Zelenski reveals how he was about to be captured by Russian troops at the start of the Ukraine war

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has revealed in the magazine ‘Time‘ how he lived the first hours of the Russian invasion, in which was about to be captured by Putin’s troops.

After spending 15 days with the Ukrainian president, the journalist Simon Shuster has recounted everything the president told him in a report entitled ‘The World of Zelensky’, in which, for the first time, the leader opens up and recounts , among other things, how after the bombing began in kyiv, he had to tell his childrennine and 17 years old, prepare to flee because they were no longer in a safe place.

“We woke them up,” Zelensky recalled, referring to him and his wife, adding that “there was a lot of noise and explosions.” At that time, the Ukrainian Army informed him that Russian troops had parachuted into kyiv to capture him or kill him and his family. “Before that night, we had only seen things like this in the movies,” said Andriy Yermak, the president’s chief of staff.

As the Ukrainian troops battled the Russians in the streets, the presidential guard tried to seal off the compound where Zelensky was staying with anything he could find, like plywood boards.

Ruslan Stefanchuk, the Speaker of the Parliament, was one of the first to see the President of Ukraine in his office that day. Stefanchuk told journalist Simon Shuster that “It wasn’t fear” what he saw on Zelensky’s face, but only wondered “how could this be happening”. “We felt that the order of the world was collapsing,” recalled the president of the Ukrainian Parliament.

As night fell on the first day of the invasion, gunfire erupted around the government quarter, after which the guards of the complex decided turn off the lights and wear bulletproof vests and assault rifles for Zelensky. There were also 12 assistants there, only a few of whom knew how to handle weapons.

One of them was Oleksiy Arestovych, a veteran of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, who told ‘Time’ magazine that everything was “absolute madness”, noting that Russian troops They even tried twice to storm the complex presidential. In this sense, Zelensky recounted that his wife and children were still inside of residence at that time.

However, when offers came in from US and British forces to evacuate the president and his team and establish a government-in-exile, andThe president said that what he needed was “ammunition”, and not leave your country. “We think he was brave, but very risky,” a US official said.

So did Zelensky’s bodyguards, who they urged the president to leave kyiv immediately, since it was not a safe place. Meanwhile, somewhere outside the capital, a secure bunker awaited the president, equipped to withstand a prolonged siege, but the Ukrainian leader refused to go there.

Instead, during the second night of the invasion, and while the Ukrainians were fighting the Russians in the nearby streets, Zelensky decided to go out into the yard and record a video with a clear message from his phone: “We are all here and we are going to defend our independence, our country,” he declared. By then, the president had already decided what his role would be in this war. “You know that they are looking at you and that you are a symbol, so you must act as a head of state should,” he told Time magazine.

Now, two months after the start of the Russian invasion, Zelensky said he had “grown up.” “I’ve grown old from all this wisdom I never wanted. It is the wisdom linked to the number of people who have died and the torture that Russian soldiers perpetrated. To be honest, I never had the goal of gaining knowledge like that,” he expressed.

Nevertheless, He doesn’t regret the decision he made when when opted for politics and he left aside the world of interpretation, in which he was successful. “Not for a second,” he assured Simon Shuster, who ends his article for ‘Time’ magazine stating that Zelensky “doesn’t know how the war will end, or how history will describe his place in it”, but “he only knows that Ukraine needs a wartime president, and that is the role he intends to play.”