Ukraine's Lady Gaga and her billionaire husband on fighting Putin from their Hampstead mansion
telegraph.co.ukan 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 idea of a Russian invasion.
He had felt a bit silly doing it, as if people might think him a coward, 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.‘So do you ever worry you’ll run out of chairs?’ I ask 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.’ Five months on, we’re standing in one of the living rooms of the Zahoors’ palatial house in Hampstead, north London, absolutely surrounded by chairs.
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