‘Prove that you are with us’
ZELENSKY APPEALS TO WEST NOT TO STAND BY AS UKRAINE IS DESTROYED
President wins standing ovations in parliaments across the world.
When rallying British MPs, he reaches for Churchill. When addressing the US Congress, he invokes Pearl Harbour. When beamed into the Bundestag, he conjures the threat of a new Wall in Europe.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has won standing ovations in parliaments across the West with a series of impassioned addresses from wartime Kyiv. We look back at the standout moments in his virtual world tour, ahead of his speeches to French and Japanese lawmakers yesterday.
‘Prove you are with us’
On 1 March, less than a week into the war, a haggard-looking Zelensky addresses the European Parliament. The 44-year-old former TV actor frames the fight against Russia as a struggle to defend the European ideals for which Ukrainians staged two revolutions in the past two decades.
“Prove you are with us,” he tells MEPs. “Prove you are not abandoning us and you are really Europeans,” he said, a day after requesting fast-track EU membership for Ukraine.
‘We will fight on the shores’
On 8 March, as the number of Ukrainians fleeing the fighting tops two million, he invoked the wartime defiance of British prime minister Winston Churchill in 1940 in the face of Nazi German advances, pledging a fight to the end. “We will fight in the forests, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets,” he told the UK’s House of Commons.
‘Please close the sky’
On 15 March, as residential neighbourhoods in Kyiv come under attack, he asked MPs in Canada, the country with the world’s second-largest Ukrainian diaspora, to imagine their cities and children being bombed. “Please close the sky,” he implored Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, calling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
‘Remember Pearl Harbour’
On 16 March, he brings members of the US Congress to their feet with a rousing speech comparing the bombardment of Ukrainian cities to the attack on Pearl Harbour that drew the US into World War II. As Ukraine mourns 10 people killed queueing for bread in the city of Chernihiv, Zelensky likened the Russian invasion to the 11 September, 2001 terror attacks in the US, “when evil tried to turn your cities... into battlefields”.
‘Tear down this Wall’
One of his most powerful speeches was to MPs in Germany on 17 March, as a theatre accommodating hundreds of civilians in Mariupol was reduced to rubble. Zelensky warned that Russia was erecting a new “wall” in Europe between “freedom and bondage” and called on German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to tear it down.
‘Final solution’
But Zelensky, who is Jewish,
draws criticism in Israel after a speech to the Knesset on 20 March comparing the Russian invasion to the Holocaust. Urging Israel, which has not joined in Western sanctions against Russia, to step up for Ukraine, he declared: “Ukraine made the choice to save Jews 80 years ago.”
He was rebuked by Israeli
Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel, who said part of the genocide of Europe’s Jews took place in Ukraine.
‘Freeze their yachts’
On 22 March, he told MPs in Italy not to be a playground for Russia’s elite. “Don’t welcome them. Freeze their properties, their accounts, their yachts.” –