“How and when do you think this war can end?”
“We all know how it’s going to end, but we don’t know when.
‘And how will it end?’
— Only Ukraine’s victory is possible, of course.
Olena Zelenska is the First Lady of Ukraine. After spending months in a secret place, with her two children, aged 17 and 9, that she has with the Ukrainian president, she returned to kyiv. She and she went there, in a presidential residence converted into a bunker, where she gave an interview to the Spanish newspaper El País. She talked about her children, her husband and the war. And as for you, there is only one possible outcome – the victory of Ukraine. “The [Zelensky] He is a man who set out to win. And if he wins, the whole country will win.”
At the beginning of the war, she says, she was sometimes confused: “I would wake up in the morning and think: ‘What a nightmare I had last night.’ Then I realized that it was not a nightmare, but reality. It’s our life. We had no children to hide in Russian missile cellars. We want them to live. Assuming this reality, understanding that we have to live in spite of everything, makes us even more desperate. But we have to do something. Not doing so would be much worse.”
After months of living away from her husband, she returned to the country’s capital. That doesn’t mean they see each other a lot. “We are still separated, because my husband lives where he works and we see very little of each other. My children want to see their father, hug him. Yesterday my son asked me when the war ends so they can have dinner or sleep together. To watch a movie or read a book. We have to get over it so it doesn’t affect your mental health.”
For the teenage daughter of Volodymyr Zelensky, this has been a difficult period. “My daughter goes to college, but she can’t see her friends or walk around the city for security reasons. She doesn’t know if she’ll be able to go to school,” Olena says, saying that she hopes she can give back “her life and her childhood”.
About her husband, she says that she did not marry the future president, nor a star of Ukrainian television. All this happened afterwards. “I expected nothing more than to find a friend, a partner, a husband for life and the father of my children. He fulfilled all my expectations: to be the best father for my children. He is the person who never failed me, I never doubted him.”
The war, although it is felt in the air, took the country by surprise, mainly because of the violence that has been experienced. “We felt a bit of tension months before the war. All Ukrainians felt it in one way or another. But nobody, not even myself, could have imagined that something of such cruelty could happen in the 21st century, of such illogical destruction and without any pretext. February 24 “was a horrible ordeal for us, something so terrible that we don’t even remember what happened before.”
For the rest, he believes that Russia is achieving the opposite of what it wanted. One of the visible faces is that so many Ukrainians have never spoken Ukrainian instead of Russian, in a country where the two languages coexist. “In the city where we were raised [Olena e Zelensky], Russian was spoken, but in neighboring villages Ukrainian was used. I finished school in Russian, but when I entered the university in 1995 I already had Ukrainian classes. We are not experiencing an abrupt transformation, we have been an independent country since 1991”, that is, with more than 30 years of transformation.
“Now, some Ukrainians speak Ukrainian as a form of protest. As usual, Russia got the opposite result to what it was looking for: by trying to Russify us, it Ukrainianized us. It is sometimes said that change is very difficult for older people. But my mother, who is 70 years old and has always spoken Russian, is starting to use Ukrainian at home.”
Source: Observadora
