“Dancing With The Stars” pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy shared a series of emotional videos on the situation unfolding in Ukraine, posting video clips from a balcony in Kyiv on Instagram and describing the scene in his home country.

Said Maksim in the first video clip: “I’m in Kyiv, contrary to what I probably should’ve done a while ago. Not that no one saw this coming, but everybody was hoping that the finality of this situation would be averted, that there wasn’t going to be these kind of aggressive measures.”

In a second video, an emotional Chmerkovskiy said: “You know me — I stay strong, and I don’t show it. But I want to go back home. And I realize that I have the way to — I realize that I have a different passport, and my family is far away.”  Maksim shared that he was “about to go into a bomb shelter because s**t’s going down,” before making a plea to Russia: “In 2022’s civilized world, this is not the way we do things. I think the Russians need to get up and actually say something, because no one’s opinion is being heard. This is all one man’s ambition of something, and however convenient it sounds in Moscow, however comfortable you are where you are in Russia, I just don’t think this is the right thing.”

Chmerkovskiy added: “I’m uneasy, I’m very scared … but I do know, at the very least, I have a chance. I have a passport and a way out. A lot of people here do not, and it’s f**king nonsense. I have [had] a f**king incredible pleasure to spend, on the ground, about six months now, and I’ve fell back in love — I never fell out of love, but I know now who these people are. I know who this country is, what it represents, what it stands for. And it’s completely not what is being portrayed to the Russian people in order to justify this invasion.”

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