Zelensky: I didn't say War was Coming because in the Chaos the Russians would have Destroyed Us

The Ukrainian president has come under unprecedented criticism from Ukrainians since the beginning of the war after his interview with The Washington Post, in which he said he knew about the looming war as early as last fall, but did not tell his countrymen. Some see this as the first real crisis in his team's communications strategy.

Volodymyr Zelensky's motives are that this would have created chaos in the country and thus the Russians would have taken it over in a matter of days, while in martial law crisis management is easier.

The interview with him was published as part of a major investigation by the publication into the events of the months leading up to the outbreak of war. It states that as early as October 2021, the White House was fully convinced that a Russian invasion was imminent.

Early in the hour-long interview in the barricaded presidency in Kyiv, he was asked whether Hostomel airport outside Kyiv should have been reinforced with troops before it was attacked on the morning of February 24 by Russian commandos, after William Burns, the director of the CIA, had in January warned about such an operation from the Russians.

Zelensky replies that in Kyiv they knew about a similar scenario, including the capture of the civilian international airport, at least half a year in advance, and reminds that last year there were Russian-Belarusian exercises to control or bomb infrastructure. According to him, there is nothing unique about the planning and that the Russians used maps and directions like those of the Nazis during World War II. "I won't talk about everything Burns and I talked about, but his main signals were about threats to my life, and those weren't the first signals, they came from everywhere,...

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