Zelensky create stand-up performances for Russian TV comedy show KVN, according to Ukrainian press agency. UNIANand later became a screenwriter for the TV production company Kvartal 95 Studiowhich she helped to found.

In an extensive interview with Vogue Ukraine in 2019, shortly after her husband came to power in a landslide election, Zelenska described herself as a “non-public person” who prefers to stay “behind the scenes”.

When her comedian husband first expressed his political ambitions, his wife was not very impressed. In the Vogue interview, which featured a glamorous photo shoot, she said: “I wasn’t too happy when I realized those were the plans. I realized how everything would change and that we would have difficulties to face it”.

She spoke of adjusting to life in the public sphere, but expressed her determination to protect her children, saying, “Let them choose how they want to live.”

In the three years since taking over as First Lady, she has accompanied her husband on numerous official visits around the world, including the US, Japan and France. Meanwhile, her position has allowed her to focus on a number of subjects that are dear to her, among them “child health, equal opportunities for all Ukrainians and cultural diplomacy,” she told Vogue.

One of its campaigns has been to improve children’s meals at school by carrying out fact-finding missions in Latvia, Japan and the US, among other countries.

Earlier this month, she created a dedicated channel on Telegram to provide advice on “how to act and live in wartime”. Hours after publishing her open letter, Zelenska, who in 2020 was admitted to hospital with Covid-19, updated her Facebook feed. Instagram with a photo of young cancer patients safely going to treatment in Poland.

She wrote: “These are young cancer patients from Ukraine. Just yesterday, they were hiding from the bombing in the basements of the clinics. Now they are crossing the Polish border on their way to safety and, more importantly, to continue their treatments. No aggressor in the world can stop them from winning the battle against the disease!”

In her letter, she reiterated her husband’s demand for a no-fly zoneadding: “Ukraine is disrupting the force that could aggressively enter its cities tomorrow under the guise of saving civilians.” “If we don’t stop Putin, who threatens to start a nuclear war, there will be no safe place in the world for any of us.”