“Dancing With the Stars” alum Maksim Chmerkovskiy is now in Poland after what he described as a “traumatizing” trip over 31 hours without sleep.
Chmerkovskiy, who was born in Ukraine, said Monday that he would be fleeing the country and making the journey to the Polish border after revealing that he had been arrested and then released by Russian forces. And in his latest Instagram story over the last 24 hours, he described the overcrowded conditions on trains as he and dozens of others tried to make it out of the country.
“Long story but all I can say now is that I’m a big man with nothing but a backpack, [but] it’s traumatizing. Currently I’m in a cabin with four adults and seven kids (ages 2-11), which usually is only occupied by a maximum of three people,” he wrote late Monday. “Walkways are packed. People everywhere. It’s sweaty and claustrophobic.”
When he was just 30 minutes away from the Polish border, Chmerkovskiy filmed another video to explain that he was waiting at a train station while the train was forced to stop to change its wheels (“can’t make this up”).
He added in a separate post that the hardest thing he had to witness was an 8-year-old boy crying “hysterically” and clinging to his father. “‘If you stay I want to stay too because if they kill you I won’t be able to help,’” he recalled the boy saying.
Though he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, another “Dancing With the Stars” alum, Peta Murgatroyd, and their 5-year-old son, Chmerkovskiy, who is a U.S. citizen, was in Kyiv filming a project called “World of Dance UA” when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.
See some of his Instagram posts via his Insta Story below:
