Mariëlle Tweebeeke has a serious interview request pending with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Nieuwsuur star would like to talk to him about the war he is waging in Ukraine.
Last week it was quite a surprise: Nieuwsuur suddenly announced that Mariëlle Tweebeeke had held an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It was an exciting conversation, because he reacted very aroused to questions about corruption in his country. “Have you lived here, Marielle?”
Also to Putin?
Mariëlle managed to captivate about half a million viewers last Friday with her Nieuwsuur interview with Zelensky. She looked back on it yesterday at the talk show table of Op1.
Op1 host Hugo Logtenberg curious: “Is this same request out to the Kremlin for Mr Putin?”
Mariëlle laughs: “I have more colleagues who said that. I said, ‘Well, guys, I’m in the area, I’ll be driving in a minute. Arrange it!’”
‘We are working on it’
Hugo: “No, but seriously?”
Mariëlle: “No, it’s turned off. We have a fantastic editor who also brought in Zelensky, Miriam Lavalette, who is a master at that, so we’re working on that.”
Hugo: “We’re looking forward to that, aren’t we? Mariëlle Tweebeeke entered Putin with the knife between her teeth.”
Travel to Ukraine
The trip to Kiev was quite tough, according to Mariëlle. “You fly to Krakow, then you go by car to Lviv and then you are waiting for hours at the border. We waited there for four hours, so I arrived in Lviv at two in the morning. The next day we took the train to Kiev for nine hours and we got the location early in the morning.”
Only then did the war come close for Mariëlle. “At first you don’t see anything in Kiev. Then you think: I don’t really see anything of that war. And then you suddenly come to that place with all kinds of roadblocks, sandbags and all kinds of soldiers.”
In a van
It was quite an experience, according to the presenter. “We had a Ukrainian cameraman and a fixer and with all the stuff in a van we went to that location.”
She continues: “Then we had to put all the stuff in a van of theirs and we were driven through all those roadblocks and then you come to that government building. We were completely checked there, had to deliver everything and then we could get started.”
Interview
You can view the result below: