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The call from the President’s office came on a Saturday evening: Be ready to go the next day, an aide said, and pack a toothbrush. There were no details about the destination or how we would get there, but it wasn’t difficult to guess. Only two days earlier, on the 260th day of the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians had retreated from the city of Kherson. It was the only regional capital they had managed to seize since the start of the all-out war in February, and the Kremlin had promised it would forever be a part of Russia. Now Kherson was free, and Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to get there as soon as possible.
His bodyguards were urging him to wait. The Russians had destroyed the city’s infrastructure, leaving it with no water, power, or heat. Its outskirts were littered with mines. Government buildings were rigged with trip wires. On the highway to Kherson, an explosion had destroyed a bridge, rendering it impassable. As they fled, the Russians were also suspected of leaving behind agents and saboteurs who could try to ambush the presidential convoy, to a*sassinate Zelensky or take him hostage. There would be no way to ensure his safety on the central square, where crowds had gathered to celebrate the city’s liberation, within range of Russian artillery.
“My security was 100% against it,” the President told me during the trip. “They took it hard. They can’t control practically anything in a region that has just been de-occupied. So it’s a big risk, and, on my part, a bit reckless.”
Then why do it? The Russian goal at the start of the invasion had been to k*ll or capture Zelensky and decapitate his government. Why give them a chance to strike? The obvious reason had to do with the information war, which had become Zelensky’s specialty. By rolling into the city that Vladimir Putin still claimed as his own, the leader of Ukraine would blow a hole through the stories of conquest and imperial glory that Russian propagandists had been using for months to justify the war. Zelensky’s visit would deepen the embarrassment of the Russian retreat and strengthen the Ukrainian will to carry on through the winter.
But that was not the reason he gave for the trip. “It’s the people,” he told me in a two-hour interview as his private train rolled through the country. “Nine months they’ve been under occupation, without light, without anything. Yes, they’ve had two days of euphoria over their return to Ukraine. But those two days are over.” Soon the long road to recovery would come into view, and many of his citizens would want a return to normality, much faster than the state can deliver it. “They are going to fall into a depression now, and it will be very hard,” Zelensky explained. “As I see it, it’s my duty to go there and show them that Ukraine has returned, that it supports them. Maybe it will give them enough of a boost to last a few more days. But I’m not sure. I don’t lull myself with such illusions.”
Our rendezvous point for the trip was outside a firehouse, in a part of central Kyiv that was without electricity when the photographer and I arrived the following evening. Russian missiles have damaged or destroyed much of Ukraine’s power grid since the start of October, a concerted effort to make the winter as painful as possible for the civilian population. People out walking their dogs used their phones to light the sidewalks. Even the central bazaar was in darkness, though the vendors inside were still selling fresh fruit and cheese, pickles, and pork belly by the glow of electric lanterns. When we passed them, lugging our bulletproof vests and helmets, we made sure to grab some food for the road. “Bring snacks,” one of Zelensky’s aides had warned in a text message. “These trips tend to be very disorganized.”
You wouldn’t know it from the black van that arrived to pick us up, as agreed, at 7:30 p.m. on the dot, and brought us through the checkpoints that surround the government district. The area had become familiar to me since the start of the invasion. For nearly nine months, Zelensky’s team had allowed me to spend much of my time here, working inside the presidential compound and reporting on the ways they have experienced the war and how it has transformed them—and him. The blackouts gave the place a haunted look. Soldiers peered out of pillboxes hidden among the trees, and flashlight beams flickered in the windows of Zelensky’s office on the fourth floor. “Do you have documents on you?” asked one of the guards. “Good, then we’ll know how to mark your grave if you fall behind the convoy.” The joke made his comrades double over with laughter.
That night, the presidential train took about nine hours to travel the length of Ukraine from north to south. Most of the compartments were taken up by the security men, who rested their a*sault rifles on the luggage racks, kicked up their feet, and watched movies on their phones. They had never seen reporters on this train before, and their only request was that we not take any photos of Zelensky’s private carriage. “If the Russians find it, that’s a bull’s-eye,” one of them explained.
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Read the rest of the story here:
https://time.com/person-o .. ymyr-zelensky/
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