World should continue supporting Ukraine to defeat Russia

Early morning on February 24, 2022 millions of peaceful Ukrainians woke up to explosions, screams of victims and the wailing of ambulances bringing the wounded to the hospitals. The full-scale attack on Ukraine had been launched by the last totalitarian power on the European continent.

Today, we commemorate the fallen heroes among the Ukrainian military and civilians killed by the brutal, unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Russia.

In April 2022, the Kremlin ruler sent his troops to conquer my country. 157,000 war crimes have been committed by Russia. 42,000 civilians have killed and wounded, including almost 3,000 children.

Not a single major object of energy infrastructure has been left intact. And recently, on Valentine’s Day, Russia hit the shelter protecting the world from radiation from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant.

It hit the shelter deliberately, with a high-explosive war-head of the suicide drone.

I firmly believe, that supporting Ukraine in this war would avert further challenges for Europe and the whole world.

So I will quote British philosopher poet and thinker John Donne: “Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.”

Ukraine is willing to achieve peace more than anybody else. But this peace should be based on respect of the UN Charter, the rules of international law, the respect for territorial integrity.

Although Russia started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, its military operation against my country started long before that day. It was February 2014 when Russian troops started the war of aggression against Ukraine in Crimea and the first blood was shed.

Tragically, the first civilian killed in this war was Reshat Ametov, a Ukrainian of Crimean Tatar origin, who held a peaceful protest against the occupation of his homeland.

He was abducted by the Russian undercover agents and later found dead with his body bearing the signs of torture. Decades earlier, the previous Russian dictator Stalin deported hundreds of thousands Crimean Tatars – the indigenous population of Crimea – from their ancestral home.

The repression against people that Russia considers a part of its empire, continues until now.

Kenyan Martin Kimani said, while addressing the United Nations at the brink of the full-scale Russian invasion: “We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.”

The Russian Federation glorifies the Soviet and Tsarist regimes and has taken illegal actions to replay its imperial past. Modern Russia is now trying to copy the strategies and tactics of the Stalinist Russia, to rewrite history and create imaginary threats to justify its attempts to destroy Ukraine, to take it back into its orbit, and threaten Europe and the rest of the world with the new Nazi-style policy of aggression and genocide.

But Ukrainians are optimistic, since the unequivocal support of our partners from all around the globe, from Sweden to Japan, from Iceland to Australia, continues and helps us everyday to save ourselves and the rest of the world from this evil.

Together we stand strong and united as this modern war has once again taught us the importance of unity. It’s unity against the aggressor the saved the world during the WWII. It will save it again in the turbulent times we are all facing today.

Pravednyk is the Ambassador of Ukraine to the Republic of Kenya