Strictly come to dance professional Pasha Kovalev said his friends have a hard time understanding why Russia decided to invade Ukraine.
The 42-year-old dancer was born in Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Russian Far East, but also has family ties to Ukraine, a neighboring country invaded by Vladimir Putin.
The 69-year-old Putin instructed his armed forces to invade the country on February 24, 2022 after rising tensions over whether Ukraine would join NATO.
Tensions between the two countries have been brewing since 2014, when Putin invaded Crimea in southern Ukraine, but he recently acknowledged that the country is “historically part of Russia” and will launch a “special military operation” that will lead to war.
(Image: ITV)
Pasha said: “My family is returning to Ukraine from my mother’s side, and I still have relatives there, so this whole situation of Russia against Ukraine seems silly to me, and all the people I know in Russia can’t understand it either. .
“I don’t think that should just happen.
“It’s depressing and the hardest thing for me is to try to cheer up my mother, because since it started, she seems to have come in and closed up a bit, she’s here with me in London.
(Image: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“We talk a lot, but it’s impossible to fix in one conversation.”
It was recently reported that Ukrainian refugees trying to flee the war-torn country faced difficulties in trying to arrive in the UK.
One four-year-old child was denied entry to the UK after it was revealed that his passport had expired, after the Home Office said children did not need passports to apply for entry.
(Image: WireImage)
MP Keith Malthaus said: “We have recognized that people fleeing the war zone may not have all their documentation, and we are trying to take a merciful and sensible approach to this problem.”
BBC presenter Rachel Burden told the Tory Minister that the current visa application took two UK graduates 11 hours to complete the required forms and Ukrainian citizens needed to complete an 11-page English document for their dogs.
She added that some people claim that the UK government is trying to make applications “as complex as possible”, to which Keith disagreed with the explanation that they are trying to make it “as simple as possible”.
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