So let's start our recording.

And my first question for our guest would be dear Xenia, how the war had started for

you personally?

And have you ever expected it will be so hard?

Thank you, Anastasia.

Thank you, dear colleagues.

I can see not only colleagues, but friends here.

And thank you for introducing myself and introducing all that effort that I'm doing now on the

front line in education, in science, diplomacy.

This is now is really very important.

Speaking more precisely on your question, for me personally and for my family personally,

this war was not expected.

It was really unexpected.

I just woke up at five o'clock with the messages and telephone calls.

I found that my son was sleeping in the nearest room.

I started reading all that messages from our rectorate because everybody knew about all

that issues that we started.

And my morning started with the coordination of our faculties, institutes, because we have

up to 40 structural units of our universities.

And they were all over Kiev and all over Ukraine.

And we were trying to coordinate to have a call of them where they are.

They should be safe.

In the first day, at 10 o'clock, we had our very big coordinated meeting in the red building.

So you can see here on that slide, this is our main building.

We are very honored of that.

This is the visiting card, not only of our university, because this is a visiting card

of Kiev and Ukraine as well, because this is a very old historical building.

So with that building, at 10 o'clock in the morning, we gathered within the heads of our

old structural units.

And we were deciding on the ways of evacuation.

We raised the question of the migration of our persons, because while we were coordinating

that since the first five hours, you know that it was a massive exodus of families,

people, and so you can imagine that I'm even personally, I was also thinking about the

security of my son.

He's under 15.

So I was really very, very extremely, extremely nervous on how to make the situation safety,

because we heard all the issues.

On the second day of the full invasion, from my personal house, I saw the missile that

was bombed in the center of Kiev.

I saw it with my eyes.

You know, from all that day, even I don't want even to remember all that emotions, because

this is a mix of different emotions.

From one point of view, you are thinking as a manager, as a leader of your university,

and you should be strong and resilient to have an example for your staff or your colleagues.

But at the same time, you are a woman and I'm a woman.

I'm the mother.

And from another point of view, it's the feeling of fear.

But we all overcame this feeling of fear.

And we were thinking only as the coordinators, as leaders, and we were thinking in a very

straight way how to save persons.