Russian television journalist and left-wing activist Maxim Shevchenko admitted that he almost died during a visit to Kyiv a week before the start of the ATO.
He stated this on air on the Komsomolskaya Pravda radio during a conversation with TV presenter Tina Kandelaki, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“I was there in the summer of 2014, after that I fled from there, they told me that they should kill me, that I should throw away my phone. I threw away my phone and left Ukraine across the Belarusian border.
I was there when the SBU captured Marat Saichenko and Oleg Sidyakin, LifeNews journalists, and I went to organize negotiations for their release.
Then they flew on Ramzan Kadyrov’s plane from Kyiv to Moscow.
But I spent a week there, it was cool, just on the eve of the war, the war was already going on, but the ATO began a week after I left,” Shevchenko said.