Kuleba: In the first weeks of the war only Zelensky, Yermak, and I knew we were in deep trouble

Former Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, in an interview with the editor-in-chief of the online outlet "GORDON," Olesya Batsman, recounted what happened in the opening days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the aggressor country Russia in the circle around Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

"Your wife told me in an interview that when you, as Ukraine's foreign minister, during the major phase of the war met for negotiations with [Russian foreign minister Sergey] Lavrov, she was really very worried that they might poison you there. The Russians' modus operandi and how they behave is already known worldwide. Tell me, please, were you afraid they would poison you at the meeting with Lavrov?" Batsman asked.

According to Kuleba, at that time he was not thinking about his personal safety.

"You know, from 24 February 2022 I didn't think about those things at all. My security advised me, but I was focused on only one thing — doing my job. I literally had neither the opportunity nor the desire to be distracted by thinking about my personal safety. So a security guard would follow me with a bottle of sealed water and just hand it to me so I would drink from our bottle rather than from whatever bottle happened to be at hand, he recalled. — But in those first weeks and months of the war you simply cannot think about anything else. At that time there were [only] three people in the country — the president [Volodymyr Zelensky], [at that time] head of his office [Andriy Yermak], and I — who were in the closest relations with partners. And we knew, better than anyone, that we were in deep trouble, that it was the end for us. Because no one in the world believed us, and no one was going to help us immediately."