You’re an inspiration, Stiller tells Ukraine president
BEN STILLER, the Hollywood actor, met Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv and told the Ukrainian president that he had been inspired by him.
“It’s a great honour for me... you’re my hero,” said Stiller, a UN goodwill ambassador who met Mr Zelensky on World Refugee Day. “What you’ve done, the way that you’ve rallied the country, the world, it’s really inspiring.”
“You quit a great acting career for this,” he added, to which Mr Zelensky replied: “Not so great as you.”
Stiller was visiting the Kyiv suburb of Irpin during a trip to eastern Europe that enabled him to meet Ukrainian refugees in Poland and speak to UNHCR staff working in the region.
Irpin, the scene of fierce fighting at the beginning of the war, was the closest Russian soldiers got to the capital after invading Ukraine in February.
“I feel it’s hard to understand what’s actually going on here if you haven’t been here,” Stiller told Mr Zelensky. “You see it on TV, you see it on social media, it’s something else to actually see it and feel it and to talk to people.”
Mr Zelensky said that it was easy for people to forget the conflict but Stiller and others could ensure international attention stayed focused on it.
Ukraine is to exhibit badly damaged Russian military vehicles in a “tank tour” to maintain awareness of the war that will take in Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, Madrid and Lisbon. “We’ll help to ensure that Russian tanks are in Europe, but as scrap,” Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defence minister, pledged.