Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky spent days hiding when the Ukraine conflict broke out in 2022, according to then-NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
In an interview with the Financial Times published on Friday, Stoltenberg spoke at length about the Ukraine conflict and NATO’s part in it. He said the West feared that Kiev would fall within the first few days of Russia’s military operation, while Zelensky would be assassinated on Moscow’s orders.
The US-led bloc has supported Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict, providing military and financial aid to Kiev. Several NATO officials, including Stoltenberg, claimed that if Russia is ‘allowed’ to defeat Ukraine, it will then attack other European states. Moscow – which views the conflict as a proxy war waged by the West – has dismissed the notion as nonsense.
In an interview with the Financial Times published on Friday, Stoltenberg spoke at length about the Ukraine conflict and NATO’s part in it. He said the West feared that Kiev would fall within the first few days of Russia’s military operation, while Zelensky would be assassinated on Moscow’s orders.
“It was a toss of the coin. If Kiev had fallen and they had taken Zelensky, which they were very close to doing, then the whole war would have been very different,” the former NATO chief added.
At one point, Stoltenberg was unable to reach the Ukrainian leader for two days as he was supposedly forced to “shelter in bunkers and evade Russian assassins,” the FT reported. When he finally heard from Zelensky, “that phone call was quite difficult,” he said, as he feared Zelensky would soon be either “caught or killed.”
Reports of Zelensky moving to a bunker after the conflict broke out have circulated before. Time correspondent Simon Shuster wrote about it in his book ‘The Showman’, in which he chronicled Zelensky’s rise to power and the first months of Kiev’s conflict with Moscow.
The Washington Post, which also mentioned Zelensky living in a bunker throughout the first few weeks of the conflict, described it as a Soviet-era bomb shelter located “deep beneath Kiev’s government quarters.”
Zelensky’s wife Elena also spoke about spending hours in a bunker after the conflict broke out in an interview with the Financial Times, but added that she and her children were later taken to an undisclosed location where they were apart from Zelensky for almost three months. Media reports suggest that Zelensky has bunkers in several locations scattered across the country.
There have also been reports in Ukrainian media of several alleged Russian-backed assassination attempts on Zelensky. Reuters reported earlier this year, citing an unnamed European official, that the Ukrainian leader has been growing “increasingly paranoid about suspected Russian attempts to assassinate him and destabilize Ukraine’s leadership” as the conflict drags on. However, he has never provided any details or evidence of the alleged attempts on his life.
Moscow has dismissed accusations of plans to eliminate Zelensky as anti-Russian propaganda. In an interview last year, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Russian President Vladimir Putin reassured him in the early stages in the conflict that Zelensky would not be killed. Dmitry Polyansky, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, reiterated earlier this year that Moscow “has no such plans.”