Ukrainian President Poroshenko says he was nearly killed in the Luhansk region in 2014
President Petro Poroshenko said that border guards saved his life while he was in the Luhansk region in the spring of 2014.
"Even during my presidential campaign, when I was in Luhansk, just 200 meters from the seized Security Service building at [the] Izvarino and Dovzhansky [checkpoints], in fact, I can say that the border guards, border intelligence simply saved my life,” Poroshenko said during a meeting with border guards in the Kyiv oblast.
The night after his victory in the presidential elections, Poroshenko said that during the pre-election trip to the Luhansk region, an attempt was made to take him hostage, and his car was shot at.
Colonel Serhiy Deyneka, who in 2014 was the commander of the Luhansk border detachment, told LB.ua that he helped Poroshenko with his departure from the Luhansk airport. According to Deyneka, the road leading from the airport to Luhansk was blocked by separatists, so the border guards opened a spare gate and Poroshenko was taken out by service vehicles.
Then, according to Deyneka, a crowd of people in Izvarino threw a packet of flour onto Poroshenko, and the colonel “by some miracle pulled [him] out”.
The border guard also claimed that the separatists planned to seize Poroshenko at the exit from Izvarino and block the roads. Deyneka recommended sending Poroshenko's escort vehicles along those roads, sat the presidential candidate and two of his guards in two Land Rover Defender cars owned by the State Border Guard Service, and drove them for an hour and a half along the state border line. Poroshenko got into the Luhansk airport once more via a spare gate, thanks to the border guards.