How Zelensky is holding up after three years of war, by his friends

• Putin no-show at peace talks dashes Ukraine breakthrough hopes

The schedule — and the stakes — were a reminder that his television satire Servant of the People, in which Zelensky played an idealistic teacher who is elected president, drastically underestimated the demands of the job he now finds himself in.

Whereas the fictional president’s toughest assignment was fighting corruption, Zelensky, 47, wakes each day to survival briefings and battlefield maps. His time is filled with global diplomacy, missile strikes and martial law. And in contrast to his days in the 21st-floor office he has control over only one part of the evolving script.

Those close to him say that he is undaunted.

“That’s what he loves best, overcoming challenges, he’s always been like that,” said Oleksandr Pikalov, 49, a close friend of Zelensky since childhood whom I met in the president’s old office. “You can see the years of war on his face these days, it’s the same for a lot of us, but the president still has a sparkle in his eyes.”

Pikalov, who sees the leader often and exchanges texts with him most days, added: “The thing you have to realise is that he loves his work and gets energy from it. He’d always be in this office on a Sunday. There was a saying born in this very room: work is what you do out of work hours.”

An affable, burly figure who played a hen-pecked defence minister in Servant of the People, Pikalov thinks Zelensky was born under a “lucky star” given the many scrapes they survived growing up in the twilight of the Soviet Union. They nearly froze to death once on the Russian steppe when their tour van broke down one night and the temperature dipped to minus 42C. “We could easily have died,” he said.

Another time, their plane tried to land unsuccessfully six times in bad weather before finally getting them back on the ground. Once a knife fight broke out in a crowd and Pikalov and his friend were pulled into the thick of it. These are the life experiences that have helped Zelensky stand up to a nuclear-armed autocrat.

From Russian plots to assassinate him in the early days of the war to the enforced separation from his wife and two children, who mostly see him these days on television, Zelensky has had to endure personal sacrifice and constant threat as the face of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia.

But besides being a wartime leader who sleeps only four or five hours a night and keeps a fist-sized, granite bust of Winston Churchill on his desk, Zelensky also likes to get involved in the nitty gritty of governmental procedure.

Every week, he holds a meeting online with the country’s parliamentary leaders to discuss upcoming bills. On Monday, they chatted about maritime safety and compensation for injured servicemen.

“He likes details,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, chairman of the foreign affairs committee who describes Zelensky as “an artist, flexible, talented, creative and who thinks outside the box and has a quick mind”. Putin, by contrast, is “a dinosaur”.

The president cannot repress the comic actor inside himself and loves to crack jokes. But he refrained from any in the latest online session. Although he exudes the same energy as always, there is “a sort of sadness about Zelensky now that wasn’t there before”, said Merezhko.

The sombre president was weighing an important decision. The next day Zelensky challenged Putin to meet him face to face in Turkey. “It was a brilliant move, like in a game of chess,” said Merezhko.

• Trump plans ‘carrot and stick’ approach to Putin ceasefire talks

But the talks degenerated into name-calling and recriminations even before they had started when Putin declined to attend, instead dispatching a low-level team that Zelensky derided as a “theatre prop”. This prompted the Kremlin to call him a “clown”. In the end, a prisoner exchange was agreed.

Meanwhile, President Trump, who was doing deals in the region, refrained from criticising Putin for his refusal to attend, saying progress hinged instead on a direct meeting between himself and the Russian leader.

This reignited Ukrainian suspicions of bias just as some in Kyiv were starting to think that Trump was getting impatient with Moscow.

Zelensky’s itinerary is relentless — he has made 22 foreign trips to 18 countries this year — but Merezkho suspects it might actually help to refresh him.

Merezkho recently went on a parliamentary jaunt to Uzbekistan himself. “It was hard work and tiresome with all the meetings, but the change of air did me a world of good,” he said. “Some change of scenery like that stops you going crazy.”

Zelensky has no choice but to keep travelling. After three years of grinding conflict with Russia — and a change of government in Washington — he finds himself on a tightrope as he tries to maintain Trump’s goodwill while defending his country’s right to an independent existence outside Moscow’s orbit.

He nearly lost his footing when Trump and JD Vance, his deputy, accused him of ingratitude and intransigence in an ill-tempered Oval Office meeting in front of the world’s press on February 28. Merezhko met him online three days later: “I was worried that the president would be depressed, or down, but, to my relief, he seemed as usual, as if nothing had happened.”

That may have been acting: the Ukrainian leader has not lost his performer’s love of a good review and criticism of any kind upsets him greatly. “He’s really sensitive to it,” said Serhii Rudenko, who wrote a biography of Zelensky. “It gets him down.”

While Zelensky did not feel he had done anything wrong by holding his ground in the White House, he agonised about what happened afterwards, sources close to him said. He felt weighed down with the fate of the nation at stake and struggled to see a way forward with Trump.

Unlike Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, who after a visit to the Oval Office, wrote on X: “I miss you already, President T.”, Zelensky “is incapable of bowing and scraping … he can’t kowtow, he doesn’t do humble and meek”, said Simon Shuster, an American journalist of Russian and Ukrainian heritage who grew close to Zelensky while writing his biography of the president, The Showman, published last year. The two have been in regular contact since then.

A born performer, the Ukrainian leader has deep confidence in his ability to win over anybody one on one.

Zelensky “wants to look someone in the eye, appeal to their humanity”, said Shuster. “That’s the format he feels strongest in as a negotiator. He told me he wanted that kind of sit down with Trump to move past that awful meeting in the White House.”

Mikhailo Podolyak, Zelensky’s sharp-tongued spin doctor, played down the importance of the setback in Washington, suggesting that for a champion fighter used to 12-round bouts the “rather emotional conversation in the Oval Office” was just another round.

“Zelensky knows how to take a punch,” Podalyak said, seated at the end of a long table in a hotel conference room. “Trump always wants to dominate … but President Zelensky, as always, came up with a constructive solution.” He was referring to the next, more cordial meeting with Trump two months later, when the two sat alone, face-to-face, in the Vatican just before the funeral of Pope Francis.

Under the vaulted ceilings of St Peter’s Basilica, Zelensky’s message to Trump was blunt, said Shuster: “Putin cannot be trusted, he will betray you, any deal you strike with him will be detrimental to your legacy.”

It may have had an effect: subsequently there a noticeable shift in tone by Trump’s team, with some officials suddenly sounding impatient with Putin. Trump, for his part, “expressed surprise at some of Putin’s military moves, including bombing areas with children”, according to an official quoted in The Wall Street Journal. Zelensky believed the Americans were starting to realise Putin could not be trusted.

The Vatican meeting showed that Ukraine’s president “knows how to talk to Trump” and “is ready to show what is real and what is unreal in a clear, factual manner”, said Podolyak, the presidential aide.

It also showed how Zelensky’s years in entertainment trained him to shape a narrative and hold the spotlight, in this case by stage-managing the setting of the Vatican encounter for maximum effect — just two chairs in a vast, echoing chamber of marble.

• Michael Waldman: I’ve met Trump and Zelensky. One boasted, one listened

Zelensky had hoped to get a similar, one-on-one encounter with Putin, apparently believing that even the Russian autocrat might blink under the weight of a human plea. That now seems unlikely. The last thing Putin wants is a ceasefire, Ukrainian officials believe. Instead, their intelligence suggests he is planning a summer military offensive.

Whatever the outcome of the latest flurry of diplomacy and back-channel bargaining, the stakes could not be higher for Zelensky, whose improbable rise from sitcom star to global statesman is already the stuff of legend — and films: the Cannes festival billed its opening on Tuesday as “Ukraine Day” with three documentaries about the conflict, including Zelensky, the story of the leader.

It begins in Kryvyi Rih, the bleak, industrial city in which he was born and where he grew up in a Russian-speaking, Jewish household, his father a computer science professor, his mother an engineer. He was bookish and slight but quick-witted and magnetic.

It was Pikalov, his acting companion, who helped to launch his career as a comedian. Two years older, Pikalov was scouting for talent for his local college comedy troupe and happened upon a rehearsal at Zelensky’s school. The future president was playing a fried egg with the yoke stuffed under his shirt. Pikalov introduced him to heavyweights of the local comedy scene.

• ‘Putin can’t find a way to oust Zelensky’: in Bucha with a leader under fire

“Even as a teenager, though, he was always the leader,” Pikalov told me.

He and Zelensky would share a pair of blue jeans that they would take turns wearing on dates. On one occasion Pikalov lent the jeans to another friend while Zelensky lent him a prized pair of boots. “Our friend disappeared for two days on this date, having a lovely time no doubt, while we were sitting in his grandfather’s kitchen, waiting for him to bring back the clothes, we couldn’t go home,” said Pikalov.

He recalls that Zelensky’s girlfriend, Olena, now the Ukrainian first lady, had “strict” parents and that she would meet Zelensky secretly on the pretext of walking Katya, the dog. She would then hand the dog to Pikalov: “I’d have to walk Katya while she went off with the future president,” he chuckled.

“It was rough on the streets in those days,” he recalled. Zelensky’s attempts to busk at a major crossroads ended badly. Twice his renditions of Elvis and Beatles hits were interrupted by local thugs, who smashed his guitar. “I guess Kryvyi Rih is not yet ready for me,” Zelensky joked.

It was a foretaste of the gritty humour that later impressed the world when, at the start of the war, he was offered evacuation by the Americans and was reported to have replied: “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition.”

In those dark days, Zelensky lived in a bunker far underground with a few trusted aides. They would blow off steam playing table tennis, at which the 5ft 7in leader excels (he was much less good at basketball, which he loved in his youth).

In the game of high-level brinkmanship, where he also seems to thrive, Zelensky will vigorously defend his red lines. He has unequivocally stated Ukraine will not recognise territories occupied by Russia as belonging to Russia, including Crimea and regions in eastern Ukraine. Nor will he relinquish what he regards as Ukraine’s right to choose its future, including membership of Nato. He wants security guarantees to prevent future Russian aggression, which would involve commitments from international partners to support the country’s sovereignty in the long term.

In the absence of such agreements, Ukrainian officials say they will have to fight on regardless of international support, hoping to outlast Putin. “We need to survive until that moment of change in Russia,” said Merezhko, the MP. “What other choice do we have?”