On February 24, about four in the morning, the Ukrainian actor and pop star Kamaliya Zahoor didn’t know if she was dreaming or if the windows of her bedroom really were rattling.
She had been woken by an explosion. Another followed. The walls of her Kyiv mansion began to shake. Then the phone calls started.
Her friends were telling her the city was under attack. She hadn’t thought it was possible. It was supposed to be a bluff. Her husband had been right to play it safe. He’d flown away with their eight-year-old twins a couple of days earlier, just in case all their friends had been wrong to laugh at the warnings of a Russian invasion.
He had felt a bit silly doing it, as if people might think him a coward or someone prone to overreaction, but they had a house in London and children to protect. As she took the first of many video calls that morning and watched live as missiles rained down on Ukraine – missiles she could hear for herself as she fled to the basement – Kamaliya had no idea what to do.
It’s five months on and we are gathered in one of the many living rooms of the Zahoors’ palatial house in Hampstead, London. “So do you ever worry you’ll run out of chairs?” I quip to Kamaliya’s husband, Mohammad, the gently spoken British-Pakistani steel billionaire everyone just calls Zahoor. “Do you ever worry there’ll suddenly be nowhere to sit?”
“No?” he says, confused. “No, no.”
Standing in the living
