Former Miss Ukraine Veronika Didusenko is speaking out about how the United States can help her home country amid the ongoing Russian invasion.
Didusenko, 26, who was crowned Miss Ukraine in 2018 but was later disqualified after pageant organizers learned she was a divorced mom, shared her heartbreak with Extra over the conflict.
She was able to flee the country following the invasion with her 7-year-old son, telling Extra host Billy Bush of the “dangerous” ordeal, “The Russian military forces started to bomb in Kyiv at 5 in in the morning … We packed very fast and we took our car. We just left. We were driving for like 18 hours… the military cars on the one side and the passengers on the other side. So it will end with Russian helicopters flying over our heads. It was really scary.”
Didusenko is currently in L.A. Her son is in Switzerland with his friends, and Didusenko plans to reunite with him this week.
She also called for President Biden to continue to provide aid for Ukraine, calling for “weapons, supplies.” “We need more sanctions against Russia,” Didusenko said.
“We want peaceful citizens to be able to leave the war zone. So that is [the] number one priority right now to save people’s lives in Ukraine,” she said. “The whole Ukraine is united right now … We believe that we can resist and we can fight back. We will fight and win in this war. And we are staying for our freedom. And for our land.”
Didusenko is joined by others who are calling for aid to Ukraine. Maksim Chmerkovskiy, a professional dancer on Dancing With the Stars who grew up in Ukraine, documented his experience in Kyiv just as the invasion began. Though he has since returned to America, he plans to return to Europe to “join the efforts on the ground.”
Sean Penn, who is making a documentary about the ongoing conflict, recently spoke to Anderson Cooper and called for America to do more for Ukraine, for the sake of not just the people of the country, but democracy around the globe.
“[Ukrainians] are fighting for their lives, and will continue to fight for their lives, and I feel that we as Americans are plummeting off a cliff — the top of which is our flag which represents all of our dreams and the best of our dreams,” he explained. “We’re plummeting where it will go out of our sight. I don’t know the answers. I don’t know if ‘no fly zones’ will create a nuclear war. I do know that we have to invest everything that we have to support the Ukrainian people, and support President Zelensky, or we will not have a memory of what America used to be.”
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