‘This is a matter of life and death’

Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, fixed me with an ice-cold gaze when I asked her what message she has for America’s politicians currently holding up $60 billion of aid to help her country beat Vladimir Putin’s Russian invaders.

“This is a matter of life and death,” she said, “and I’d really like for those decision makers to understand that very profoundly. It’s not about money. It’s not about political point-scoring. It’s about life.”

Congress is engaged in a stand-off with hard-line Republicans insisting any more funding for Ukraine must be linked to stricter policies on the US southern border.

And the softly spoken tension in Ms. Zelenska’s voice belies the desperation that many Ukrainians feel for its biggest, most powerful ally to step up again for them, before it’s too late.

“While decisions are being taken,” she told me in an exclusive interview for “Piers Morgan Uncensored” in London, “people are dying and that’s the worst thing that can happen. I want them to feel that every hour that they hesitate, that they go to their offices, that they meet with their colleagues — in Ukraine, people are dying, and they do not have to be dying, and that’s the worst thing that is happening. I am sure that the majority of people there want to help Ukraine. And we understand the internal political processes in the United States, and we know they’re complex, they’re not simple. And we’re awaiting this decision, but we really, really need it.”

Top of her priority list is more funding for Ukraine’s air defense systems.

“Just for the civilian population,” she explained, “air defense saves lives everywhere in Ukraine. Russia, with their missiles and their drones, can reach any part of Ukraine and they’re constantly doing this. They want us to live in fear. And, yes, when we hear the siren of an air raid, we go down to our shelters, but not every place in Ukraine has shelters. And still, children in schools are dying. Children in their homes are dying while sleeping. And if we had enough air defense, we’d feel more resilient.”

It had been 20 months since I’d last seen Ms. Zelenska in Kyiv with her husband President Volodymyr Zelensky just four months after Russia brutally invaded her country.

But she was confused when I told her that timescale.

“I thought we met more recently?’ she replied with a quizzical expression. “Not so long ago? My feeling was that not so much time has passed, so from this feeling, I can understand that for us, time has stopped in some way. In one way, things are happening very quickly, things are changing. But at the same time, we feel that time is static, I don’t think that in my life, something has changed significantly. We’re still living in the same mood as four months after the start of the large-scale war.”

Ms. Zelenska arrived for our interview with her team including the obligatory bodyguards who protect her everywhere she goes.

When the war began, she was identified by intelligence sources as Vladimir Putin’s No. 2 highest-priority target in Ukraine – after the President.

If the Russians could capture her, they could use that as maximum leverage to exert pressure on her husband.

Yet far from being cowed by this chilling ongoing reality, she exudes an air of impressively resilient defiance.

Ms. Zelenska arrived looking immaculately elegant in a black two-piece suit and cream blouse, clutching an iPhone, and greeting me in English with a warm smile: “Hi Piers, nice to see you again!”

“You must be exhausted?” I suggested.

“I’m a little tired,” she admitted. “But it’s OK. I don’t want to complain.”

Her sad eyes indicated a weariness at the sheer relentless hell of war and when we sat down, I asked a simple question: “How are you?”

“It’s difficult,” she conceded. “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. You have to maintain your energy at some level. I compare the state to a smartphone when the battery is running out and you have an opportunity to charge it somewhere to make sure that you’re still online. You do it but you don’t have an opportunity to fully charge your battery. You can’t get distracted from the war. You can’t forget about the war, go on holiday for a week, away from the war. You’re constantly in this state and you cannot fully recharge. Ever. But the objective is to have enough energy. Enough to continue living, to carry on with life.”

Her spirits had been rallied in the UK by the support of the British Royal Family.

Last week, on the second anniversary of the invasion, King Charles, who is suffering from cancer, issued a message saying: “The determination and strength of the Ukrainian people continues to inspire, as the unprovoked attack on their land, their lives and livelihoods enters a third, tragic, year. Despite the tremendous hardship and pain inflicted upon them, Ukrainians continue to show the heroism with which the world associates them so closely. Theirs is true valor, in the face of indescribable aggression.”

“We were moved by his address,” said Ms. Zelenska, who met with Queen Camilla during her UK visit last week. “It’s very good to know that we have very sincere and powerful friends in the Royal Family.”

She wasn’t as moved by Putin’s State of the Nation address in Moscow last Thursday.

When I ask her if she has a message for the Russian dictator, her face tenses in visible disgust.

“To be honest, I wouldn’t even want to say this name. When we were children in the Soviet Union, sometimes children would write letters and put them in a time capsule and send them to space. And maybe somebody, sometime an alien will find this capsule and will read this message from these Soviet children from the 1970s. It’s the same thing. Why would I write this message to nowhere? Nobody will hear it. Nobody will pay any attention. It’s just addressed to nowhere.”

But when I pressed her again about what she would say to Putin if he was watching the interview, she said: “I just don’t know what this is for? I could never understand this. I do not understand any of the answers that he gives. I do not understand it, and I don’t know how a normal person can live with this?”

Then I asked her: “There have been hundreds of cases of Ukrainian women raped and abused by Russian soldiers. Over 20,000 Ukrainian children have been effectively kidnapped and taken out of the country. There have been barbaric attacks on maternity units and whole cities razed to the ground. I went to Bucha myself when I was over in Ukraine to hear the devastating stories of (the atrocity) what happened there. These are all war crimes. Should Putin be in an international court facing war crime charges?”

Ms. Zelenska replied: “Behind every crime, there is a person who carried out the crime and a person who commissioned the crime and we don’t know every person that carried out the crime, but we definitely know who commissioned the crime, who ordered the crime. And there needs to be punishment for every crime.”

The war, coming on the back of the COVID-19 pandemic, has taken a terrible toll of millions of Ukrainian families, not least on her own two children, a 19-year-old daughter Oleksandra and 11-year-old son Kyrylo.

“It would not be right to complain because the situation for our family is not that different from other families in Ukraine,’ she said. “But it’s painful for me that they’re losing these years of childhood… it’s difficult when you can’t plan anything for your children. You can’t dream together with them, to fill their lives with positive emotions. So, everything is on pause. No holidays, no rest. Everyone thinks about the war. My son talks constantly, and it’s very difficult to explain this to children. When your child asks you, ‘When will the war be over? Can you tell me?’ There is no answer. Nobody has this answer. We all want for this horrible time in our lives to be over.”

How often do the kids see Volodymyr?

“About once a week for a few hours. Sometimes less frequently when he has foreign visits, or he cannot meet us for other reasons. Never more frequent. Of course, it’s a very difficult time for him. He gets very tired. But he has his own ways to recharge. The children always help. And he can have a silly time with them, to sing silly songs, laugh with them, and that also helps him to recharge.”

And her?

“I can see him at the residential office sometimes, because I have my own office. And sometimes I can call him and if he’s not too busy, I can go into his office and see him. We can sometimes have lunch together but not too often. We have parallel lives but that’s normal.”

Does she ever get overwhelmed by the horror?

“It is a tragedy to live in the situation that we find ourselves and to see casualties every day. You cannot switch off your emotions. Recently, I was shaken by the tragedy of a whole family killed by missile strike, a mother together with her two sons. One of them was younger than one year old. They burned alive. These things don’t allow you to be happy or calm, ever, and there are some things that just finish you off, when you just start crying, and sobbing. Recently, there is a documentary made by one of our directors (Alan Badoev’s ‘A Long Day’) and I wasn’t able to watch it till the end. It consists fully of things that were filmed by people on their telephones at the start of the invasion. I could not stand it for a very long time. I was in tears. I felt overwhelmed. Emotions. It was really powerful. I will finish watching this film today, but I just didn’t have enough emotional reserves to finish it the first time. There’s another documentary, ’20 Days in Mariupol.’ My daughter went to see it at the premiere with her boyfriend who is from Mariupol. And he and his parents hid in the basement of their building for several weeks before they were able to flee. And he saw with his own eyes the bodies of his neighbors that had been killed. And I asked her, ‘How did you take it?’ And she said, ‘I cried.’ He cried also. But also, the rest of the people in the cinema cried. On the one hand, it’s very difficult but on the other hand, sometimes you need to let it out. You need to cry. All of the emotions that we accumulate every day. I’m very grateful to the people who made these documentaries because they tell the world about us and for us it’s a way of therapy. A way to let it go to…and we cannot do it all the time. My job is to keep smiling, to keep talking to people, to inspire people. Regardless of whether or not I have the energy for that, so I try to keep my emotions inside. And these things are a way for me to let go for at least a few minutes.”

To lighten the mood, I read a tribute Volodymyr had paid to her in Vogue Magazine, when he said: “She is my love. She is my greatest friend. Olena really is my best friend. She’s also a patriot, and she deeply loves Ukraine, and she’s an excellent mother.”

Olena’s face instantly lit up into a beaming grin.

“I can only say thank you for the words. It’s not the first time I hear this, fortunately he tells me this very often. But we are really friends and I think that’s the secret of our relationship. We don’t have a difficult time with each other. We understand each other and we support each other. It’s not just the words, well done, keep working, I believe in you. No, we can make each other laugh when it’s needed or we can tell each other, ‘Get a grip, go get your job done.’ So, we feel each other. It’s very nice for me that he’s so open with his feelings with the media, however, I don’t need to hear them. I know this and I can feel it.”

The worst moment for them came in those first chaotic hours of the war.

“The most difficult time for us was when we were separated. He stayed in Kyiv, and I had to go outside of Kyiv and spend several weeks outside of Kyiv. And this is when I had the most horrible thoughts come to my head and I was thinking that perhaps we’ll never see each other again. And what allowed me to hold on is that we still have a lot to do together, that I want to do together.”

On his birthday on Jan. 25, 2022, just before the war started, she posted a photo of Volodymyr smiling at her at a party, and wrote: “I wish every woman had these views… I always feel your love… as long as you look like that, I’m not afraid of anything. We have to realize everything we dream of together. Happy birthday to my love.”

This year, on the same day, a Russian military transport plane crashed killing 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war.

“I didn’t post on his birthday because that day, many tragic things had happened,” she said, “and we agreed that I’m not going to wish him happy birthday publicly. It wasn’t the right time to talk about happy things. I suggested that we stay silent on that day, and he understood that.”

President Zelensky has come under increasing criticism in Ukraine where political opponents have accused him of corruption and becoming an autocrat, and this has led to falling approval ratings.

The Mayor of Kyiv, former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Vitali Klitschko, sniped recently: “Zelensky is paying for mistakes he’s made. At some point, we will no longer be any different from Russia, where everything depends on the whim of one man.”

Ms. Zelenska is phlegmatic about the attacks: “I would very much like for the person who is responsible for everything to be somebody else, not my husband whom I love and respect. But he is responsible for everything, and he carries the responsibility. Political struggle never stops. Not even during the war. That’s how the world is. Nobody’s ever happy with everything, especially in a difficult time like this. Of course, it is difficult for the people to carry this load of war. Sometimes people see bad things happening and they’re looking for someone to blame and I guess, the easiest person to blame is the person who’s responsible for everything. I’m fine about this criticism. What I don’t accept is total hatred which is not based in facts. And I know that the aggressor (Russia) will always stoke any kind of tension inside the country that would undermine our unity. And a lot of resources are spent on this. They use every opportunity in Ukrainian society to stoke the negative things. And I understand the rules and I’m fine with this. He will take any criticism. For me, perhaps, it’s more difficult emotionally because I take offense sometimes, I get upset. All of these things are hurtful when it’s being said about the person you love and respect, it’s never nice.”

There are growing calls for the transfer of Russian assets in countries like the United States to pay for the recovery of Ukraine.

“I think this is fair,” said Ms. Zelenska. “Russia has to pay financially for the damage done to Ukraine, for the destruction of our infrastructure. We understand that we may never see any financial compensation directly, so it would be fair for these financial assets that Russia has in our partner countries to be frozen and to be spent on the renewal of our infrastructure. Why should our partners help us to rebuild? Why shouldn’t it be the people who destroyed it?”

One of Ukraine’s biggest problems is global “war fatigue” with the media’s attention drifting away to other conflicts like the Israel and Hamas war in Gaza.

“We need to understand that more wars can start in other places, but it doesn’t mean that the war in Ukraine will stop,” she says. “And this fatigue from the war, well, of course, it’s hurtful to hear for us. The Ukrainians have much more fatigue! Ukrainians are tired, but we have to hold on, because this is a matter of our survival. Don’t get tired. If you’re tired, you’re not our allies. We cannot allow you to get tired. We cannot say, ‘Don’t look at us. Don’t look at us suffering.’ If you’re tired, you’re not our friends. It’s sad but that’s life and we’re going to continue fighting for our lives, for the lives of our children, and we will not get tired doing this.”

Her response to Donald Trump’s claim he could end the war in 24 hours?

“I don’t think that anyone can end this war in 24 hours except Putin.”

As to those who want Ukraine to throw in the towel and make a peace deal where Putin gets to keep the land he’s murderously stolen, Ms. Zelenska is emphatic in refuting the notion of surrender:

“President Zelensky gave a very clear answer. And it’s not just his opinion as the leader and president of our country, it’s an opinion that he expresses on behalf of our nation. We’re not prepared to make allowances. We understand that the aggressor (Putin) does not stop when he receives what he wants. He will continue moving further and further. We don’t want our children to still be fighting in this war and then our grandchildren. We want to stop this now, but we will not stop this on their terms.”

And with that final passionate declaration, first lady Olena Zelenska bid me farewell and hurried away to start the long 20-hour plane-train-car journey back home to Kyiv, and the war that never ends.

The full interview will be published on Piers Morgan Uncensored’s YouTube channel, Monday at 12 p.m.