14 Saturday April 30 2022 | the times
News
Russian commandos came “within
minutes” of seizing President Zelensky
and his family shortly after the invasion
of his country, according to new inter-
views with the Ukrainian leader and his
staff.
Enemy gunfire was audible within
the walls of Zelensky’s office at his
compound on Bankova Street in Kyiv
after President Putin launched the war
on February 24.
Zelensky said that his memories of
that first day were a disjointed set of
images and sounds that existed “in a
fragmented way”.
Before sunrise, he recalled, he and his
wife, Olena Zelenska, went to tell their
17-year-old daughter, Aleksandra, and
nine-year-old son, Kiril, that the bomb-
ing had started and to prepare them to
flee their home.
“We woke them up,” Zelensky said.
“It was loud. There were explosions
over there.”
The Ukrainian military soon told
him that Russian strike teams had para-
chuted into Kyiv to kill or capture him
and his family.
The presidential offices were not the
safest place to be, but Zelensky refused
to leave, he told Simon Shuster, of Time
magazine.
With Ukrainian troops fighting the
Russians in the streets, the presidential
guard tried to seal Zelensky’s com-
pound with whatever they could find.
A gate at the rear entrance was
blocked with a pile of police barricades
and plywood boards, resembling a
Alina Peregudova won gold at the
national championship last yearYoung Olympic hopeful
killed by Russian shelling
Joshua ThurstonA 14-year-old girl who was on course to
represent Ukraine in weightlifting at
the Olympics has died in the shelling of
Mariupol, according to the city council.
Alina Peregudova won gold at
Ukraine’s national championship last
year and was a candidate for the
national weightlifting team. “She
aspired to continue to win at the high-
est level. But the ‘Russian peace’ came,
which ‘liberated’ her from this future,”
Mariupol city council wrote on the
messaging app Telegram. Her mother
was also killed in the attack.
In September last year Alina was
awarded a diploma of the National
Olympic Committee in Donetsk region
for high achievements.
Russia’s invasion has claimed the
lives of several athletes. This month
Yegor Kigitov, 21, a member of
Ukraine’s national shot-put team, was
killed during a battle. On March 17 theformer captain of Ukraine’s national
water polo team, Yevhen Obedinsky,
39, died in Mariupol, his father, Olek-
sandr, reported on Facebook.
“Mariupol and the world will never
forget Russia’s crimes against human-
ity. You will not hide or justify them.
Those who came to us with the war
will be punished,” Mariupol city
council wrote.News War in Ukraine
A
British man who was
taken prisoner while
fighting with foreign
volunteers in Ukraine
has been paraded on
Moscow television, as colleagues
and family appealed for the release
of two British aid workers also
seized by Russian forces (Richard
Lloyd Parry writes).
Andrew Hill was shown slumped
in a chair with a bandaged head and
left arm, and blood on his right
hand. He mumbled answers to an
English-speaking male interrogator
off camera.
The Russian announcer said that
he “laid down his arms and
surrendered to the Russian military
in the Mykolaiv region, after the
group of mercenaries in which he
fought was defeated and he himself
was injured”.
Hill, from Plymouth, appeared on
television the day after the
confirmation of the death of another
British member of the Ukraine
Foreign Legion, Scott Sibley.
Hill said that he had crossed into
Ukraine from Poland alone to give
aid to refugees and that he had then
been approached by someone to
“help further in Ukraine”. He said
that he knew little about the
Ukraine Foreign Legion, which wasset up in the early days of the war to
recruit foreigners willing to fight
against the Russian invasion.
“I don’t have a rank, I don’t know
the [name of] the regiment,” he
said. “I just know that the Foreign
Legion said that I could help.
“I was on the border for a bit.
They said if I wanted to help I could
help further in-country so I wentBloodied
Briton is
paraded on
Moscow TV
Andrew Hill mumbled answers to anZelensky: I was
just minutes from
being captured
mound of junkyard scrap more than a
fortification.
In order to piece together the story of
those first hours and to see the presi-
dent’s daily routine, Shuster spent two
weeks with Zelensky and his team,
conducting interviews with him and
almost a dozen aides.
They told Shuster that, in violation of
security protocols, friends and allies
had rushed to be with the president at
his compound on the morning of the
invasion.
Among them was Ruslan Stefan-
chuk, the speaker of parliament, who
would have to take command if Zelen-
sky were assassinated, meaning it was
advisable for him to shelter separately.
“It wasn’t fear on his face,” Stefan-
chuk said of the president. “It was a
question: How could this be? Maybe
these words sound vague or pompous.
But we sensed the order of the world
collapsing.”
As night fell on the first day, gunfights
broke out around the government
quarter. Zelensky, a former comedian
and actor, was still there with his wife
and children. Guards turned off lights
and distributed bulletproof vests to the
president and his staff.
“It was an absolute madhouse,” Olek-
siy Arestovych, one of Zelensky’s senior
aides, told Shuster. “Automatics for
everyone.”
Arestovych said that Russian troops
had made two attempts to storm the
compound. It was not clear if Zelensky
and his aides fired their weapons.
Shuster’s interviews suggest that,
while short on political experience, Zel-
ensky and his team — many of whom
were from the world of showbusiness
— sensed the need to reach out to the
people as the war progressed.
“You understand that they’re watch-
ing,” Zelensky told Shuster. “You’re a
symbol. You need to act the way the
head of state must act.”On the second night of the invasion,
he filmed a video message of himself
and his team wearing the drab green
army shirts that would become their
wartime clothes. “We’re all here,” said
the president. “Defending our inde-
pendence, our country.”
Zelensky turned down offers from
the United States and Britain to send
forces to extract him from Kyiv, telling
officials in Washington in one secure
call: “I need ammunition, not a ride.”
In the early days at the compound,
when Russian artillery was still in range
of Kyiv, Zelensky requested a briefing
from his top general at about 5am; later
he put that back by two hours to have
time for a breakfast of eggs.
The president and his aides often
received news of bombings and atroci-
ties via posts on social media before the
military had briefed them.
Zelensky told Shuster that certain
images lingered in his mind as symbols
of the horror of the war. One was a
photograph of the body of a woman left
mutilated by the blast when Russian
missiles hit a train station in the city of
Kramatorsk on April 8, killing at least
50 people.
“She was wearing these bright, mem-
orable clothes,” he said. The picture
stuck in his mind as he met Ursula von
der Leyen, president of the European
Commission, for key talks in Kyiv.
He struggled to gather his thoughts
as he took the podium next to Von der
Leyen. “It was one of those times when
your arms and legs are doing one thing,
but your head does not listen,” he said.
“Because your head is there at the sta-
tion, and you need to be present here.”
Since Russian forces retreated from
around Kyiv this month, Zelensky and
his aides have been able to spend more
time in their usual rooms rather than in
bunkers underneath the compound.
“What can we do?” one aide told
Shuster. “We’ve got to keep working.”Russian strike teams
tried to storm the
presidential compound
to seize Ukraine’s leader
in the first hours of war
A Ukrainian rock band has teamed up
with Ed Sheeran on a song inspired by
the lead singer’s forced separation from
his wife.
The band Antytila, whose members
have been fighting in the Ukrainian re-
sistance since the war started, posted a
video on TikTok in their uniforms in late
March asking to take part in Sheeran’s
Concert for Ukraine. Though
the band’s request was
declined by the event
organisers, who said the
concert at the Re-
sorts World Arena
in Birmingham on
March 29 had to
avoid any asso-
ciations with the
military, Sheeran
is releasing a track
with them which
comes out on
Monday. The single is
a remix of his song
2step and Antytila’s
Band of soldiers on Sheeran remix
Blanca Schofield section focuses on the need to hold on
to hope when separated from loved
ones during times of conflict.
The lyrics were written by the lead
singer, Taras Topolia, 34, who has not
seen his wife, Olena Topolia, a popular
Ukrainian singer known as Alyosha —
since the first day of the Russian inva-
sion when Topolia helped her to leave
Kyiv before cycling to the nearest con-
scription point. The distance between
them has increased as Alyosha and the
couple’s three young children
are now in New
Jersey in the
United States.
“The lyrics
are about
the forced
separation
of me and my wife — it describes my ex-
perience of the first day of the invasion
when she left with our kids and I stayed
behind in Kyiv. I had no other option
because I had to stay to fight for my
country. The war has interrupted a lot
of unions like mine,” Topolia, who is
now fighting and working as a para-
medic in the Kharkiv region, said.
“In the song I say that although it is
difficult now and we are living through
dramatic times, everything will pass,
everything will be fine and when it
passes, we will dance and kiss again.”
After an invitation from Sheeran’s
manager asking them to collaborate on
the remix, Topolia started jotting down
lyrics “while on the battlefield”. With
the help of his bandmates, he recorded
his vocals in a 30-minute session in a
studio in Hostomel — a town on the
outskirts of Kyiv that had only recently
been re-captured by Ukrainians —
before going back to his duties. A video
filmed in Kyiv, Irpin and Kharkiv will
accompany the remix. Profits from the
video will go to charities helping
Ukrainian refugee children.Antytila,
led by Taras
Topolia, who
recorded his
lyrics before
returning
to duty