Ukraine war: President Zelensky marks the anniversary of Russia’s invasion with a defiant message
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky today marked the anniversary of Russia’s barbaric invasion with a somber message of defiance to his people by vowing to bring Russian “murderers” to justice.
At the dawn of a day of commemorations and challenges, Zelensky tweeted that the Ukrainians had proven “invincible” in what he called “a year of pain, sadness, faith and unity.”
Zelensky promised that Ukraine would win the war this year after a “furious year of invincibility.”
In a defiant video speech, Zelensky recalled the terror unleashed a year ago by the Russian assault, which sparked Europe’s biggest and deadliest war since World War II.
‘Ukraine has inspired the world. Ukraine has united the world,’ Zelensky said, hailing cities that have become synonymous with Russian war crimes such as Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol as ‘capitals of invincibility.’ ‘We will never rest until the Russian murderers face their deserved punishment.’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky today marked the first anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Russia with a somber message of defiance to his people, saying “we will defeat them all.”
In a video released to the media and titled “the year of invincibility”, the 45-year-old recalled how he addressed the Ukrainians a year ago in a hasty statement, as Kiev and the world reeled from the act of war by Russia.
In a defiant video speech, Zelensky recalled the terror unleashed a year ago by the Russian assault, which sparked Europe’s biggest and deadliest war since World War II.
When the first airstrikes hit Ukrainian cities a year ago, hundreds of thousands fled across the border to neighboring countries.
He said that February 24, 2022, the date of the Russian invasion, was “the longest day of our lives.”
‘We survived the first day of the full-scale war. We didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, but we clearly understood that for every tomorrow, you need to fight. And we fight,” he said.
Ukrainians planned memorials, candlelight vigils and other remembrances for their tens of thousands of dead, a toll that is growing all the time as fighting rages in eastern Ukraine in particular.
There were concerns that Russia could launch another barrage of missiles at Ukraine to add even more gloom to the day.
Fortunately, the air raid alarms did not go off overnight in the capital, kyiv, and dawn broke silently.
Still, the government recommended that schools move classes online and office workers were asked to work from home.
Tributes to Ukraine’s resilience flowed in from abroad. The Eiffel Tower in Paris was one of the monuments illuminated with the colors of Ukraine: yellow and blue.
Zelensky said that the Russian assault on February 24, 2022 had been a moment when “millions of us made a decision”.
The Ukrainians did not choose the white flag of surrender, but the blue and yellow one. Not running away, but facing. Resisting and fighting’, his tweet said.
In the year since, the world has watched in horror as Putin’s soldiers fired missiles at apartment buildings, tortured civilians before shooting them to death, and systematically raped women and girls.
Men, women and children – the youngest known victim is a 14-year-old boy – have been executed by Russian soldiers, dumping their bodies into deep channels dug into the ground.
The scale of the suffering and the indiscriminate attacks against men, women and children have caused the death of at least 7,000 civilians and the flight of nearly eight million Ukrainians to countries across Europe.
When the first airstrikes hit Ukrainian cities a year ago, hundreds of thousands fled across the border to neighboring countries. Thousands more had fled in the days before the invasion, fearing the worst.
Emotional scenes at train stations showed fathers bidding a tearful goodbye to their wives and children before returning to fight for Ukraine. Some families have been separated forever, with tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers killed so far.
Those Ukrainians who have stayed in Ukraine have seen their homes and villages razed to the ground and their loved ones killed or injured by Russian missiles.
Ukrainian President Zelensky speaks to the media in the town of Bucha, northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kiev, on April 4, 2022, following the discovery of war crimes.
Emergency workers clear rubble after a Russian rocket hit a multi-story building leaving many people under the rubble in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro on January 14.
A woman cries as she tries to find her son’s body in the rubble of a residential building destroyed during the Russian invasion in the town of Borodianka, Kiev region, Ukraine, on April 9, 2022.
In March of last year, a month into the war, Russian soldiers dropped a series of indiscriminate bombs on civilian areas, leaving death and destruction in their wake.
During a three-month siege of the southern city of Mariupol, Russian forces razed the city, killing hundreds of civilians in missile attacks. The world watched in horror as Russian forces bombed a maternity hospital on March 9, killing a pregnant woman and her baby and injuring at least 17 people.
A week later, Russian planes again launched missiles on civilian areas, this time on the Donetsk Regional Theater in Mariupol, which housed hundreds of civilians and had “children” written on it in large white letters outside. At least a dozen people were killed and dozens more injured in the attack.
Attacks against civilians continue. Last month, on January 14, 2023, a Russian missile attack on an apartment building in the city of Dnipro killed at least 44 people, including five children, and injured 79 people.
And since October, Russian forces have also repeatedly attacked Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, plunging Ukrainian cities into darkness and leaving millions without heat during bitterly cold winter months.
In the first months of the war, Russian forces were forced to withdraw from Ukrainian towns and cities, but as they withdrew, the war crimes they had committed against civilians became apparent.
Since March, mass graves have been filled with the bodies of thousands of civilians, many with their hands tied behind their backs, along with torture chambers uncovered in liberated areas of Ukraine in areas of Ukraine’s Kyiv and Kharkiv regions, including the cities of Bucha, Irpin and Izyum.
Surviving civilians have detailed how Russian soldiers detained them for months and subjected them to electric shocks, mock drowning and beatings.
Horrifying testimonies, including how Russian soldiers gang-raped a 22-year-old Ukrainian mother, sexually abused her husband and made the couple have sex in front of them before raping their four-year-old daughter, have also shown how the Putin’s men have used rape as a weapon of war.
In many cases, Russian soldiers shot or threatened to shoot the women’s husbands as soon as they tried to defend their wives from being raped.
Russian soldiers have also detained more than 20,000 Ukrainian “hostages” and sent them to Russia, Ukraine’s human rights envoy Dmytro Lubinets said last month.
In response, economic and diplomatic fallout has spread around the world.
Western nations are supporting Ukraine militarily, financially, and politically. But China, India and the countries of the global south have proven ambivalent about Western arguments that Ukraine is the front line of the fight for freedom and democracy.