How will we discuss Olena Zelenska, the comedy author turned reluctant president’s spouse, who has emerged as a determine of defiant patriotism as bombs fall over Ukraine?
“Right this moment I cannot have panic and tears. I might be calm and assured,” Zelenska, 44, wrote on Instagram the final Thursday of February, the day Russia launched an unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “My kids are taking a look at me,” she went on. “I might be subsequent to them. And subsequent to my husband. And with you.”
Zelenska is married to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In 2019 the couple grew to become the youngest president and first girl within the nation’s historical past. They’ve two kids—Oleksandra, an adolescent, and Cyril, who’s below 10. Zelenska is an expert comedy author. As first girl, she has championed ladies’s security, kids’s well being, and incapacity entry. She and her kids have remained within the nation, the president mentioned final week, regardless of reviews from Ukrainian intelligence that “the enemy has marked me as goal primary, my household as goal quantity two.”
How will we discuss Olena Zelenska? How will we discuss a girl who is very achieved and interesting in her personal proper, with out decreasing her to a robust man’s spouse? How will we speak in regards to the reserves of braveness Zelenska should be accessing to remain in Ukraine together with her husband and kids, with out suggesting that her whole price as a person comes from being a spouse and mom? How will we acknowledge what Zelenska clearly is—a wise, profitable, very conventionally lovely girl—with out making use of a girlboss gloss to a warfare?
The Russian assault on Ukraine has been a reminder that the world’s urge for food for leisure and sweetness is voracious even in a time of violence. The president has been heralded in publications all over the world as a intercourse image, with international conversations about his appears to be like, his masculinity, and who ought to play him in a film. Misinformation posts have gone viral, inaccurately figuring out a girl in pink lipstick and fatigues as Zelenska. Zelenska, for her half, has used her social media to share photographs of precise Ukrainian girl troopers. “Our present resistance has a very feminine face,” she captioned her put up, displaying reverence for her “unbelievable compatriots.”
Supply: Glamour