Kuleba said that his son Yegor and his parents were in Kyiv on the night of February 24, 2022. Kuleba’s daughter Lyubov, together with her mother, Kiev City Council deputy from the “Servant of the People” Evgenia Kuleba, was vacationing at the seaside at that time.
“My parents and my son in the car left Kyiv at night in the morning of February 24 with the first blows,” Kuleba said.
When asked by Gordon why he did not insist that his lover, Ukrainian businesswoman Svetlana Paveletskaya, leave Kyiv, Kuleba admitted that at the start of a full-scale war she was with a friend in Bucha, Kyiv region.
“Well, when they tell me that I saved my family from the war, and left the Ukrainians to their fate, I can tell you another story that Svetlana Paveletskaya met the war in Bucha, because on the evening of February 23, she wrote to me: “I’m scared, I’ll go to my friend in Bucha and I’ll wait for you there. You will come to Kyiv, and then I will also return to Kyiv.” She jumped out of Bucha literally a couple of hours before the city was actually blocked,” Kuleba said.
He added that the house in which Paveletskaya was located was shelled by Russian occupiers a few days later.
“I did not have the moral right to do something with my family that other Ukrainians did not have the opportunity to do for theirs. I believed that the military was preparing, that they were ready. I could not take my family out before the start of the war. Well, I could not live with this without telling people: “People, take out all your families,” he admitted.
Video: Visiting Gordon / YouTube
Context
The Russian Federation launched a war against Ukraine in 2014, when it occupied Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine from the northern, eastern and southern directions. In the spring of the same year, the Ukrainian army deoccupied the north of the country, and in the fall – parts of the Kharkov and Kherson regions, in particular Kherson.
