The 44-year-old wartime leader gave a speech in battle dress.
Kyiv:
President Volodymyr Zelensky told Ukrainians in an emotional speech Wednesday marking 31 years of independence that his country was “reborn” when Russia invaded and would never give up its fight for independence from Moscow’s domination.
In a recorded speech broadcast on the six-month anniversary of Russia’s February 24 invasion, Zelensky said that Ukraine no longer saw the end of the war when the fighting stopped, but when Kyiv finally emerged victorious.
“A new nation appeared in the world at 4 a.m. on February 24. It was not born, but reborn. A nation that neither cried, nor cried nor feared. One that did not run. Did not give up. Up. More Don’t forget,” he said.
The 44-year-old wartime leader delivered a speech in combat uniform in front of central Kyiv’s massive monument to independence from the Russian-dominated Soviet Union in 1991.
Zelensky outlined Ukraine’s tough war stance that opposes any sort of agreement that allows Moscow to lock in territorial gains, which have occupied southern and eastern Ukraine over the past six months.
“We will not sit at the negotiating table out of fear with a gun to our head. The most terrible iron for us is not missiles, planes and tanks, but shackles. Not trenches, but shackles,” he said.
He vowed that Ukraine would regain lost territory in the former industrial Donbass region as well as the peninsula of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
“What is the end of war for us? We used to say: peace. Now we say: victory,” he said.
The Ukrainians prepared for a prolonged war – and a brutal winter of energy shortage – after pushing back Russian forces in what Moscow described as a “special military operation” to prevent the fall of Kyiv.
Western military sources say Russian forces are making little progress in their offensive in Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions, comparing the fighting to the slow, bloody, casual fighting of World War I.
The streets of central Kyiv were unusually empty on Wednesday morning after a dire warning of launching new missile strikes on major Russian cities. An air raid siren sounded in the capital at 0740 GMT.
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