Ix Shen leaves Kyiv: ‘It’s not in our best interests to live extensively underground’

Thousands of Singaporeans have been following the daily Instagram posts of former Mediacorp star  Ix Shen, who’s been living in Podil, a district of Kyiv, since late last year.

Mr Shen had said shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb 24 that they would stay on, but on Tuesday, he announced  a change of plan.

“Based on our latest information, we have decided that it’s not in our best interests to live extensively underground during the next phase of fighting.

“So we’ll be evacuating from Kyiv, in the west direction, and we’re planning and moving as we go along. We’ll be safe and okay,” he said in his daily video.

For the past four months, he and his wife, Natalia, who is Ukrainian, have been living in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Like most people, they have been mostly hunkered underground for safety.

He and Natalia, a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, wed in 2015. On Feb 24, he told The Straits Times in a Zoom interview that his wife is a reservist in the military and might therefore be called up to serve as a medical officer in the army.

In his most recent video, he is seen standing behind his car, its trunk open and apparently packed with the family’s belongings.

The tone of the post was markedly different from the video from the day before, which he had captioned “The spirit is strong.” He had opened that video with a Ukrainian national salute, “Slava Ukraini” which means “Glory to Ukraine.”

“We are safe and ok,” he said. Motioning to an apple in his hand, he added, “Yesterday at the supermarket, we had fresh fruits. The resilience and the spirit is still strong.”

As Russian troops close in on Kyiv, more people are evacuating from the city.

Russia announced that it was ready to provide humanitarian corridors on Mar 9 (Wednesday) for civilians fleeing Kyiv as well as four other cities, Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, and Mariupol.

But in the southeastern city of Mariupol, one such humanitarian corridor has already failed, with the  city’s mayor  saying that Russian forces were bombarding the area where some 200,000 people had gathered to leave. If Mariupol falls, it would allow Moscow to create a land corridor to Crimea, which it already controls.

An airsrike has killed at least 21 people, including two children, in the besieged north-eastern city of Sumy. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said that 5,000 civilians were evacuated from the city on Tuesday.

The United Nations said that some two million people have  already fled Ukraine since  Russia launched its invasion.

/TISG

Ix Shen shows situation on the ground in Ukraine with daily IG videos