THE FREEDOM FIGHTER
THE PRESIDENT WANTED TO GET TO THE TRENCHES.
He’d already walked for half an hour in his helmet through the mud, surrounded by generals and guards, and he insisted they continue. On the far side of some sagging power lines, the group could see the start of the Russian positions, well within reach of the snipers who had killed three Ukrainian soldiers two weeks before. But Volodymyr Zelensky refused to stop.
“Our guys are over there, right?” the commander in chief asked one of his generals, who was advising the group to turn back. “They’ll hear I came all this way and didn’t come to see them. They’ll be upset.” Then Zelensky tossed a glance in my direction, spun around, and continued hiking through the brush.
The gesture made me wonder: Was this an act? We’d met for interviews before, the first time backstage at Zelensky’s comedy show in the spring of 2019, during his moon-shot campaign for Ukraine’s presidency. We met again that winter in Kyiv’s presidential headquarters, which he described at the time, only half joking, as a gilded fortress he wanted to escape. But this trip to the front lines last April was the first time I’d seen him with his troops—the former actor playing the part of the generalissimo. It was not entirely convincing.
The danger, though, was very real. By the time Zelensky came to power, Ukraine had been at war with Russia for more than five years. The death toll had topped 13,000, with almost nightly shooting or shelling across the front lines, a jagged tear between the once fraternal nations. No one knew at the time that the war would soon become incalculably worse. But during our trip to the front, Zelensky was aware the Russian troops were already massing by the tens of thousands on the other side of the border.
“They want us to be afraid,” he told me at the end of the trip, as we flew back to Kyiv on the presidential plane. “They want the West to be frightened of the strength and power of Russia. There’s no
