The actor Ben Stiller met President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital while in his role as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).
Complimenting with his previous action career, the Hollywood star told Zelensky he was his hero. He told the BBC, “It’s my first time coming to an area that’s in conflict”.
He further adds, “But it’s really strange because when you drive into the country, really in the west of the country, you don’t really feel the conflict, except for the curfew at night where it gets really quiet and a little bit eerie.
In Lviv, people seem to be reverting back to their normal life, trying to do as much as possible.
And as you step closer and closer to Kyiv, into the east side of the country, you start to see the roadblocks and see the destruction, which really is shocking to look at when you haven’t really seen anything like that up close.”
Ben Stiller, who is known for films like There’s Something About Mary and Dodgeball, added in the interview with BBC Breakfast on Tuesday, saying, “I’m an actor, so the first thing I go like, ‘Oh, it looks like a movie. But the board scale of it is even bigger and it is real, so that is really distressing to see.”
The heavy war continues in Ukraine’s eastern region – with key sites under intense bombardment from the Russian forces.
This week, the NATO secretary-general was warned- this pertained to the fact that the west must prepare to continue supporting Ukraine in any war lasting for years.
Since 2016, Ben Stiller has been an ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
He reported that people in Kyiv were trying their best to go about their business as normally as possible. Going out for dinner, walks, for example, but he added, the reality was that they all knew the dispute, the war could return their way.
‘Nobody wants to run away from their home’
“The thing that really gets me is that these are just people like any of us, like you and I who have just been caught in a circumstance totally out of their control”, the actor continues.
“And nobody wants to run away from their home, nobody wants to have to go out into the works and have a whole new life and start afresh, or even just trying to find a way to survive.
“These are people just living their lives: mothers, fathers, families, friends.”
“A mother of two twins, who had to grab her kids and run for shelter, not even knowing where to go for shelter, they went into the basement and had to wait there till the sound of rockets had resided and then take a chance to come back up and grab their clothes. All this only to have no idea where to even go for safety”, he said.
“I mean, this kind of story, where you just try to place yourself in that situation, and imagine, ‘What would happen if a rocket came screaming by my apartment?”
