Hollywood star Sean Penn took to social media to share his thrilling story of how he fled Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion of the country.
Penn arrived in Kiev last week to film material for a documentary about tensions surrounding Ukraine, which he had been working on for several months.
The actor was even present at a Ukrainian government press conference last Thursday, just hours after Moscow announced its “special operation” to demilitarize and “denazify” the Kiev government, which it accused of “genocide” in the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.
The 61-year-old celebrity also met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and was praised by his office for displaying “the courage that many others, especially Western politicians, lack.”
However, Penn still decided not to stick around in the country for too long after the Russian invasion, and went looking for safety in neighboring Poland.
However, getting to the border together with thousands of Ukrainians, who were also fleeing the conflict, turned out to be really a troublesome affair.
“Myself and two colleagues walked miles to the Polish border after abandoning our car on the side of the road,” the actor wrote on Twitter on Monday.
The post included a photo of Penn dragging his suitcase along the road with a massive queue of vehicles in the background.
Almost all of the vehicles in the line were carrying “women and children only, most without any sign of luggage,” he wrote, suggesting that the cars were the only possessions of value that those people had.
The Ukrainian government had earlier banned men aged between 18 to 60 from leaving the country, saying they must stay and fight.
In his earlier tweets, Penn described the Russian invasion as a “brutal mistake” and called upon Washington to boost its support for Kiev. “If we allow [Ukraine] to fight alone, our soul as America is lost,” he wrote.
UN figures show that nearly 875,000 have fled the conflict since the Russian offensive started.