President Zelensky said his nine-year-old son was struggling with not having ‘warm moments’ with his father during the conflict in Ukraine.

Since the beginning of the war Zelensky has often been far from his own family.

Zelensky then shared the situation of his boy to Survival expert Bear Grylls when he travelled through Ukraine to meet Zelensky in Kyiv in November 2022, for an interview broadcast on Channel 4.

He told Grylls in an interview broadcast that his then nine-year-old son, Kyrylo, was finding it difficult to be separated from his father.

President Zelensky said: ‘Sometimes, I have four to six hours to be with them [his family]. It’s very hard for my son, because you know, this age, so for him it’s a really tough situation because he needs father and we don’t have enough warm moments.

The Ukrainian leader shares two children with his wife Olena, who he met when he was 17, son Kyrylo and daughter Oleksandra, 18.

The Ukrainian leader also said Russian soldiers had raped children in front of their parents and that thousands of children had been ‘deported’ to Russia from occupied territories.

He described the first day of the full-scale invasion as the ‘hardest moment’ in the fighting so far and said that some officials hadn’t believed that there would be an invasion until the very last minute.