ZINCH: I SHOULD BE HOME
for my daughter, not [for] my family, I would be there. Yes, part of me feels I should be there.
“I know the people from my country, the mentality and all of them think exactly the same.
“I am so proud to be Ukrainian and will be forever, for the rest of my life.
“I know the people, the mentality of the people from my country, they prefer to die and they will die, but they are not going to give anything.”
Zinchenko revealed in a moving interview on the BBC’S Football Focus how his wife Vlada woke him at midnight — 3am Ukraine time — on February 24 to alert him to Russia’s invasion of their homeland.
He added: “My wife woke me up and she was crying. She showed me the videos, the pictures, what’s going on now in Ukraine and that feeling I cannot explain because I had never felt myself in that position.
“I’m just crying. It’s already a week, but I can drive the car from the training ground and I can just cry for nothing.
“It’s everything in my head. Imagine the place where you were born, where you were growing up and there is just empty ground.
“I know a lot of things, which probably the rest of the world don’t know because I have a lot of friends there and a lot of people from different cities and they are sending me the facts.
“The people are starving, people are sleeping underground, in bunkers, wherever, they cannot live a proper life.”
Zinchenko is bitterly disappointed that no player from Russia’s national team has spoken out about tyrant Vladimir Putin (above) and his war.
He said: “I was surprised that no one from all of them, most of them playing in the national team, can say their positions – but they don’t, they just ignore it and I don’t know why.”
Asked why he was speaking out, he said: “I play for Manchester City, I have 1.5million followers on Instagram and my mission is to show the rest of the world the real truth, what is going wrong now in Ukraine.”
Zinchenko also spoke of his hopes that NATO will impose a no-fly zone.
He added: “We need to stop the war, we need to close the space in the air because the main damage is from there. People must understand that everyone is at risk.”