The nights are the hardest, when he lies there on his cot, the whine of the air-raid sirens in his ears and his phone still buzzing beside him. Its screen makes his face look like a ghost in the dark, his eyes scanning messages he didn’t have a chance to read during the day. Some from his wife and kids, many from his advisers, a few from his troops, surrounded in their bunkers, asking him again and again for more weapons to break the Russian siege.
Inside his own bunker, the President has a habit of staring at his daily agenda even when the day is over. He lies awake and wonders whether he missed something, forgot someone. “It’s pointless,” Volodymyr Zelensky told me at the presidential compound in Kyiv, just outside the office where he sometimes sleeps. “It’s the same agenda. I see it’s over for today. But I look at it several times and sense that something is wrong.” It’s not anxiety that keeps his eyes from closing. “It’s my conscience bothering me.”
The same thought keeps turning over in his head: “I’ve let myself sleep, but now what? Something is happening right now.” Somewhere in Ukraine the bombs are still falling. Civilians are still trapped in basements or under the rubble. The Russians are still committing crimes of war, rape, and torture. Their bombs are leveling entire towns. The city of Mariupol and its last defenders are besieged. A critical battle has started in the east. Amid all this, Zelensky, the comedian turned President, still needs to keep the world engaged, and to convince foreign leaders that his country needs their help right now, at any cost.
Zelensky, with his chief of staff Andriy Yermak, center, speaks to journalists in Bucha on April 4
Metin Aktas—Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
It wasn’t long before Zelensky insisted on going to see the action for himself. In early March, when the Russians were still shelling Kyiv and trying to encircle the capital, the President drove out of his compound in secret, accompanied by two of his friends and a small team of bodyguards. “We made the decision to go on the fly,” says Yermak, the chief of staff. There were no cameras with them. Some of Zelensky’s closest aides only learned about the trip nearly two months later, when he brought it up during our interview.
Heading north from Bankova Street, the group went to a collapsed bridge that marked the front line at the edge of the city. It was the first time Zelensky had seen the effects of the fighting up close. He marveled at the size of a crater left by an explosion in the road. When they stopped to talk to Ukrainian troops at a checkpoint, Zelensky’s bodyguards, he says, “were losing their minds.” The President had no pressing reason to be that close to the Russian positions. He says he just wanted to have a look, and to talk to the people on the front lines.
A few days later, Zelensky went on a ride that aides refer to as “the borscht trip.” At a checkpoint near the edge of the city, the President met a man who would bring a fresh pot of borscht for the troops every day. They stood there, within range of enemy snipers and artillery, and had a bowl of soup with bread, talking about the Soviet Union and what the Russians had become since its collapse. “He told me how much he hated the Russians,” Zelensky recalls. Then the cook went to the trunk of his car and pulled out some medals he had earned while serving in the Soviet military. The conversation left a deep impression on Zelensky. “It felt right,” says Yermak. “Just talking to the people we work for.”
Such outings were rare. Though he received frequent updates from his generals and gave them broad instructions, Zelensky did not pretend to be a tactical savant. His Defense Minister was seldom by his side. Nor were any of Ukraine’s top military commanders. “He lets them do the fighting,” says Arestovych, his adviser on military affairs.
His days were a succession of statements, meetings, and interviews, usually conducted through the screen of a laptop or a phone. Courtesy calls took up time, like one Zoom session with the actors Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, who had raised money for Ukraine through a GoFundMe campaign. Ahead of his nightly address to the nation, Zelensky would set out themes in conversation with his staff. “Very often people ask who is Zelensky’s speechwriter,” says Dasha Zarivna, a communications adviser. “The main one is him,” she says. “He works on every line.”
Through March and early April, Zelensky averaged about one speech per day, addressing venues as diverse as the parliament of South Korea, the World Bank, and the Grammy Awards. Each one was crafted with his audience in mind. When he spoke to the U.S. Congress, he referenced Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The German parliament heard him invoke the history of the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall.
The constant rush of urgent tasks and small emergencies had a numbing effect on the team, distending the passage of time in ways that one adviser describes as hallucinogenic. Days would feel like hours, and hours like days. The fear became acute only in the moments before sleep. “That’s when reality catches up with you,” says Leshchenko. “That’s when you lay there and think about the bombs.”
In early April, the team began emerging much more often from the bunker. The Ukrainian forces had driven the enemy back from the suburbs of Kyiv, and the Russians were moving their forces to the battle for the east. On the 40th day of the invasion, Zelensky made another trip outside the compound, this time with cameras in tow. He rode that morning in a convoy of armored vehicles to Bucha, a well-to-do commuter town where Russian troops had slaughtered hundreds of civilians.
In the village of Mala Rohan, mourners attend the funeral of Artur Shchukin, who died March 25
Maxim Dondyuk—Der Spiegel
The visit was the first in a parade of European leaders who began coming to Kyiv in April. Smartphones were not allowed inside the compound during these visits. A large cluster of phone signals, all transmitting from one place, could allow an enemy surveillance drone to pinpoint the location of the gathering. “And then: kaboom,” one guard explained, tracing the arc of a rocket with his hand.
Zelensky and his team still spent most nights and held some meetings in bunkers underneath the compound. But the Russian retreat allowed them to work in their usual rooms, which looked a lot like they did before the war. One obvious difference was the darkness. Many of the windows were covered with sandbags. Lights were switched off to make it harder for enemy snipers. Other precautions made no apparent sense. Guards had ripped the lights out of an elevator leading up to the executive offices. A tangle of wires protruded from the holes where they had been, and Zelensky’s aides rode up and down in the dark. Nobody remembered why.
On days when I came to the compound alone, the mood was more relaxed. Custodians dusted the cabinets and put fresh lining in wastebaskets. The first time it surprised me to find the metal detector and X-ray machine unplugged at the entrance while a janitor worked around them with a mop. Later it felt normal for a tired guard to glance in my bag and let me through.
Upstairs the war began to feel far away. Mykhailo Podolyak, one of a quartet of the President’s closest advisers, declined to barricade the windows in his office. He didn’t even close the drapes. When he invited me to meet him one day in April, the room was easy to find, because his nameplate was still on the door. “We go downstairs when we hear the air-raid sirens,” he explained with a shrug, referring to the bunker. “But this is my office. I like it here.”
Such faith in Kyiv’s air defenses seems like a coping mechanism, the offspring of defiance and denial. There is no way to stop the type of hyper-sonic missiles that Russia has deployed against Ukraine. The Kinzhal—the name means dagger in Russian—can travel at more than five times the speed of sound while zigzagging to avoid interceptors. It can also carry one of Russia’s nuclear warheads. But Podolyak sees no point in dwelling on this information. “The strike is coming,” he told me. “They’ll hit us here, and it’ll all be ruins.” There was no fear in his voice as he said this. “What can we do?” he asked. “We’ve got to keep working.”
The fatalism functioned as an organizing principle. Some crude precautions—barricaded gates, bulletproof vests—had felt necessary during the war’s opening stage. Later, when there was no longer a risk of Russian commandos bursting through the doors, Zelensky’s team understood that such defenses were ultimately futile. They were facing an invader with a nuclear arsenal. They had decided not to run. What was the point of hiding?
Read More: Ukrainians Are Speaking Up About Rape as a War Crime to Ensure the World Holds Russia Accountable
Zelensky now works most often in the compound’s Situation Room, which is neither belowground nor fortified. It is a windowless boardroom with one embellishment: a trident, the state symbol of Ukraine, glowing on the wall behind Zelensky’s chair. Large screens run along the other walls, and a camera faces the President from the center of the conference table. At around 9 a.m. on April 19, the faces of his generals and intelligence chiefs filled the screens in front of Zelensky.
Overnight, the President had given a video address to the nation, announcing the start of the battle for eastern Ukraine. Now he wanted to hear where the fighting was most intense, where his troops had retreated, who had deserted, what help they needed, and where they had managed to advance. “At certain points in the east, it’s just insane,” he told me later that day, summarizing the generals’ briefing. “Really horrible in terms of the frequency of the strikes, the heavy artillery fire, and the losses.”
For over a month, Zelensky had been texting with two Ukrainian commanders. They were the last defenders of Mariupol, a city of half a million people that the Russians encircled at the start of the invasion. A small force is still holding out inside an enormous steel factory. One of their leaders, Major Serhiy Volynsky of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade, had been in touch with Zelensky for weeks. “We know each other well by now,” Zelensky told me. Most days they call or text each other, sometimes in the middle of the night. Early on, the soldier sent the President a selfie they had taken together long before the invasion. “We’re even embracing there, like friends,” he says.
Zelensky addressing the Portuguese parliament via videoconference on April 21
Patricia De Melo Moreira—AFP/Getty Images
His aides are keenly aware of that mission, and some give Zelensky mixed reviews. “Sometimes he slips into the role and starts to talk like an actor playing the President,” says Arestovych, who was himself a theater actor in Kyiv for many years. “I don’t think that helps us.” It is only when Zelensky is exhausted, he says, that the mask comes off. “When he is tired, he cannot act. He can only speak his mind,” Arestovych told me. “When he is himself, he makes the greatest impression as a man of integrity and humanity.”
Perhaps it was lucky for me to meet the President toward the end of a very long day. Nearly two months into the invasion, he had changed. There were new creases in his face, and he no longer searched the room for his advisers when considering an answer to a question. “I’ve gotten older,” he admitted. “I’ve aged from all this wisdom that I never wanted. It’s the wisdom tied to the number of people who have died, and the torture the Russian soldiers perpetrated. That kind of wisdom,” he added, trailing off. “To be honest, I never had the goal of attaining knowledge like that.”
It made me wonder whether he regretted the choice he made three years ago, around the time we first met. His comedy show had been a hit. Standing in his dressing room, he was still glowing from the admiration of the crowd. Friends waited backstage to start the after-party. Fans gathered outside to take a picture with him. This was just three months into his run for the presidency, when it was not too late for Zelensky to turn back.
But he does not regret the choice he made, not even with the hindsight of the war. “Not for a second,” he told me in the presidential compound. He doesn’t know how the war will end, or how history will describe his place in it. In this moment, he only knows Ukraine needs a wartime President. And that is the role he intends to play.
—With reporting by Nik Poli/ Washington and Simmone Shah/ New York
Contact us at letters@time.com.
