Russian President Vladimir Putin initially asked his military forces to try to occupy the capital, but failed due to fierce Ukrainian resistance. However, Russian forces arrived within minutes of the capture of Zelensky, possibly to assassinate him on February 24, the day Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the invasion, TIME reported. The TIME article includes a series of interviews with the president and his closest advisers. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky receives questions at a press conference on April 23, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Russian forces are about to capture Zelensky and his family at the presidential office in the early hours of their invasion of Ukraine, according to a new report. John Moore / Getty Before sunrise on February 24, Zelensky and his wife Olena Zelenska told their children – a 17-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son – that the bombing had begun and that they needed to prepare for the evacuation. “We woke them up,” Zelensky told Simon Schuster of TIME, who spent two weeks in the presidential band this month. “It simply came to our notice then. “There were explosions over there.” Zelensky said his memory of the early hours of the war was “fragmented”, but some memories stood out. The Ukrainian military told the president that Russian strike groups had parachuted into Kyiv to kill or arrest him and his family. On the night of February 24, fire broke out in the government district and security turned off the lights in the complex and brought bulletproof vests and rifles for Zelenski and about 12 of his advisers, TIME reported. One of them, Oleksiy Arestovych, a veteran of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, said Russian troops had tried to invade the presidential compound twice, while Zelensky and his family were still there. US and British forces have offered to evacuate the president and his entourage so they can form a government in exile. Zelensky reportedly said, “I need ammunition, not a walk.” There was also a shelter outside Kyiv that the president could have gone to, which was safe and could withstand a long siege. Zelensky, however, refused to leave Kyiv, instead taking to the streets despite fighting around the hotel to record video calls to the Ukrainian people. After failing to occupy the Ukrainian capital, in early April the Russian army withdrew its forces from Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv, focusing its attack on the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. Western officials say the change in military tactics has given the Russian military the opportunity to regroup and re-stockpile ammunition after suffering heavy casualties.
