Ukrainian American celebrity Maksim Chmerkovskiy is posting updates from a Kyiv bomb shelter as the Russian invasion continues.
“The situation is pretty dire,” he said in a video Friday.
Chmerkovskiy, 42, who rose to fame as a dancing pro and competitor on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars,” has called Fort Lee home. He was born in Odessa, Ukraine and came to New York with his family in 1994. The Latin-ballroom dancing champion is also a judge on “Dancing with the Stars Ukraine.”
While Chmerkovskiy said he is safe, dancers who he recently judged in competition are now picking up weapons and risking their lives to defend their country, he said.
The Russian conflict in Ukraine stirred memories of his trauma from the ’90s, he said, when he always felt on edge before his family left Eastern Europe.
“Please speak and post about all of this, so talking resumes and shooting stops!” he told his 921,000 Instagram followers.
Chmerkovskiy and his brother, fellow “Dancing with the Stars” champion Val (Valentin) Chmerkovskiy (who won the competition twice; Maksim won in 2014), and their father, Aleksandr “Sasha” Chmerkovskiy, own the Dance with Me chain of dance studios, which has locations in Fort Lee and Glen Rock.
When Maksim and Val were growing up, the family had dance studios in Ridgewood and Saddle Brook.
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Though Chmerkovskiy said he wanted to depart Ukraine and return to his family in the United States, he is staying put for now.
“I’m not currently trying to leave,” he said in a video posted to Instagram. “I’m staying here. I’m gonna do my best to make sure I’m safe as possible but I’m not moving towards the border. I heard it’s not safe. Unfortunately some of my friends are right now on the route, on the road to (the) Polish border. But they’re also reporting that it’s quite dangerous.”
Chmerkovskiy said he would continue to update his followers. He posted his first video about the situation Thursday, standing on a balcony in Kyiv.
“Contrary to what I should’ve probably done a while ago, but again, everybody has sources and resources and I have mine and I trust my sources and no one saw this coming,” Chmerkovskiy said. “Not that no one saw this coming, but everyone was hoping that the finality of the situation would be averted … that it’s not going to be this kind of aggression, this kind of aggressive measures.”
As he said this, a siren wailed in the background.
Chmerkovskiy also shared video of families leaving the city with suitcases.
Initially, he talked about knowing he could eventually leave because of the nature of his passport.
“Honestly, I’m getting really emotional, it’s been a little difficult,” he said in another video. “You know me, I stay strong and I don’t show it, but I wanna go back home.”
He wiped tears from his eyes.
“I realize that I have the way to, you know?” Chmerkovskiy continued. “I realize that I have a different passport and my family is far away and what I’m realizing is that my friends, who kids are here, whose moms, dads are here and elderly people are here, that they can’t just escape, you know?”
From there, he addressed his Russian followers and asked them to speak out, however “comfortable” they are in their position, be it Moscow or elsewhere in the country.
“Dear Russians, you know me,” Chmerkovskiy said. “And I know there’s a lot of people currently in Russia that are watching this that are watching the news and hearing the propaganda and hearing this complete nonsense that’s been talked about. I am not at this point someone who is pleading for someone else’s safety from a far distance, from a safe distance. I’m somebody who is about to go to a bomb shelter because sh-t’s going down.
The celebrity dancer had been filming the dance competition series “World of Dance” in Ukraine. He said he had been in the country six months when the Russian invasion began.
“I think that in 2022 civilized world, this is not the way we do things, and I think that as a powerful, forward-thinking nation, not a third world kind of country, I think the Russians need to get up and actually say something because no one’s opinion is being heard,” he said. “This is all one man’s ambition.”
The TV personality said he stood with his native country.
“WAR is NEVER an answer,” he said in one Instagram post. “I will never be the same. This is stressful and I’m getting old feelings back, like I’ve done this before. This does feel like the way it was when and why we left in the 90s. Like my old PTSD I’ve finally fixed is coming back. I literally only just forgot about those ‘always on the edge’ feelings and actually started worrying about things like bbq grills. I’m crying as I’m typing this because all man deserves to worry about ‘bbq grills’ and not f–king war. Hug your loved ones.”
“Please pray for my husband Maks,” Chmerkovskiy’s wife, fellow “Dancing with the Stars” champ Peta Murgatroyd, said in an Instagram post.
“I don’t usually ask these things from my social media network, however today is extremely hard and the next few will be even harder,” said Murgatroyd, 35.
Chmerkovskiy and Murgatroyd got married in 2017 and have a 5-year-old son, Shai.
Valentin Chmerkovskiy, 35, also addressed his brother’s status in Ukraine.
“My parents fled this country for this exact reason,” he said in a post to his one million followers on Instagram. “Not because it wasn’t good to them, but because their kids would see war eventually. It’s a cruel irony that 28 years later my brother is in a bomb shelter in Kiev.
“If they hadn’t left I would be on the front lines defending my home right now,” Val Chmerkovskiy continued.
“And the most heartbreaking thing of all I would be either killing or dying at the hands of my fellow brothers. The Russian people don’t want this!! We stood by each other(’s) side. We loved and celebrated one another. I speak Russian yes but make no mistake about it, I am a proud Ukrainian and now the world will finally know the difference. Slava Ukraini all day every day! And to all my Russian friends this might be the best and only time to stand up to your dictator.”
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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.