Ukrainian president: ‘I wanted to get coronavirus’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy claimed he seriously considered intentionally infecting himself with the coronavirus to show people that “it’s not the plague.”

“I wanted to go through this process. I wanted to get sick with the coronavirus,” Zelenskiy told Ukrainian Pravda in an interview published Tuesday, after being asked whether he was afraid of catching it.

“Why? To make it easier for people,” Zelenskiy said. “We gathered together [with the team], and I suggested to our people: ‘Come on, I’ll get sick, I’ll immediately be isolated … I’ll sleep it off, etc, and live through it normally. So that people understand that it’s scary, to an extent, you can get sick, you feel unwell, [but] I’ll go through it myself and show them … so they understand, so there’s no depression, that it’s not the plague. Because we’ve forgotten now, but at the very beginning there was a very scary moment when everyone thought we’d all die.”

Asked whether there was a specific person from whom he planned to catch the virus, Zelenskiy said “no, but we understood that in the center there were people lying [in hospital], it wouldn’t have been complicated.”

“The only thing that stopped me is that someone said that people might say it’s a PR stunt,” Zelenskiy said, before adding: “Of course, my family wouldn’t have forgiven me. They would have said I’m crazy. And actually they would have been right.”

Zelenskiy made the comments during a two-day trip to the Khmelnytskyi region last week.