According to Reznikov, the atmosphere in Zalujnî’s reception hall was different – there the commanders’ reports were received and orders were given.
“There was more activity, but I don’t remember any particular change that happened in Zalujnîi. He was focused and collected at all times since I met him. (…) Nothing has changed for him. He prepared all his life for this attack, and now this moment has come,” Reznikov recalled.
At the other end of Kiev, at about the same time, the president of the Verkhovna Rada, Ruslan Stefanciuk, woke up to the sound of explosions. In a short time, he received a phone call from the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Denis Monastîrski, who informed him about the beginning of the invasion, and then from the secretary of the Security Council, Alexei Danilov, who told him that Vladimir Zelenski called a meeting of the Security Council National Security and Defense of Ukraine.
Also, Ştefanciuk had to summon deputies from the Verkhovna Rada, as Zelenski’s decree imposing martial law had to be approved by the Parliament in order to take effect. Deputies agreed in party talks that, for security reasons, they would not gather in the meeting hall, but in a hall under the Motherland sculpture in Kyiv. According to Ștefanciuk, one of the deputies started a live broadcast in which he said where the Rada meeting would take place. As a result, the deputies decided to gather at the Rada building.
At 6:30, MPs started arriving at the Parliament. Former Ukrainian president and European Solidarity leader Petro Poroshenko said his wife, Marina, woke him up. He told her to leave, but she refused. Poroshenko left his home in Kozin, a city in the Kiev region, for the party office and arrived in the Rada at 7am. There he saw many frightened people discussing a possible evacuation.
“I said that if you evacuate Parliament, first of all, I’m not going. And secondly, you have the right to do this, but it will be a very strong signal for everyone to flee from Kiev. Who wants to leave, leave, but no one must know about it. Because we have to be here to show that we are determined and that we will not give up on Kiev,” said Poroshenko.
According to First Deputy Chairman of the Rada, Oleksandr Kornienko, the absence of a mass evacuation “showed people that the authorities remain in Kiev and will stand and fight.”
The meeting of the Rada started at 8:00. Danilov asked the deputies to support the introduction of martial law. All the 300 deputies present in the hall then voted “for”. Among them were members of the pro-Russian Opposition Platform – For Life party.
“I didn’t notice them. Silent as water, under the grass! They didn’t raise their heads, they didn’t chatter,” recalls Poroshenko.
Ştefanciuk asked the deputies the right to determine the time and place of the next sessions. As he later explained, this was necessary to legally ensure that the Rada can work in any scenario, including if Kiev is surrounded. The parliamentarians supported this proposal and the fact that voting will take place manually and not through an electronic system.
On Bankova Street, where the office of the President of Ukraine is located, high-ranking officials went home around 1:00 a.m. on February 24, but had already started returning at 4:00 a.m. The head of the office, Andrii Iermak, later recalled that he arrived home around two in the morning, but that within an hour and a half he had already received intelligence and military reports about the outbreak of attacks. He returned by car.
The cited source notes that Volodymyr Zelensky, who since the evening of February 23 had been convincing the country that a large-scale invasion would not take place, must have felt the greatest responsibility. He had to make sure that “an entire country that was sleeping, wakes up, gathers all its forces and resists the blow”.
On the first day of the war, Zelenski had eight phone calls with world leaders: Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Boris Johnson, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, Recep Erdogan, Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, European Council chief Charles Michel and Emmanuel Macron.
In peacetime, it used to take weeks to organize each such conversation, but then “diplomatic time” shrunk. Zelenskiy had his first such conversation around 7 a.m. when he called British Prime Minister Boris Johnson directly.
At 6:42 a.m., Zelenskiy recorded his first wartime address. He talked about imposing martial law. An hour and a half later, a new presidential address was broadcast – the last in which he is dressed in a classic business suit. He then addressed the citizens in an army T-shirt, which would become “an integral part of his image”.
A parliamentary delegation led by the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, Ştefanciuk, soon arrived at the president’s office. According to Poroshenko, the MPs had a “consistent” conversation with Zelensky. They agreed that now they are no longer adversaries, but have only one enemy – Vladimir Putin. Poroshenko notes that such a proposal was made by Zelensky.
According to participants in the meeting, it was abruptly interrupted. Security guards entered the room and asked to hide.
“The president’s security guys came in and said there is some movement towards Bankova, so the president should leave already,” Stefanciuk said.
A cabinet meeting was held at 11:00 a.m. to announce the decision to evacuate some cabinet members to western Ukraine. One part of the government remained in Kiev, while the other part, keeping the quorum, could make decisions from elsewhere.
Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said that same morning they began looking for a train to take the ministers, their families and classified documents out of Kiev.
Reznikov stated that if he had acted according to established protocol that day, he probably would have been captured. He explained that the defense command post of the Ministry of Defense, where the minister was supposed to go with his team, was in Gostomel, where the Russian paratroopers landed.
