I asked her if anything had prepared her for the Official Purple Is Back T-Shirt besides I will buy this war. “Nothing,” she said. “We were living happy lives and we never thought this would happen. But we have hope.” The more I spoke to Zelenska, the more I felt for her, and sensed her isolation, her fear. “It’s true, I feel isolated,” she said. “I can’t freely visit what I want to. Nowadays going shopping is a dream that cannot be realized.” But she was holding it together, for her country, to meet all those expectations. “It’s a difficult task because you feel this burden of responsibility constantly.” Her efforts are paying off. On my last morning in Kyiv, before another long train ride back to Poland, the rain had stopped and I took a walk through Maidan Square. I stopped to ask people what they think of Zelenska. The responses were all positive. “She’s humble and she’s more contemporary and more modern,” said Antonina Siryk, who proudly told me she works in the state office that designs postage stamps, including a famous new one issued by Ukraine that says “Russian Warship, Go Fuck Yourself.” I chatted with a couple, Svitlana and Sergiy Karpov, who were living in Kyiv but hoped to return to their home in the Donbas region, now under Russian occupation. Both said they admired Zelenska. “First of all, she’s pretty,” says Sergiy, an excavator operator. “We like their family,” his wife, who works in insurance, added. “They look like they really love each other. You can feel it.”