#FALLING HEARTS MME FREE#

Once inside the compound, I passed multiple security checkpoints and a labyrinth of blacked-out corridors lined with sandbags and soldiers. With Ukraine’s airspace closed to civilian flights, I took an overnight train from Poland, through landscapes that have seen some of the 20th century’s worst horrors. I met Zelenska-surnames are gendered in Slavic languages-deep inside the presidential office compound, a heavily guarded place I had traveled long hours to reach. “Frankly I don’t think anyone is aware of how we have managed emotionally.” What inspires her, she told me, is her fellow Ukrainians. “These have been the most horrible months of my life, and the lives of every Ukrainian,” she said, speaking her country’s language through a translator. When I met her on a recent rainy afternoon in Kyiv, where cafés were busy even amid frequent air-raid sirens, her luminous face and green-brown eyes seemed to capture the range of emotions coursing through Ukraine today: deep sadness, flashes of dark humor, recollections of a safer, happier past, and a steely core of national pride. But ever since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Zelenska has suddenly found herself center stage in a tragedy.

#FALLING HEARTS MME FREE#

The wife of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a longtime comedy writer, always preferred to stay behind the scenes, while her husband, a comedian turned politician whose presidency may yet determine the fate of the free world, glowed in the limelight. There is no script for first ladies in wartime, and so Olena Zelenska is writing her own.

Falling hearts mme