Feb. 28 (UPI) — Dancing with the Stars pro Maks Chmerkovskiy, who was in Kyiv when the Russian invasion began, said Monday in an update he will start to make his way out of Ukraine.
“I’m going to try to make my way out. I’m going to try to start getting towards the border,” Chmerkovskiy, who is Ukrainian-American, said in the update posted to his Instagram account. “I have options. My options are better than most people’s, unfortunately, but I’m just a little nervous.”
“It’s going to be alright, well I know, it’s going to be okay,” he added, urging followers not to panic if he doesn’t provide many more updates.
Chmerkovskiy was staying at hotel in Kyiv when the Russian invasion began late Thursday, and he told followers in an earlier update he was “safe,” but the overall situation was “dire.”
“Just a lot of fighting everywhere,” he said in the new update. “The streets are crazy. At one point, I got arrested…but again, all good, I promise.”
“For me, it was just a reality check,” he added.
He also gave an update on his friends, who he mentioned in his earlier Instagram post.
Chmerkovskiy said one of his friends has been headed from Kyiv to the city of Lviv in the west, to the Polish border, traveling 17 hours by bus, but still hasn’t made it to the border.
He added that she told him it was cold at night when the engine was turned off to save gas, but there were volunteers along the bus route providing food and hot drinks.
Chmerkovskiy said that another friend took the kids out, and she and her husband are “taking up arms” in the ground defense against the invasion.
In an Instagram video Sunday, he was wiping back tears as he described the situation.
“I’m in a very safe place, but this is nuts, and I think everybody is going through a lot of emotions, and I think it’s time I expose mine a little bit in a more personal manner,” he said. “This is a war, this is a crazy situation, it’s insane.”
“What Ukrainians are doing, it makes me so proud,” he added. “Just spread the word that this needs to pause, stop, stop, stop the shooting…The reality is I just want to go home at this point. I’m just hoping for a safe ending to it all.”
In another post, he posted footage he said was of “mostly unarmed Ukrainian civilians,” who stopped “and turned away Russian tanks.”
He also posted a photo he said was of “a civilian car shot at while trying to escape the war,” adding that a man died and his wife and two daughters were injured.
The invasion has led to at least 368,000 Ukrainians fleeing the country, the United Nations announced Sunday.
On Monday, the United States closed its embassy in Belarus and authorized diplomats to voluntarily leave Russia amid the war in Ukraine due to “safety issues,” according to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.