How do we talk about Olena Zelenska, the comedy writer turned reluctant president’s wife, who has emerged as a figure of defiant patriotism as bombs fall over Ukraine?
“Today I will not have panic and tears. I will be calm and confident,” Zelenska, 44, wrote on Instagram the last Thursday of February, the day Russia launched an unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “My children are looking at me,” she went on. “I will be next to them. And next to my husband. And with you.”
Zelenska is married to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In 2019 the couple became the youngest president and first lady in the country’s history. They have two children—Oleksandra, a teenager, and Cyril, who is under 10. Zelenska is a professional comedy writer. As first lady, she has championed women’s safety, children’s health, and disability access. She and her children have remained in the country, the president said last week, despite reports from Ukrainian intelligence that “the enemy has marked me as target number one, my family as target number two.”
How do we talk about Olena Zelenska? How do we talk about a woman who is highly accomplished and fascinating in her own right, without reducing her to a powerful man’s wife? How do we talk about the reserves of courage Zelenska must be accessing to stay in Ukraine with her husband and children, without suggesting that her total worth as an individual comes from being a wife and mother? How do we acknowledge what Zelenska obviously is—a smart, successful, very conventionally beautiful woman—without applying a girlboss gloss to a war?
The Russian attack on Ukraine has been a reminder that the world’s appetite for entertainment and beauty is voracious even in a time of violence. The president has been heralded in publications around the world as a sex symbol, with global conversations about his looks, his masculinity, and who should play him in a movie. Misinformation posts have gone viral, inaccurately identifying a woman in red lipstick and fatigues as Zelenska. Zelenska, for her part, has used her social media to share images of actual Ukrainian woman soldiers. “Our current resistance has a particularly female face,” she captioned her post, showing reverence for her “incredible compatriots.”
The violent horrors in Ukraine are not a movie, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his family are not protagonists. But some confusion is understandable. Zelenskyy was a very successful comic actor before he ran for president. In the kind of twist for which the phrase “stranger than fiction” was created, between 2015 and 2018 Zelenskyy starred on a Veep-like Ukrainian television show, playing a regular man who woke up one day as president of Ukraine. The next year Zelenskyy ran for president, citing positive responses to his character’s governing style. He won in a landslide. In 2019, when President Trump was impeached for abusing power by pressuring the president of Ukraine to announce an investigation into Democratic politicians, the person he pressured was Zelenskyy. And all along, Zelenskyy has been the person who did the Ukrainian voice for Paddington Bear in both Paddington and Paddington Two.
Where does Olena Zelenska come into this outrageous story? She and her husband grew up in the same city in the center of Ukraine, The Washington Post reports, and they met in university, where he was studying law and she was studying architecture. According to the Ukrainian publication Unian, they dated for eight years. They built joint comedy careers: Zelenskyy in front of the camera as an entertainer, and Zelenska behind it, a writer. They founded a production company, Kvartal 95, or Quarter 95, which ultimately put out Servant of the People, the comedy in which Zelenskyy played Ukraine’s president. Zelenska wrote scripts, and Zelenskyy and other actors performed them.
The couple on Valentine’s Day 2022:
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It’s hard not to romanticize the way the couple built their careers in tandem, playing to each of their strengths. “Safe. Snug. Never calm, but always interesting,” Zelenska captioned an Instagram shot of herself with her husband in January 2020. “This is how you feel when a real man is around. The one you can rely on in everything,” she wrote, adding that her husband “really listens” and that he still gives her a feeling of butterflies. Zelenska has said that she was less than thrilled by her husband’s political ambitions. When he was elected, she told Ukrainian Vogue, she kept up her work as a studio writer. But quickly she embraced her role.
In Ukraine the first lady does not have an office or official duties. Her responsibilities are her own to create or not. Joining her husband on diplomatic trips overseas, she told Ukrainian Vogue, she “became convinced that making positive changes is real; you just have to sincerely crave something, and work hard.” She started with an initiative to improve nutrition for children in schools.
Masha Efrosinina, the ambassador of the U.N. Fund for Population in Ukraine, told Vogue that she once explained to Zelenska that while Ukraine has a national hotline for people experiencing domestic violence, the number is not well known. She said that Zelenska immediately responded, “Do you want me to write it on a badge and wear it myself?” Together the two created the National Call Center for domestic violence, while the president signed Ukraine’s version of an executive order on the same topic, The Diplomatic Courier reports.
In her tenure as first lady, Zelenska has given rousing speeches about women’s rights, she has pushed for better infrastructure for people with disabilities, she has worked on Ukraine’s Paralympic efforts, and she has championed STEM education for girls. From the start, she made the choice to wear Ukrainian designers as often as possible, to show their talent to the world, she told Vogue.
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A continent away, watching a war through clips and headlines, it’s hard to talk about Olena Zelenska. But Zelenska, a writer, never seems to struggle to say where she stands. “The president’s spouse has the opportunity to communicate with those who are close to power,” she told Vogue. “Doors of officials do not close before the first lady. I’m not a politician, and I do not have the right to interfere in the president’s work, but to become an intermediary between people and officials, so that the latter will hear the first, I can and I am really willing to.” And just a few weeks ago, Zelenska reflected on being known for women and children’s issues, for her style, for her family. “I truly believe in soft power and cultural diplomacy,” she told The Diplomatic Courier. “It is a part of that power which is important for Ukraine.”
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
