In US visit, Ukraine’s first lady pleads for air defense systems
WASHINGTON — Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska appealed face to face to U.S. lawmakers Wednesday for more air defense systems to help guard her country’s skies, in an unsparing Capitol address showing the bloodstained baby strollers and small crumpled bodies left by Russian bombardment.
“We want no more airstrikes. No more missile strikes,” Zelenska told Republican and Democratic congressional members in a speech capping a visit to Washington in the stead of her husband, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “Is this too much to ask for?”
“This is what I’m asking for and what my husband is asking for,” she said from the stage of the Capitol’s congressional auditorium, showing photos of carnage on an overhead screen that had lawmakers shaking their heads. “As parents.”
Zelenska’s Washington meetings with first lady Jill Biden, President Joe Biden and other top administration figures have been among her highest-profile events of the war. She spent the first two months after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February in seclusion with her two children, for safety.
Her husband has remained in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, through the war. He made a powerful address by video to lawmakers in the same auditorium earlier this year, drawing repeated standing ovations.
Zelenska repeatedly thanked lawmakers and Biden for the billions of dollars in arms and other support the U.S. has delivered to Ukraine. She called for more air defense systems to help repel unending Russian missile and airstrikes that have killed countless civilians and leveled some Ukrainian cities.
She showed photographs of a smiling, paint-smeared 4-year-old girl, Liza Dmytrieva, whom the first lady had happened to meet before Christmas. The screen next showed an overturned baby carriage with blood caking on the sidewalk beneath it, after an airstrike killed the girl and badly injured her mother last week.
Zelenska showed and told the stories of other Ukrainian children killed or maimed by airstrikes or shot to death.
“Our family represents the whole world for us, and we do everything to preserve it,” Zelenska said. “We cry when we cannot save it. And we remain completely broken when our world is destroyed by war.”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces on Wednesday damaged a bridge that is key to supplying Russian troops in southern Ukraine, where Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said Moscow will consolidate its territorial gains.
Lavrov told state-controlled RT television and the RIA Novosti news agency that Russia plans to retain control over broader areas beyond eastern Ukraine, including the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in the south, and will make more gains elsewhere.
Lavrov’s remarks and the Ukrainian missile attack on the strategically important Kherson region bridge indicated the nearly five-month war could broaden after unfolding mostly in eastern Ukraine since April.