“Dancing With The Stars” performer Maksim Chmerkovskiy detailed his “traumatizing” escape from Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion in a series of Instagram stories on Monday.
The Ukrainian American dancer revealed he was on a packed, “sweaty and claustrophobic” train to Warsaw in Poland.
“I’m a big man with nothing but a backpack it’s TRAUMATIZING,” he wrote.
The moment that “finally broke” the Odesa-born dancer who immigrated to America in 1994, though, was seeing a young boy “hysterically crying and not wanting to let go of his father,” he said.
Per Chmerkovskiy, who was in Ukraine working on the reality series “World of Dance UA,” the son told his father: “If you stay I want to stay too because if they kill you I won’t be able to help.”
In later stories, he revealed he was at a train station some 30 minutes from the Polish border, waiting for the wheels on the locomotive to be changed for Poland’s rail network.
