The First Lady of Ukraine in Paris on Wednesday

According to our information, the first lady of Ukraine Elena Zelenskaya will be in Paris this Wednesday. The visit of the wife of President Vladimir Zelensky will take place mainly at the UNESCO headquarters, in the 7th arrondissement, where she will communicate with representatives of the 194 UN member states specializing in the field of education and culture. The speech she will give in Ukrainian on behalf of her husband, the first lady in an official capacity in Ukraine.

In this capacity, she has been collaborating with UNESCO since the Russian invasion of her country almost two years ago on several programmes. The organization has trained 15,000 school psychologists. “Because of the war, every third Ukrainian schoolchild returned to school remotely,” explains Audrey Azoulay, spokeswoman for the Director General of UNESCO. The rest are in schools with underground bomb shelters, where they must get to every air raid raid. Distance learning, psychological support for teachers and students to study in such difficult conditions – this is the goal of the program.

“Ukrainian Shelf” in the UNESCO Library

In addition, the first lady will open a “Ukrainian shelf” in the UNESCO library. Sharing with her husband a desire to communicate to maintain support for Ukraine – which sometimes seems to be sidelined in the wake of the war between Israel and Hamas – Elena Zelenskaya is multiplying this type of operation at universities and institutes around the world. Finally, as a show of solidarity, city artist Christian Guemi, aka C215, will create a live, ephemeral mural of Ukraine on the facility’s interior wall during the visit.

Are there special security measures planned for this visit, as for the visit of her husband, the president of a country at war? “Dislocation is necessary for any visit of high-ranking personalities to France,” we will limit ourselves to UNESCO’s commentary. The first lady is expected to continue her stay privately until Saturday but does not plan to attend the Peace Forum in Paris on Friday.