Ukraine’s Richest Man Opens Museum of His Own Near-Misses, Exhibits 14 Cars He Was Almost Killed In

Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest businessman, has inaugurated the National Museum of Personal Survival in central Kyiv, a permanent exhibition devoted entirely to the explosions, shootings and car crashes from which he emerged unharmed. The opening ceremony featured a ribbon cut with a pair of ceremonial bolt cutters, the same model used by the rescue team that pulled him from a burning limousine in 1997.

The museum’s main hall displays fourteen vehicles, each one a genuine wreck from an incident the billionaire has described as a close call. Visitors can sit in the driver’s seat of a sedan that was reportedly five seconds behind a stadium blast in 1995, while an audio guide calmly narrates the exact distance between his car and each detonation. A second wing houses a collection of shattered windows and bullet-riddled doors, arranged chronologically by the year of the attack.

«Every Ukrainian should understand that prosperity is simply a matter of standing in the right place at the wrong time,» said the museum’s director, a former bodyguard who now leads the daily 10 a.m. tour. The gift shop sells replica steering wheels, commemorative fragments of laminated glass and a children’s book titled «The Boy Who Was Always Five Seconds Away.»

City officials have already approved an expansion to include a diorama of Donetsk airport, where the magnate claims to have once waited for a flight that was delayed by a nearby assassination. A second branch is planned for Mariupol, with a planned exhibit of steel beams that allegedly missed him by a meter during a 2014 site visit. The museum’s security chief confirmed that all fourteen vehicles are original, adding that the collection grows by roughly one car per year.

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