‘I lived between two wars’: Israel’s Ukraine envoy on Kyiv, Zelensky and his son wounded in Gaza

It was 5 a.m. on February 24, 2022. Michael Brodsky, Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine, was sleeping in a hotel in Lviv, nearly 2,000 kilometers from what had until then been considered Europe’s vulnerable eastern frontier. He woke, looked at his phone and could hardly believe what he was seeing. Kyiv was being bombed. Russia was attacking on several fronts at once. Then, suddenly, an air raid siren sounded in Lviv too, at what had seemed an impossible distance from the front. “You hear explosions and you don’t know what to do,” Brodsky recalls. “In Israel, we’re trained for this. In Ukraine, it was a completely different reality.” That was, in effect, when Brodsky’s real term as ambassador began. Not the one he had expected when he arrived in Kyiv in August 2021, six months before a full-scale war still seemed to many like a theoretical possibility, but an entirely different posting: five years as ambassador to a country that spent most of them at war. “Nothing in your diplomatic career prepares you for that,” he says. “It is a permanent state of emergency.” Now, as he finishes his posting and returns home, Brodsky is opening up about the moments when he was afraid his relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his circle the anger he faced from Ukrainians who felt abandoned by Israel and the most personal and difficult moment of all, when Israel’s ambassador in Kyiv learned that his son had been seriously wounded, not in Ukraine but in Khan Younis. The phone call that came twice There is an almost unbearable symmetry to Brodsky’s story. Brodsky, 54, was born in St. Petersburg and immigrated to Israel at 18. He joined the Foreign Ministry at 30. He and his wife have three sons, now 27, 24 and 22. His youngest still serves in the military, in an Israeli Air Force filming unit. His middle son, Eyal, served in the elite Maglan unit and was seriously wounded in fighting in Khan Younis in February 2024. The injury was reported at the time after Eyal Brodsky was hit by shrapnel and underwent surgery. “We received the news and immediately flew to Israel,” Brodsky says. But the way he learned what had happened illustrated the strange gap between his official role and private life. “The Defense Ministry first informs the embassy security officer, who is supposed to inform the ambassador. The security officer came to our hotel in Lviv, but a minute before he arrived, our eldest son had already called and told us about Eyal, that he had been wounded and that we could relax a little. They were bringing him to Shaare Zedek, and he was going into surgery to remove the shrapnel.” The next day Brodsky and his wife, artist Regina Shafir, flew to Israel and reached the hospital after the operation had already ended. He stayed beside his son for two weeks before returning to his post in Kyiv. His wife remained in Israel and, apart from visits, did not return. It was the moment when Brodsky’s two wars, one in which he served as a diplomat and another that struck his own family, merged into one almost impossible reality. “I didn’t feel a difference,” he says of the period after October 7, when air raid sirens were sounding in both Ukraine and Israel. “I came from a country where there were sirens every few hours, and here there were sirens too. I didn’t feel torn. I felt like an ambassador living between two wars.” Back to that morning of February 24. The embassy had evacuated Kyiv for Lviv three days before the invasion, even though almost no one believed a full-scale war was actually about to begin. “Almost nobody believed there would be an all-out attack,” Brodsky says. “Everyone thought that even if there was an attack, it would be limited to the east of the country. And when the Russians attacked across the entire country at full force, I remember thinking: This will be over in a few days, and Ukraine will surrender. “I wasn’t the only one. Ninety-nine percent of the foreigners in Ukraine thought the same. So did Israeli security officials.” In the parking lot of the Lviv hotel, between sirens and explosions, Brodsky’s phone did not stop ringing. “I didn’t have a single call without another call waiting. It went on for weeks.” There were worried families, officials in Jerusalem and Israelis who had somehow obtained the ambassador’s personal number. “People were calling and screaming, ‘Save us.’ People were trapped not only in Kyiv but in the east of the country, including Israeli students studying in Kharkiv. ‘They’re shooting at us and we don’t know how to get out. You’re the official representatives of the state.’” In the first hours, Brodsky admits, his team was almost completely helpless. Within days, however, working with the local Jewish community, they established a transportation network that brought thousands of people to the Polish border, not only Israelis and not only Jews. “We didn’t select people,” he stresses. “We evacuated Ukrainians, non-Israeli Arabs, citizens of Arab and Muslim countries who were stranded at the border. They didn’t care that we were Israelis. They asked us to save them, and we didn’t say no. We even evacuated Egyptian students.” For the following three years, his life was divided between Kyiv and Poland, a week or two here and a week or two there, working in rotations so that somebody from the team would always be present. Only at the beginning of 2025 did he decide, in coordination with the Foreign Ministry, to return the entire team permanently to Kyiv. Asked whether he feared for his life, Brodsky hesitates before answering. “Not more than everyone else around me. There was never a specific threat against us, but we were in very dangerous situations.” In recent months, he says, Russian attacks on Kyiv have intensified. “There are nights when the capital is attacked by dozens of ballistic missiles and hundreds of drones. You hear explosions, and you don’t always have time to get to a shelter, and in many cases there isn’t even a shelter.” His apartment building had an underground parking garage. “But it wouldn’t withstand a direct hit from a ballistic missile, and I didn’t see much point in going down because, simply, I wouldn’t have enough time. Usually the boom comes a minute after the siren. But sometimes it’s the other way around: You hear the boom, and only then does the siren start.” One meeting with Zelensky In his five years in office, Brodsky says he met Zelenskyy face to face only once, when he presented his diplomatic credentials before the war. “He was very relaxed, very friendly. A warm person, an emotional person who entered politics without any previous experience,” Brodsky recalls. “Today, if you can make the comparison, he is more of a Ukrainian patriot than a Jew, and that is also how the public sees him. On the other hand, he never hides his Jewish background. He always talks about it. But for us it doesn’t really matter. We see him first and foremost as the president of Ukraine.” What does Zelenskyy really want from Israel? Brodsky’s answer is direct. “There is no difference between what he says publicly and what he says behind closed doors. He wants defense cooperation, air-defense systems and weapons of every kind. He doesn’t see the war ending soon, and therefore he needs to strengthen Ukrainian security in every possible way.” Beyond weapons, Brodsky says, Zelenskyy also wants Israel to advocate for Ukraine in Washington, recognizing what he sees as Jerusalem’s unusual access to the American political system. When Brodsky is reminded of the tense Oval Office confrontation involving Zelenskyy, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, he does not hide his reaction. “It hurt me too. But things have changed since then. Ukraine has managed to prove its military capabilities. It developed advanced technologies in drones and counter-drone defense, technologies it is already exporting around the world, including to Gulf countries.” So why doesn’t Israel make greater use of that knowledge? “We have knowledge and experience of our own, in some cases even more advanced. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t learn from the Ukrainian experience. “A situation in which the enemy attacks you with hundreds of drones can happen to us too. We are not there yet, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen soon.” He describes the Ukraine war as an unsettling mixture of eras. “It is World War I and World War III at the same time. On one hand, it is trench warfare in which the front barely moves for years. On the other, it is a war based on innovative technology, especially drones. It is a real game changer.” Not every conversation Brodsky had with Ukrainian officials was warm. “I had some very difficult conversations,” he admits. “I felt that they not only didn’t understand, they didn’t want to understand.” He says he does not resent them for it. “When your house is burning, you don’t think about the neighbors. You think about yourself first.” Brodsky attributes much of the tension to Zelenskyy’s own disappointment with Israel. “Being an emotional person, I think for him it was personal too. As a Jew, he expected Israel to immediately stand by them. He ignored the constraints we faced.” Those constraints, Brodsky says, were very concrete: Russia’s military presence near Israel’s border with Syria and Israel’s perceived need to preserve a channel of communication with Moscow to reduce the risk of a direct clash in Syrian airspace. “We knew for certain that if we crossed a red line there would be a Russian response. The potential to harm Israel was enormous, and Russia knew how to exploit it, for example by supplying weapons and intelligence to our enemies.” The conclusion Brodsky returns to repeatedly is that, in his view, Israel ultimately chose the right policy. “We found the right balance between our existential interest, maintaining a channel of dialogue with Russia, and our moral commitment to a democratic country under attack.” He is particularly proud of Israel’s humanitarian assistance: an Israeli field hospital established in Ukraine, wounded Ukrainians treated in Israel, children with cancer brought for treatment and training provided to Ukrainian specialists in psychological care for post-traumatic stress. “That is what ultimately managed to preserve the relationship as a close one, despite the disappointment.” “I am proud of what we did on the humanitarian side, of the assistance we provided. It was important, value-based assistance that helped restore our image, which was undoubtedly damaged at the start of the war because we did not provide Ukraine with what it demanded from us” Despite the diplomatic tensions, Brodsky says his encounters with ordinary Ukrainians on the streets of Kyiv told a different story. “A lot of people recognized me on the street, and I felt a lot of warmth and sympathy. ‘Thank you for treating our wounded. Thank you for taking in sick children. Thank you for the doctors you sent.’ “Nobody mentioned that we hadn’t supplied weapons. That was always the first question in media interviews, but on the street I never felt any hostility. On the contrary, only sympathy.” Brodsky’s personal history, as someone born in what was then the Soviet Union, might have complicated his role as Israel’s ambassador to a country fighting Russia. “For some Ukrainians, it was a problem,” he says candidly, “even though I was never a Russian citizen, not for one day of my life.” His way of dispelling that suspicion was both symbolic and personal: he learned Ukrainian and even gave interviews to local media in the language. “They appreciated it very much.” No anti-Israel demonstrations There is one moment in the conversation when Brodsky is asked how a country already fighting its own war reacted when Israel was struck by the October 7 attack. “Something amazed me,” he recalls. “On October 7, every Ukrainian