'We won't give up': Ukraine's First Lady Olena Zelenska pens an emotional letter to media

The wife of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has written an open letter, saying what has happened to her country is "impossible to believe".

The letter, entitled 'I Testify' and addressed to the world's media, was released on encrypted messaging service Telegram.

In it, Olena Zelenska says: "Despite assurances from Kremlin-backed propaganda outlets, who call this a 'special operation' - it is, in fact, the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians".

She warned that if Putin is not stopped, nobody will be safe. "If we don't stop Putin, who threatens to start a nuclear war, there will be no safe place in the world for any of us," she wrote.

But she says Russia's President Vladimir Putin has underestimated Ukrainians, who stand in "unparalleled unity".

Deploring the deaths of children in the war, she names some of those who have died and goes on to say there are now several dozen children "who have never known peace in their lives".

She writes: "Perhaps the most terrifying and devastating of this invasion are the child casualties. Eight-year-old Alice who died on the streets of Okhtyrka while her grandfather tried to protect her. Or Polina from Kyiv, who died in the shelling with her parents.

"14-year-old Arseniy was hit in the head by wreckage, and could not be saved because an ambulance could not get to him on time because of intense fires.

"When Russia says that it is 'not waging war against civilians,' I call out the names of these murdered children first."

Olena Zelenska was born in Kryvyi Rih, in 1978, in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic - a part of the Soviet Union.

She met her future husband – Volodymyr Zelensky, who would go on to become the president of Ukraine – at Kryvyi Rih National University, where she studied architecture. The couple married in 2003 after dating for eight years.

While President Zelensky had no political experience before being elected into office in 2019, in recent days he has been increasingly described as a convincing war leader.