We have seen Bankova Street in Kyiv several times in 65 days of war, but never from the direct perspective of the Presidential Staff grappling with Moscow’s special forces “Para” above them; with orders to capture or kill Volodymyr Zelensky. The very first hours of the invasion. The Kremlin is in a hurry. Kyiv is full of saboteurs: spies who pass information to the Russians. Until the flash goes off. Very few in Ukraine’s presidential complex, reveals American magazine Time, knew how to use guns. One was Oleksiy Arestovych, a military intelligence veteran and now Zelensky’s adviser. “It was an absolute madhouse,” he says, claiming the Russians tried to storm the complex twice.
Zelensky, his wife and children were there. They also include Speaker of Parliament Ruslan Stefanchuk, to whom the chain of successors in Ukraine will hand over command should the President be killed. Instead of taking shelter, Stefanchuk ran to Bankova Street on the morning of the invasion. The Ukrainian President then emerged at dawn on February 26 after rumors of an escape, or rather a hypothetical coordinated exfiltration by the United States to leave the country safely, by the person concerned, who also supported the Anglo proposal had received were flatly rejected. Americans to set up a government in exile. Zelensky took to the streets with his cell phone and said live on social media: “We need guns, not steps,” he denies in the “fake news” video selfie of the capitulation: “We’re not giving up, we’re here and we’re fighting for our nation.” The walk through the city’s government district concealed a chilling backstory. “The guards at the compound turned off the lights and brought in body armor and assault rifles for Zelensky and a dozen collaborators.”
What had happened in those hours remained a hunt of rumors, third-hand stories about Zelenskyy’s everyday life in the house that had become a place of refuge. Instead, something had just happened: the Russian army’s first attempt to convince Ukraine to meet the president was and was. “In the world of Zelensky,” as Simon Shuster’s report in Time is called, it is the president himself who describes for the first time how Russian troops came close and took the government district of Kyiv on the first day of the conflict. Memories “fragmented”, but terrible. After the bombing began, he and his wife Olena went to their 17-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son: “Get ready…”. “We woke them up,” Zelensky told Time. The Russian strike teams parachuted into Kyiv.
Moscow special forces, Shuster writes, aimed at the presidential complex: kill them or capture them. Gunshots were heard from the President’s office. It quickly became apparent that these offices were not the safest place to be, and while Ukrainian troops fought the Russians in the surrounding streets, the Presidential Guard attempted to seal the complex with whatever they could find. A bunch of police barriers and sheets of plywood to block the gate at the back entrance; more of a scrap heap from a landfill than a fortress.
“Before this evening, we had only seen something like this in films,” says Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. Shuster, according to the synopsis on the cover, spent two weeks “in the field with the President and his team,” exposing everyday wartime life between sleepless nights, anti-aircraft sirens and an obsessively controlled agenda, in search of something useful to to remain in control during these dramatic hours, apart from the calls from the west. More attacks will follow. We’re at least 4 since dawn this February 24th. The Para, then Kadyrov’s Chechens and Wagner’s mercenaries. In the center is a leader who, from the very first preparation, is now traveling with Americans’ coded equipment, with which he can be heard speaking uninterruptedly to President Joe Biden. In a recaptured Kyiv.