point along the way, i also sign off property. it is a busy time? it is a busy week, yeah. and we will get very excited about your two scoops coming up. i am assuming you are not going to tell me anything about them now? no, i m not. ok, more from you, emma, in a bit, but first let s turn to ukraine and the bbc s world affairs editor, john simpson, he went to kyiv to interview president zelensky, but found himself back on our screens reporting on monday s bombardment by the russians. john simpson was of course a fixture of bbc coverage from the world s hotspots for decades. earlier today, he crossed the border into poland and i asked him what it s like to be back. a bit like the old days, really. to us, too! i mean, i do miss these kind of things. not because i have. people say oh, it is the adrenaline kick and all that kind of slightly boring stuff. actually, it s really interesting to be in a place where important things are happening and to see them
you ve run the wires out through the doors and into your ear. he had, i think it was rather a large earpiece, a lot larger than mine. yours was very discreet, i didn t notice your one. did you feel a responsibility, you always feel a responsibility to get the interview right, but given the escalation, you have seen what it was? there were two or three important issues that you couldn t walk away from an interview with president zelensky without asking him. the first one was, did he think that there was going to be a nuclear attack? no question more important than that, really. and for his own reasons, of course, he has got to really keep our attention on the russian threat. so he wasn t going to say, no, i don t think there will be one,
for yourself and to know what is really going on. as opposed to, you know, what everybody thinks or what you read, whatever. that is why it is so interesting and that s what takes you back to these places again and again. of course. in a bit, i would like to come back to your assessment of what is happening in ukraine and the wider continent, but let s go back to your interview with president zelensky which went out on friday, and was the point of your visit as i understand it. take us through the circumstances, give us a sense of where it was recorded and the security around him? we did it in the presidential palace. but it was very much kind of wartime conditions. there were little sandbag emplacements along the corridors and up the main staircases and so on.
have been so divisive, things i have covered. you know, the invasion of iraq in particular, but also a variety of other things where large numbers of people back home did not agree with, with the whole idea. in this case, it is different. there are people who are very strongly against what president zelensky stands for and what ukraine stands for, but there aren t that many of them. i think it really is important not to go along with that feeling, you know, we are all on your side, mr zelensky. that doesn t feel good to me. that was the bbc s world affairs editor, john simpson, talking to me from the polish ukrainian border. you can see the full interview on the bbc iplayer.
wartime interview. no natural light because the windows were all sandbagged up. and it felt very. very tense and very, very. very tense and very, very exciting and interesting. and it was noticeable at the start of the interview president zelensky answered in english before switching to ukrainian, why was that? he made a bit ukrainian, why was that? he: made a bit of a mistake a few days earlier. the beginning of last week, something like that. when he seemed to say at some australian conference, again, not quite clear why he would have done that, but he seemed to say that the west should stage pre emptive strikes against russia to stop it using nuclear weapons. of course, everybody immediately assumed that meant he was calling for