An American journalist became Zelensky’s shadow for two weeks - he spoke about his bunker and secret team

Correspondent TEAM Simon Schuster spent two weeks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, visited his bunker, learned about his fears and hopes, lived and felt the war from the inside. ForumDaily decided to completely translate the text in the first person in order to reliably convey the atmosphere.

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The worst nights are when he lies in his bunk, air raid sirens blaring in his ears and his phone still buzzing next to him. The phone screen makes his face look like a ghost in the dark, his eyes scanning the messages he hasn't had time to read during the day. Some from his wife and children, many from his advisers, some from the encircled troops who again and again ask him for more weapons to break the siege of the Russian troops.

In his own bunker, the president has a habit of looking at his daily agenda even when the day is over. He lies awake and thinks if he missed something, maybe he forgot someone. “It makes no sense,” Volodymyr Zelensky told me at the presidential residence in Kyiv, next to the office where he sometimes sleeps. - Same agenda. I see it's over for today. But I look at it several times and feel that something is wrong. It's not anxiety that keeps him from closing his eyes. “I have a guilty conscience,” he says.

The same thought is constantly spinning in my head: “I let myself sleep, and now what? Something is happening right now." Somewhere in Ukraine bombs are still falling. Civilians are still locked in basements or under rubble. The Russians still commit war crimes, rape and torture. Their bombs razed entire cities to the ground. The city of Mariupol and its last defenders are besieged. A critical battle has begun in the east. Despite all this, Zelenskiy, the comedian-turned-president, still needs to keep the world engaged and convince foreign leaders that his country needs their help right now, at all costs.

Zelenskiy said that outside of Ukraine, “people see this war on Instagram, on social media. When they get tired of it, they leave." This is human nature. Horrors tend to make us close our eyes. “A lot of blood,” he explains. "It's a lot of emotion."

Zelensky feels the world's attention is waning, and it worries him almost as much as Russian bombs. Most nights when he goes over his agenda, his to-do list has less to do with the war itself than with how it is perceived. His mission is to make the free world experience this war the same way Ukraine did: as a matter of its own survival.

He seems to be able to do it. The US and Europe rushed to his aid, providing Ukraine with more weapons than any other country since World War II. Thousands of journalists came to Kyiv, filling the emails of its employees with requests for interviews.

My request was not only for the opportunity to ask the president a question. It was to see the war as he and his team experienced it. For two weeks in April, I was allowed to do this in the presidential palace on Bankovaya, observe their daily routine and wander around the offices where they now live and work. Zelensky and his staff have made this place almost normal. We joked, drank coffee, waited for the start or end of the meeting. Only the soldiers, our ubiquitous escorts, personified the war as they led us past the rooms where they slept on the floor, illuminating the dark corridors with their flashlights.

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The experience showed just how much Zelensky has changed since we first met three years ago backstage at his comedy show in Kyiv, when he was still an actor running for president. His sense of humor is still intact. "It's a means of survival," he says. But two months of the war made him firmer, now he starts to get angry faster and take risks much more calmly.

History in brief

Russian troops were only minutes late to find him and his family in the early hours of the war, their gunfire once heard within the walls of his office. He is haunted by images of dead civilians. As well as the daily calls of his troops, hundreds of which were trapped: they ran out of food, water and ammunition.

This account of Zelensky in the war is based on interviews with him and nearly a dozen of his aides. Most of them were thrown into this experience without any real preparation. Many of them, like Zelensky himself, came from the world of acting and show business. Others before the war were known in Ukraine as bloggers and journalists.

On the day we last met—the 55th day of the invasion—Zelensky announced the start of a battle that could end the war. Russian troops regrouped after heavy losses near Kyiv and launched a new offensive in the east. There, Zelensky says, the armies of one side or the other are likely to be destroyed. “It will be a full-scale battle, the largest we have ever seen on the territory of Ukraine,” Zelensky told me on April 19. “If we hold out,” he remarked, “it will be a decisive moment for us. Crucial moment".

In the early weeks of the invasion, when Russian artillery was within range of Kyiv, Zelenskiy rarely waited for sunrise before calling his commander-in-chief for a status report. Their first call usually came around 5:XNUMX am, before the light began to filter through the sandbags in the windows. Later, they rescheduled the conversation for a couple of hours so that Zelensky had time to have breakfast - invariably eggs - and go to the office.

The arrangement of the rooms has changed little since the invasion. But the streets around the complex have become a maze of roadblocks and barricades. Civilian vehicles cannot approach, and soldiers ask pedestrians for secret passwords that change daily, often meaningless phrases such as the name of a coffee cup in Ukrainian, which would be difficult for a Russian to pronounce.

Behind the checkpoints is a government district known as the "triangle" that Russian troops tried to capture at the start of the invasion. When we talked about the first hours in our interview, Zelenskiy warned me that his memories were “fragmentary,” a disjointed collection of images and sounds. One of the highlights came just before sunrise on February 24, when he and his wife Yelena Zelenskaya went to inform their children that the bombing had begun and prepare them for evacuation. Their daughter is 17 and their son is 9, both old enough to know they are in danger. “We woke them up,” Zelensky said. - It was loud. There were explosions nearby."

It soon became clear that presidential offices were not the safest place. The military told Zelensky that Russian strike teams had landed in Kyiv to kill or capture him and his family. “Until that night, we only saw this in the movies,” says Andriy Yermak, head of the Presidential Administration.

As Ukrainian troops fought off the Russians in the streets, the presidential guard tried to seal off the area with whatever they could find. The gate at the rear entrance was blocked by a pile of police barricades and plywood boards that looked more like a pile of scrap metal than a fortification.

Friends and allies have rushed to Zelenskiy, sometimes in defiance of security protocols. Some of them brought their families to the territory. If the president is assassinated, the chain of succession in Ukraine suggests that parliamentary speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk will take command.

Stefanchuk was one of the first to see the President in his office that day. “There was no fear on his face,” he told me. “That was the question: how could that be?” For months, Zelenskiy downplayed warnings from Washington that Russia was about to invade. Now he was aware of the fact that a full-scale war had broken out, but he could not yet understand all that it meant. “Perhaps these words sound vague or pompous,” says Stefanchuk. “But we felt that the order in the world was collapsing.” The Speaker soon rushed down the street to Parliament and presided over martial law votes throughout the country. Zelensky signed the decree in the afternoon.

As night fell that first evening, gunfire broke out around the government quarters. Guards inside the complex turned off the lights and brought Zelensky and about a dozen of his assistants body armor and machine guns. Only a few of them knew how to handle weapons. One of them is Oleksiy Arestovich, a Ukrainian military intelligence veteran. “It was a real lunatic asylum,” he told me. “They gave everyone automatic weapons.” According to him, Russian troops made two attempts to storm the complex. Zelenskiy later told me that his wife and children were still there at the time.

There were proposals from American and British troops to evacuate the president and his team. The idea was to help them create a government in exile, most likely in eastern Poland, that could continue to lead from afar. None of Zelenskiy's advisers remember him seriously considering these proposals. Speaking on a secure telephone with the Americans, he responded with a witty phrase that made headlines around the world: "I need ammunition, not taxis."

“We thought it was bold,” says a US official briefed on the call. “But very risky.”

Zelenskiy's bodyguards felt the same way. They, too, urged him to leave the complex immediately. Its buildings are located in a densely populated area surrounded by private houses that can serve as nests for enemy snipers. Some houses are close enough to throw a grenade through a window across the street. “The place was open,” says Arestovich. “We didn’t even have concrete blocks to block off the street.”

"You are a symbol"

Somewhere outside the president's capital, a protected bunker was waiting, equipped to withstand a long siege. Zelensky refused to go there. Instead, on the second night of the invasion, as Ukrainian troops fought the Russians in the nearby streets, the president decided to go outside and film a video message on his phone. “We are all here,” Zelenskiy said after a roll call from officials standing next to him. They were dressed in army green T-shirts and jackets that would become their wartime uniform. “Defending our independence, our country.”

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By that time, Zelensky understood his role in this war. The eyes of his people and most of the world were on him. “You understand that they are watching,” he says. You are a symbol. You must act as a head of state should act."

When he posted the 25-second clip to Instagram on February 40, the sense of unity he projected was a little deceiving. Zelenskiy was alarmed at the number of officials and even officers who had fled. He did not respond with threats or ultimatums. If they needed time to evacuate their families, he allowed it. But he asked them to return to their posts after that. Most of them did just that.

Other people volunteered to live in the bunkers of the presidential complex. Sergei Leshchenko, a well-known journalist and MP, arrived days after the invasion to help the team counter Russian disinformation. He had to sign a non-disclosure agreement forbidding him from sharing any details about the bunker's design, location, or amenities. All its inhabitants are bound by this vow of secrecy. They are not even allowed to talk about the food they eat there.

Its isolation has often forced the Zelenskiy team to experience the war through their screens, like the rest of us. Footage of the fighting and rocket attacks tended to appear on social media before the military had time to brief Zelensky about the events. It was common for the president and his staff to gather in the bunker around a phone or laptop, cursing pictures of destruction or hailing a drone strike on a Russian tank.

“This is my favorite video,” Leshchenko told me, showing a clip of a Russian helicopter shot down from the sky. Memes and viral videos were a source of morale boost, as were the military ballads Ukrainians composed, recorded and posted online.

Zelenskiy soon insisted on seeing the action in person. In early March, when Russian troops were still shelling Kyiv and trying to surround the capital, the president secretly left his residence, accompanied by two of his friends and a small group of bodyguards. They didn't have cameras. Some of Zelenskiy's closest aides learned of the trip almost two months later, when he mentioned it during an interview.

Heading north from Bankova Street, the group approached a collapsed bridge that marked the front line on the outskirts of the city. Zelensky saw the consequences of the fighting up close for the first time. He was struck by the size of the crater formed by the explosion on the road. When they stopped to talk to the Ukrainian military at the checkpoint, Zelenskiy's bodyguards were "going crazy," he said. There was no good reason for the president to be so close to Russian positions. He says he just wanted to watch and talk to people on the front lines.

A few days later, Zelenskiy set off on what aides are calling a “borscht trip.” At a checkpoint on the outskirts of the city, the president met a man who brought fresh pots of borscht to the soldiers every day. They stood there, within range of enemy snipers and artillery, eating a plate of borscht with bread and talking about the Soviet Union and what the Russians had become since it collapsed. “He told me how much he hated the Russians,” Zelensky recalls. The cook then went to the trunk of his car and pulled out some medals he had earned while serving in the Soviet army. The conversation made a deep impression on Zelensky.

Such trips were rare. Although he often received news from his generals and gave them detailed instructions, Zelensky did not claim to be a tactical genius. His secretary of defense was rarely by his side. There was not one of the top military leaders of Ukraine.

A series of meetings

His days were a series of announcements, meetings and interviews, usually through a laptop or phone screen. "Courtesy calls" took up a lot of time. Before his evening address to the nation, Zelensky spoke with his headquarters. “Very often they ask who Zelensky’s speechwriter is,” says communications adviser Dasha Zarivna. - He's the main one. He works on every line."

Throughout March and early April, Zelenskiy averaged one address a day speaking at venues such as the South Korean Parliament, the World Bank, and the Grammy Awards. Each speech was created with a specific audience in mind. In his speech to the US Congress, he mentioned Pearl Harbor and 11/XNUMX. The German parliament heard him refer to the history of the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall.

The constant rush associated with urgent tasks and minor emergencies overwhelmed the team and dragged out the passage of time in a way that one consultant called hallucinogenic. Days will seem like hours, and hours will feel like days. Fear was exacerbated only in the moments before bedtime. “That's when reality overtakes you,” says Leshchenko. “That’s when you lie and think about bombs.”

Butch and fury

In early April, the team began to leave the bunker much more often. Ukrainian troops pushed the enemy back from the outskirts of Kyiv, and Russia transferred its forces to the east to fight. On the 40th day of the invasion, Zelensky made another trip outside the compound, this time with cameras. That morning, he rode in an armored convoy to Bucha, a suburban town where Russian troops killed hundreds of civilians.

According to Zelensky, their bodies were scattered around the city, "found in barrels, basements, they were strangled, tortured." Nearly all have fatal gunshot wounds. Some lay on the streets for several days. When Zelenskiy and his team saw the atrocities up close, their horror quickly turned to fury. “We wanted to cancel all peace talks,” says David Arakhamia, whom Zelenskiy has chosen to negotiate with the Russians. “I could barely even look them in the face.”

On April 8, while investigators were still exhuming mass graves in Bucha, Russian rockets hit a train station in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine. Thousands of women, children and old people gathered there with their luggage and pets, hoping to catch the evacuation trains. The rockets killed at least 50 and injured more than a hundred people. Several children lost limbs.

Zelensky learned about the attack from a series of photographs taken from the scene and sent to him in the morning. One frame stuck in his mind. It depicts a woman decapitated by an explosion. “She was wearing these bright, catchy clothes,” he says. Zelenskiy couldn't get rid of that image on the day he walked into one of the most important meetings of his career. Ursula von der Leyen, a senior EU official, traveled to Kyiv by train to offer Ukraine a fast track to membership. The country has been waiting for this opportunity for decades. But when that moment finally arrived, the president couldn't stop thinking about that woman on earth.

As he stepped onto the podium next to von der Leyen, his face took on a tinge of green, and his usual gift for oratory let him down. He didn't even have the courage to mention the missile attack in his speech. “It was one of those times when your arms and legs do the same thing, but your head doesn’t obey,” he told me later. “Because your head is there at the station, and you need to be here.”

The visit was the first in a string of European leaders visiting Kyiv in April. Smartphones were not allowed on the compound during these visits. A large cluster of telephone signals transmitted from a single location can allow an enemy surveillance drone to pinpoint the assembly point. “And then: boom,” one of the guards explained.

Zelenskiy and his team still spent most nights and some meetings in bunkers below the territory. But the retreat of the Russians allowed them to work in their usual offices, very similar to the pre-war ones. One obvious difference was the darkness. Many of the windows were covered with sandbags and the lights turned off to make it difficult for enemy snipers. Other precautions made no obvious sense. Guards cut off the light from the elevator leading to the administrative offices. Tangles of wires protruded from the holes, and Zelensky's aides walked in the dark.

On the days when I came to the territory alone, the mood was more relaxed. For the first time, I was surprised that the metal detector and X-ray machine at the entrance were unplugged, and a cleaner was busy around them with a mop. Later, a tired security guard looked into my bag and let me through.

Upstairs, the war began to seem distant. Mikhail Podolyak, one of the president's four closest advisers, refused to barricade the windows in his office. He didn't even close the curtains. When he invited me to meet him one day in April, the room was easy to find because his name 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 defense (AD) seems to be a survival mechanism, a product of denial. It is impossible to stop the hypersonic missiles that Russia has deployed against Ukraine. The Kinzhal missile can travel at more than five times the speed of sound, zigzagging to avoid interceptors. It can also carry one of the Russian nuclear warheads.

Fatalism functioned as an organizing principle

Some crude precautions—barricaded gates, bulletproof vests—seemed necessary in the early stages of the war. Later, when there was no longer any risk of Russian special forces bursting through the doors, Zelensky's team realized that such protection was ultimately useless. They faced an invader with a nuclear arsenal. They decided not to run. What was the point of hiding?

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Now Zelensky most often works in the Operations Room of the complex, which is neither underground nor in the fortification. It's a windowless boardroom with one decoration: a trident, Ukraine's state symbol, glowing on the wall behind Zelensky's chair. There are large screens along the walls, and from the center of the conference table, a camera looks out at the president. Around 9 am on April 19, the faces of his generals and intelligence chiefs filled the screens in front of Zelensky.

At night, the president made a video message to the nation announcing the start of the battle for eastern Ukraine. Now he wanted to hear where the fighting had been most fierce, where his troops had retreated, who had deserted, what help they needed, and where they had advanced. “At some points in the east, it's just crazy,” he told me later that day, summing up the briefing of the generals. “Really terrible in terms of frequency of strikes, heavy artillery fire and casualties.”

For more than a month, Zelensky corresponded with two Ukrainian commanders. They were the last defenders of Mariupol, a city of half a million that the Russians had surrounded at the start of the invasion. A small force is still holding on inside the huge steel mill. One of their commanders, Major of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade Sergei Volynsky, was in contact with Zelensky for several weeks. “We already know each other well,” Zelensky told me. Most often they call or text each other, sometimes in the middle of the night. Earlier, the soldier had sent the President a selfie they had taken together long before the invasion. “We even hug like friends,” he says.

The Russian offensive on Mariupol destroyed the brigade. Zelensky told me that about 200 servicemen survived. They found shelter and supplies inside a steel mill, running out of food, water and ammunition. “It was very hard for them,” Zelensky says. “We tried to support each other.”

But Zelenskiy could do little on his own. Ukraine lacks heavy weapons to break through the encirclement of Mariupol. In the east, Russian troops have a clear advantage. “They outnumber us by several times,” says Yermak.

Unsolicited Wisdom

In almost every conversation with foreign leaders, Zelenskiy asks for weapons that could help level the playing field. Some countries such as the US, UK and the Netherlands have agreed to provide it. Others hesitated, especially Germany. “The situation with the Germans is really difficult,” Zelensky says. “They act as if they don’t want to lose relations with Russia. Germany is largely dependent on natural gas supplies from Russia. This is their German pragmatism. But it costs us dearly.”

Ukraine has clearly expressed its displeasure. In mid-April, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was about to visit Kyiv when Zelensky's team asked him not to come.

Sometimes the president's bluntness can seem like an insult, like when he told the UN Security Council that he should consider dissolving himself. Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, told me that he would be grateful if Steinmeier were invited to Kyiv "as a friend." But Zelensky realized that friendly requests would not give Ukraine the weapons it needed.

This is how Zelensky understands his primary responsibility. Not as a military strategist empowered to move battalions around the map, but as a communicator, a living symbol of a nation whose ability to grab and hold the world's attention will help determine whether its nation will live or die.

His aides are well aware of this mission, and some speak of Zelensky ambiguously. “Sometimes he gets into character and starts talking like an actor playing the president,” says Arestovich, who himself was a theater actor in Kyiv for many years. “I don’t think it will help us.” According to him, only when Zelensky is exhausted does the mask fall off. “When he is tired, he cannot play. He can only express his opinion,” Arestovich explains. “When he’s on his own, he comes across as an honest and humane person.”

I may have been lucky to meet the president at the end of a very long day. Almost two months after the invasion, he had changed. New wrinkles appeared on his face, and he no longer searched the room for his advisers, pondering the answer to the question. “I got older,” he admitted. “I've grown old with all this wisdom I never wanted. This is the wisdom associated with the number of dead people and torture.”

“This is such wisdom,” he added after a pause. “Honestly, I never had a goal to get such knowledge.”

It made me wonder if he regrets the choice he made three years ago, around the time we first met. His comedy show became a hit. Standing in his dressing room, he was still glowing with the admiration of the crowd. Friends were waiting backstage to start the afterparty. Fans gathered outside to take pictures with him. It was just three months after he ran for president, and it was not too late for Zelenskiy to turn back.

But he does not regret the choice he made, even with an eye on the war. “Not for a second,” he said. He does not know how the war will end and how history will describe his place in it. At the moment, all he knows is that Ukraine needs a wartime president. And that is exactly what he intends to be.

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