The wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shared along with her husband the touching but sad birthday news in reference to the ongoing war with Russia.
“Now you smile much less,” First Lady Olena Zelenska wrote on Twitter on Wednesday to mark the forty fifth anniversary of her death.
Zelenska attached a smiling photo of the couple who met as teenagers to her message.
“I wish you more reasons to smile. And you understand what it takes. All of us do it,” she continued.
Zelenskaya’s tribute comes as Ukraine approaches a yr of war with Russia.
While the exact variety of victims of the conflict can’t be confirmed, recently estimated by the United Nations that the variety of civilian casualties in Ukraine exceeded 7,000 – and might be much higher.
Also on Wednesday, President Biden said the US would send Ukraine 31 M1 Abrams tanks – a reversal of an earlier announcement that the provision “simply doesn’t make sense.”
Zelenska, 44, was a former comedy author and was a key figure in the Ukrainian war effort.
Speaking last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, she was shown rubbing her eyes while talking about a helicopter crash near Kiev that killed 14 people, including Ukraine’s interior minister.
“Unfortunately, it’s one other terrible day for Ukraine,” she said.
“From the outside it could seem that we’ve got to get used to it by now, but unfortunately this isn’t the case.”
A couple of months earlier, in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America”, Zelenska urged Americans to proceed supporting Ukraine.
“Please never stop supporting – this is amazingly necessary to us, it’s essential,” she begged.
Zelenska, who has two children with Zelensky, has also spoken openly about the impact of the war on her family life.
“It’s much harder for him in that regard,” she told Vogue about her husband last summer, noting that the couple’s children usually are not allowed to see their father attributable to unspecified security concerns.
Zelensky, who was recently named TIME Magazine’s Person of the 12 months, also spoke about his concern for the safety of his family.
“I didn’t want them to be in danger. This is not about romance. It’s about the horrors that happened here, on the outskirts of Kiev, and all the horrors which can be happening now in our country, in the occupied territories,” said the former comedian.