After narrowly escaping death as the Russian military began their invasion of Ukraine, Iuliia Mendel recounts the moment she saw her home country become unrecognizable in real time.
Mendel, a Ukrainian journalist and former press secretary to President Voloydymer Zelenskyy, told CTV鈥檚 Your Morning about her book 鈥楾he Fight for our Lives鈥, detailing her experience leading up to Russia鈥檚 invasion and her attempt to stay and help defend her country.
鈥淭he world around us was just collapsing,鈥 she said in an interview on Tuesday. 鈥淓verything that we achieved was under threat, we understood that we were in the fight for our very existence.鈥
In March, Mendel says she heard bombs everywhere when she was traveling from the western city of Lviv to Kyiv in March, where she believes she wouldn鈥檛 have survived if the circumstances were different.
鈥淩ussians shelled the part where we were staying and if they were in a different angle with their shelling, I don鈥檛 think I [would] be sitting here,鈥 she said.
Mendel says in another incident she travelled to the city of Vinnytsia where the locals told her Russian missiles had attacked them 30 minutes before her arrival leaving the city in flames.
Witnessing the damage made her and her now-husband want to stay back to help, she said. Although many lives were lost she wants people to celebrate those who chose to volunteer and fight to protect their community.
鈥淲e're really proud of our army and our volunteers who sacrificed their lives to stand at the battlefield and to support our army to stand for what we achieved for democracy and for our freedom,鈥 she said.
At 32, Mendel won a nation-wide competition against 4,000 other applicants to become Zelenskyy鈥檚 press secretary in 2019. Mendel says she believes Zelenskyy hired her because they shared the same vision for their country and could relate to her similar upbringing to his coming from a poor, provincial town.
Mendel, who served in his office until 2021, says while many criticized Zelenskyy in his early days in office, she believes the public now sees him as a leader who is unafraid of entering a battlefield.
鈥淲hen I heard that he refused to leave Ukraine when there was a threat to his life and to the life of his family, I was not surprised,鈥 she said. 鈥淚 had been traveling with him to Donbas, that Russia invaded in 2014 and I saw how he was going into the zones of shelling just to stay with the soldiers and to show that their leader is with them.鈥
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