The 44-year-old wartime leader delivered a speech in battle fatigue.
Kyiv:
President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Ukrainian people in a moving speech marking 31 years of independence on Wednesday that their country was “reborn” when Russia invaded and that they would never give up the war. freedom from Moscow’s domination.
In a recorded speech broadcast on the sixth anniversary of Russia’s invasion on February 24, Zelensky said that Ukraine no longer sees the war ending when the fighting stops but when Kyiv is finally won. .
“A new nation appeared in the world at 4 a.m. on February 24. It was not born, but reborn. A nation that does not cry, scream or fear. A country that does not flee. Don’t give And don’t forget,” he said.
The 44-year-old wartime leader delivered a battle-weary speech in front of the towering monument in central Kyiv to independence from the Russian-dominated Soviet Union, which fell apart in 1991.
Zelensky stressed Ukraine’s hardline war stance opposes any form of compromise that would allow Moscow to lock in territorial interests, including lands in southern and eastern Ukraine captured in the past six months. .
He said: “We will not sit down to the negotiating table out of fear, with a gun to our heads. For us, the most terrible irony is not missiles, planes and tanks, but tanks. shackles. Not trenches, but shackles.”
He vowed that Ukraine would regain lost territory in the eastern Donbas industrial region as well as the Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
“What for us is the end of war? We used to say: peace. Now we say: victory,” he said.
The Ukrainians are bracing for a protracted war – and a brutal winter of energy shortages – after repelling Russian forces at the start of what Moscow describes as a “special military operation” and stopping the fall of Kyiv.
Western military sources now say that Russian forces are making little progress in their offensive in the eastern and southern territories of Ukraine, comparing the skirmish to the slow fighting, bloody and attrition during World War I.
The streets of central Kyiv were unusually deserted on Wednesday morning after days of dire warnings that Russia could launch new missile attacks on major cities. An air raid siren sounded in the capital at 0740 GMT.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
