Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said in an interview with the Ukrainian site “Babel” that he was informed about the imminent invasion of Russia on February 24 and he did not sleep at all the night before the attack.

“A few days before, we had semi-official information from our military and intelligence that the invasion of Ukraine is most likely planned for the night of February 24 at four in the morning. Woke up at three, didn’t sleep for an hour. And at four o’clock the military called me and said: “it has begun,” Klitschko says.

“At six or seven in the morning, I already called everyone and the first morning meeting at the city hall already took place,” he reports.

The mayor of the Ukrainian capital says that the information about the Russian invasion came from open sources – from the Ukrainian army, information from Western partners and countries that support Ukraine.

“They noted that the probability [unui război la scară largă] it is quite large. And by no means relax, but prepare for it. That’s why I constantly raised this topic, held meetings that not everyone liked,” he states.

His statements echo those of former Ukrainian special forces commander General Serhii Kryvonos in early August, who in turn said that Ukraine’s political leaders had ignored warnings from special services and Western partners about an imminent Russian invasion.

What surprised Vitaliy Klitschko

But Klitschko says he expected hostilities to begin in the east of the country and could not have imagined that the Russian attack would be so swift and come from both the south of Crimea and the north of Belarus, where the Ukrainian capital was attacked from.

“But I have a big question to this day: for two months, the Russians, with more than a hundred thousand troops in the north, conducted the so-called high-probability-of-invasion exercises that everyone was talking about,” Klitschko said. regarding the military exercises started by Russia on the territory of Belarus on February 10, two weeks before the start of the war.

“And then they approached Kyiv almost without resistance. But this is a general question for the military. I did not expect that the capital would be almost surrounded so quickly, and the Russians would approach our city,” says the mayor of the Ukrainian capital.

Vitaliy Klychko also told Babel journalists that he was threatened by a fan from Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s office after he signed an open letter demanding the return of Ukrainian citizenship to a businessman who was stripped of citizenship by the Ukrainian president.

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