Oral history: Leaders recall dismay, fury on first day of war in Ukraine

I said to my ministers, “Please keep your phones on, because we’re going to have a government meeting, because the war is going to start.” And I was going to bed and hoping that I will not get this call, I will not get this message.

The chatter had been building up on the intelligence for a long time, and it had reached a crescendo on the last couple of days before the invasion, and we could literally hear the Russian units moving into position. We could tell. … It’s a mixture of kind of incredulity really, but also fatalism. There was just something about Putin’s tone the last time I’d talked to him. … He’d already made up his mind.

That evening, we knew what was going to happen. The only uncertainty was the exact hour. I had a dinner with some of my staff in my residence. We discussed and went through the last preparations. And then, actually, I went to bed. But it was a short night.

We had had a lengthy meeting in the Oval [Office] with the president that morning [on Ukraine]. In the category of walking and chewing gum at the same time, we actually had a [national security] principals meeting that afternoon on Iran. [Later,] we had a video gathering with senior national security officials. … By that time, we were extremely confident it was happening then, in a matter of hours.

I was disgusted by Putin. I was disgusted by what he was doing. I was nauseated by his language, by his lies, by his aggression, by his condescension toward Ukraine. I thought the whole thing was repellent, arrogant, chauvinistic, wrong.

In the middle of the meeting, people started looking at their cellphones and pointing. I got a text message from the Ukrainian ambassador, who was on the other side of the room, and he told me the attack had started. I looked around the room, I saw everybody on their phones. I think [Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya] only knew when he was shown a phone message by one of his staff. The room was kind of stunned. I use the word “electrified” sometimes, but that’s not right. The room was stunned.

We were all in the office [at the Pentagon], everyone was on pins and needles … the system is all cued up on the balls of its feet. … Then of course the invasion happened. We pick up Russian forces with pre-assault fires, airborne troops, artillery and missile attacks. We pick up airstrikes, all the combined arms Russian military forces that start assaulting across the border on multiple axes.

What I understood in that moment, when I was getting dressed, I thought about the rockets flying over my children, over all of our children. This means that there will be a huge number of deaths. It was clear.

To be honest, I hadn’t believed in the invasion scenario. … [Zelensky chief of staff Andriy] Yermak calls me sometime after 4 a.m. I was a little out of it at that hour. He just says, “It’s started. Get to the office.” I didn’t even understand what had started. … We had earlier come up with a response plan in the event of this. So that was activated and then we were moved down to this shelter. And that’s how I got stuck down there. I probably left that bunker for the first time a month later.

All the necessary decisions were promptly taken. Monastyrsky was the first to be at the president’s office. I was the second to come at 5:11 a.m. It was in a calm mode. … I was only surprised by the president’s white dress shirt.

Normally in a crisis like this, there are a lot of hours spent just trying to come to grips with a crisis … trying to decide what you’re going to do about it. In this case, it was all done in advance. … We actually had developed a written checklist of elements we would work through … the first 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, 96 hours.

Here’s what it wasn’t. It wasn’t chaotic. We’re the military, this is what we do when we’re in combat, in crises. We have procedures we follow. … We had made decisions in the days and weeks leading up to the invasion. … When they actually attacked, those plans went into action.

I was at home, it must have been something like 10:30 … and my deputy chief of staff, Tom Sullivan, called to say that Russia had launched its initial salvo of missiles. … Most of us have everything we need at home to communicate. I have a secure room at home, phone, video links to everyone else. … I talked to the national security adviser [Sullivan] at some point. … My main conversation was with the secretary of defense and our joint conversation with the NATO secretary general.

Later on, I forget how long it was, Blinken, the chairman, the national security adviser and I are on the phone with the president, giving him a rundown of what’s transpired.

What Zelensky is really saying to me is that the situation is absolutely appalling. Tanks are swarming toward Kyiv from several directions. He’s talking about the way the Ukrainians are fighting. The bravery they’re showing. … His message is, “Give me help.” His message is, “Give me the kit now.” He has a purpose. His purpose is not just to say, “Oh, my God, I’m being attacked.” His purpose is to say, “Johnson, we need military help now. Help us organize it.”

It was very late at night in Washington. … Russian planes were in the air. … And the world was about to change. I remember it vividly. … I asked [Zelensky], “What is there, Mr. President? What can I do for you? How can I be of help?” … [He] said, and I quote, “Gather the leaders of the world. Ask them to support Ukraine.” … That dark night, one year ago, the world was literally … bracing for the fall of Kyiv … perhaps even the end of Ukraine.

I’m struck by [Zelensky’s] complete, his sort of sublime indifference to the suggestion that he might want to move his cabinet or his government to Lviv [in western Ukraine]. I’m saying to him, whatever you do, do not get taken out by the Russians. You are the resistance. Ukraine’s fight needs to coalesce around you. Is there anything we can do [to assist in his protection or relocation], and he said, “We’re fine, we just need weapons.”

It wasn’t like it was a continuous bombardment, so to speak, but a few bombs had gone off during the night, a few bombs had fallen and otherwise it was relatively quiet. … And it all seemed very, very calm, very collected. And I can still remember the weather. It was a cold, clear morning. I seem to remember that in the morning in Kyiv, I still had the impression that it smelled a bit like East Berlin just before reunification.

We realized that this would change Europe, that this was one of the darkest days in Europe’s modern history and would cause a lot of suffering and death. … Just the sheer size of the invasion made it obvious that this was going to cause a lot of suffering, death, damage. So it was anger, but also sadness — those are the two feelings that describe what I felt that morning.

You’re also seized with the human consequences of this, too. And the devastation that was being wrought by the Russians in Ukraine. … I think all of us understood that this is likely to be a slog given Putin’s fixation on controlling Ukraine.

I remember very well one moment when I spoke to one of my colleagues from the European Council, one of the other prime ministers with whom I spoke many times. … He was very skeptical, not believing really, that Russia can make a full-scale invasion. And I asked him, “Do you believe me now?” and he answered, “Yes, fully.” … So this day was a turning point in the history of the world, in the history of Europe, for sure. So there were those hopes of, you know, awakening from the geopolitical slumber.

There was a woman from Kyiv who was traveling with her husband. … And in the middle of the flight, she approached me. … She sat down and said, “Listen, we have three children with a babysitter in [Kyiv]. Me and my husband, we’re coming back from a business trip in Turkey. Please give us some advice. Do we stay in Warsaw and arrange for our children and babysitter to get to Poland? Or do we go to Kyiv?” And that was a moment when you bear a lot of responsibility on your shoulder as a minister. … When she left, it suddenly struck me how this is just a drop, what I experienced. It would be less than a drop of the pain, suffering and difficult decisions that millions of Ukrainians are going to go through in this war.

You noticed the hardship people were in, especially … just before the border. That was the most emotionally intense part, the last 20 kilometers before the border, where you noticed that people were afraid, they all wanted to get out, and no one felt safe anymore. And people put up with great material disadvantages. They simply left their cars at the side of the road and walked with the bare necessities. So that was very, very, very depressing.

We were working throughout the rest of the evening in getting the [U.N.] resolution [condemning Russia] into final form. … We do all our work on WhatsApp. … I was sending WhatsApp messages pretty much all through the evening to various members of the council, to my staff, to Washington and to the others as we started the process of putting the final touches on this draft. We did get the draft done and we were able to get 82 countries to co-sponsor … knowing, of course, that the Russians were going to veto it. We weren’t good with that … but what we wanted to do was prove that they were isolated.

I believe I went home about 3 in the morning, during the day Ukraine time, basically to take a shower, change and come back.

I don’t think I slept very much. … The joint staff, my staff is calling to give me frequent updates. … We have some of the best information, the best situational awareness, and sharing information with allies and reassuring them is key.

Eventually [I slept]. It was more the next morning than that night.

At some point that first day, the president gathered us all together. There were a lot of us in that bunker — maybe 120 people including the security guards. He said, “Look, we’re staying. From tomorrow, it may be that we don’t have a chance to leave. Everyone has their own life and needs to make a decision for themselves. Choose to either stay or go somewhere safer.” … The whole situation felt like a dream, so I went to another room and called my wife. I said that we can make a choice right now. … She answered me very clearly — maybe with some humor — that she’d rather tell our kids that I was a hero once than a deserter many times.

We had people lying in the corridors — there were people everywhere, snipers, different people. We basically lived here. We had no electricity, we walked with flashlights. And with these flashlights, we worked.

We were preparing for street fighting in Kyiv. Here [in city hall], we laid sandbags against all of the windows. … There were molotov cocktails covering the yard.

There was no coffee or anything to help keep us alert because everyone was in this spirit of making quick decisions. And they were indeed happening very quickly. No one slept. … Those first hours, we asked what information to give people and [Lt. Gen. Yevhen] Moisiuk told me to tell everyone, “Kill the occupiers!” And that was it.

I had a long conversation with [Zelensky that day]. … I drew him my vision of how the events would unfold. I told him … that no one would help us now. Because they have no understanding of who we are. And our task is to survive the first two or three weeks, not to break down, and to repulse the enemy. Then there will be gradual help. Then this help will increase, and then we will have partners with whom we will get a great victory. He listened to me very carefully and asked, “Do you think it will happen?” I said, “Volodymyr Oleksandrovych, there is no other way.”

It looks like it’s what we predicted. The main effort pointing toward Kyiv. There’s another large-scale effort that’s south of that … headed to the north and west, and also looks like it could wind up in the Kyiv area. That’s unfolding about like we thought it would. We’re just trying to get a feel for how much the Ukrainians have left in terms of command and control; is the leadership in charge?

We quickly began to see the tenaciousness of the Ukrainian resistance and the success they were having … and the way the Russian military was beginning to stumble. … We began to see some things that surprised us a little bit.

There were so many meetings, and the ambiance and the atmospherics were very similar. … It’s intense. “Hectic” is not a word I’d use. It implies chaos and confusion, a lack of clarity. I would say it’s very intense. The seriousness of the moment was awesome anyway … the largest land war in Europe since 1945.

It’s Joe [Biden] who is really determinative. I do my shtick. I make my arguments that Putin must fail and Ukraine must succeed. … Joe picks that up and uses the phrase or something like it. He genuinely saw it very, very clearly. Putin had basically forfeited all right to be treated as somebody you could negotiate with. It was over and it was binary.

I could see around the room that there were people who were so genuinely shocked, with their physical being, that they couldn’t utter a word. And they were like, “We were naive. We should have listened to you,” all those things. … [Zelensky] was saying that “I’m in this room, and I don’t know if I’m going to be alive by this evening.” And he was like, saying goodbye and that “we are being bombed, are being hunted. They want to kill me. Probably they’ll get to me.” And that was so, that was very, what is the right word? Touching is maybe too soft. That was really going to your bones. … The connection was lost. And then it was like, “Is this it?” I mean, very, very creepy.

There were moments during this day, and in particular in the evening, when I was very much anxious and fearful of Ukraine surrendering very quickly. I have to admit that I had those thoughts in my mind while going to bed. … So I was full of those dark thoughts … and I didn’t sleep very well that night.

Honestly, I’m thinking the whole thing is utter tragedy. I’m thinking, what could we have done to avert it? Is there something we missed, something we should have done with Putin? I’m thinking back over all the conversations I had with him. Did we show too much weakness? But I’m also thinking basically that he’s totally misread this and he’s made a massive mistake. I think pretty much from the get-go, even if he captures Kyiv, he’s not going to conquer the spirit of the Ukrainians. And in the end they’ll get him. That’s what I’m really thinking. Kyiv is still standing. Zelensky is still there.