Russia-Ukraine war: President Zelenksy revealed about the time he was almost captured or assassinated by assassins

In an interview with Time magazine, Zelensky told reporter Simon Shuster, who spent two weeks in the Ukrainian president’s residence, that Russian troops almost caught him when they tried to capture the capital Kiev in a short period of time. attack on February 24 – the first day the conflict broke out.

Zelensky said that the Ukrainian military informed him that the assassins had come to Kiev to assassinate or capture him, his wife and their children.

The Ukrainian leader said his wife, Olena, and their daughter, 17, and son, 9, were still in the presidential residence when the bombs started going off.

“We woke the kids up,” Mr. Zelensky said, adding that he and his wife immediately began preparing the children to leave the property while he himself was determined to stay put.

“There were very loud bangs there,” Zelensky added.

Gunfights broke out around the government compound as night fell on the first day of the war, the Shuster reporter wrote.

According to Zelensky, the assassins tried to break into the compound twice.

Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to the President of Ukraine, added: “Before that night, we had only seen such things in movies.”

According to reports, Mr. Zelensky has avoided many assassination attempts since Russia launched the conflict in Ukraine.

“We have a very strong intelligence and counterintelligence network, they monitor everything,” an adviser to the Ukrainian president, Mikhail Podolyak, told Ukraine’s Pravda news agency.

Mr. Podolyak claimed that many plots to assassinate Mr. Zelensky were prevented, including assassins who were killed trying to penetrate the Ukrainian leader’s government compound.

“Our foreign partners have revealed two or three assassination attempts. But I believe there must have been more than a dozen such assassination attempts,” Mr. Podolyak stressed.