Regarding the airport, some six months prior to all of this, and perhaps even earlier, if you remember, there was a gathering of troops on the territory of Belarus and so on. We appealed to all our partners, telling them that we believed this is how they would act. They were training there — and it was well known — to capture or bomb key infrastructure points. They had been training, they had plans to capture Boryspil airport and so on. I don’t know how old these plans are.
They used maps, and the way they were capturing things, some of their paths were the same as those of the Nazis during World War II. So to say they had something unique planned here, it is impossible. Everything we had, it was there.
I’m not ready to talk about everything Burns talked about, but his main signals were about threats to my life. And those were not the first signals — they came from everywhere, from our intelligence services, from foreign colleagues and so on.
Look, as soon as the full-scale invasion began, from that moment on, our economy was losing $5 billion to $7 billion a month. This is wages. And you know the money our partners give us, we cannot spend the money on military salaries. There is some kind of global paradox in all this. I need money so I don’t lose my country. But I can’t spend this money on military salaries. Therefore, simultaneously with the explosions and the shelling, I had a very problematic story. I have to pay salaries to people who go there and die. And you’re hopeless. I don’t have time for reasoning, warnings, commitments — I just have a task to do. I must not allow them to occupy our land, and I have to pay people who die. That’s exactly what it sounds like. There are no sentiments. You have to do this every month.
When it comes to all warnings or signals from certain partners, here is what I explained to them: If we don’t have enough weapons, it will be difficult for us to fight. We will fight them, that’s for sure. And they don’t want to talk. [Russian President Vladimir Putin] hasn’t been willing to communicate for three years. So I don’t want to listen to this nonsense that Russians are ready to talk, this is nonsense. I clearly explained that. Everything we need is weapons, and if you have the opportunity, force him to sit down at the negotiating table with me. I’d been talking about this specifically, because we believed there will be an invasion.
You can’t simply say to me, “Listen, you should start to prepare people now and tell them they need to put away money, they need to store up food.” If we had communicated that — and that is what some people wanted, who I will not name — then I would have been losing $7 billion a month since last October, and at the moment when the Russians did attack, they would have taken us in three days. I’m not saying whose idea it was, but generally, our inner sense was right: If we sow chaos among people before the invasion, the Russians will devour us. Because during chaos, people flee the country.
And that’s what happened when the invasion started — we were as strong as we could be. Some of our people left, but most of them stayed here, they fought for their homes. And as cynical as it may sound, those are the people who stopped everything. If that were to happen, in October — God forbid, during the heating season — there would be nothing left. Our government wouldn’t exist, that’s 100 percent sure. Well, forget about us. There would be a political war inside the country, because we would not have held on to $5 billion to $7 billion per month. We did not have serious financial programs. There was a shortage of energy resources in the market created by the Russians. We did not have enough energy resources. We would not have been able to get out of this situation and there would be chaos in the country.
But it is one thing when chaos is controlled and it is during a military time — you run the state in a different way. You can open the border, close the border, attack, retreat, defend. You can take control of your infrastructure. And it’s another situation when you do not have a military situation or emergency regime in place, and you have a state that is ruled by a huge number of different officials and institutions. And minus $7 billion a month, even without weapons, is already a big war for our country.
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