It been a year since the start of an all-out war waged by Russia against a sovereign and independent Ukraine. Eight years prior, we resisted Russia’s aggression and its occupation of the Crimea and Donbas. We held back in every way the attempts of a further occupation of Ukraine, both in the warzone and at the negotiation table, when they promised us Donbas in exchange for abandoning the foreign policy course aimed at integrating into the family of European nations.
In the best tradition of the Hitlerian Fascism, on 24 February 2022, without any warning or a declaration of war, Russian bombs and missiles started to strike peaceful Ukrainian cities and villages. In the first few hours, the entire civilized world, even the Ukrainians, remembering the horrors of World War II, couldn’t comprehend that humanity was returning to the realities of a horrific and senseless concept known as war.
After the first few months of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, it turned out that the entire Ukrainian people had risen against Putin’s caprices. This is why for nearly a year Russia has not been fighting against a “regime”, but has instead been committing a genocide against the entire Ukrainian people – its destruction as nation. Today’s actions of Russian troops in Ukraine constitute the largest-scale ethnic destruction an of entire nation post-World World II.
The incumbent Russian authorities negate the right of Ukrainians to life, culture, language, and the very existence of Ukraine as a state. Tens, perhaps even thousands of civilians have become the victims of the occupier – in Mariupol alone, over 87,000 civilians, who were simply not allowed to leave the city, have been killed or are missing. Every day, the peaceful citizens of Ukraine die due to shelling in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Kharkiv, and other cities and villages.
The Russian authorities have not been able to decide for almost a year what the goals are of this tragedy. Somewhere in the Moscow bunkers, they have been operating with notions like “demilitarization” and “denazification”, incomprehensible to us. They expected that the Ukrainians would greet the occupiers with flowers on the squares and cities of their cities and destroy “the hated Nazi regime”, but it has turned out that Russia’s own view of building its vertical of power behind the shields and batons of numerous members of the National Guard and police officers protecting the dictatorship regime and putting fear into their own people does not work in Ukraine.
Furthermore, it has turned out that it is possible to frighten their own citizens by the mythical plans of the Ukrainian attack against Russia and justify the Russian aggression by protecting the Ukrainian population who speak the Russian language from the Nazis, satanists, and such like. But imagine protecting the population who speak Serbian, English, or German by killing the citizens of another country. Do find me an international definition of the term “the population that does not speak the Russian language”, and “a citizen that does speak the Russian language”. So, who is Russia protecting? Because of whom and what is it saving the lives of thousand of citizens who know and use the Russian language? Therefore, now there is a reason for all those who want to learn Russian to consider it carefully. Will they not eventually become dangerous to their own state? Will this not be an excuse for a possibility of Russian bombs and missiles attacking them, as they have done in Mariupol, Kherson, Melitopol, and Bakhmut
Despite all the international acts and common sense, Russia has been recruiting murderers, robbers, and rapists, and organizing terrorist organizations who are already used to looting, raping, and killing, as confirmed in the Ukrainian cities of Bucha and Irpin, as well as the liberated villages in the Kherson and Kharkiv region. War is an unpredictable thing. Of course, we all hope this war ends as soon as possible. We will endure and protect our country – Putin and his supports have left us with no other choice. We are grateful to all the democratic and freedom-loving powers of the world who have been helping us. To those who supply us with weaponry, anti-aircraft systems, ammunition, airplanes, artillery systems, medicine, and clothes. To those who are helping rebuild the infrastructure and create the conditions for living there. The sooner we defend our homeland, the fewer people will perish, and the less damage will be inflicted to our infrastructure and economy, and, in addition, the fewer troubles there will be in the world.
Today, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are the “shield of Europe”. We are fighting for our country, our citizens, our independence and our right to have a free life in our own homes. However, we are also protecting the European nations from an onslaught of Ruscists and, more importantly, our common European values. Ukraine’s position remains unchanged, namely, the liberation of all the occupied Ukrainian territories within the borders internationally recognized in 1991. It is only after that that diplomatic negotiations are possible. One of the points in the proposed peace plan project by President V. Zelenskyy is a full withdrawal of the Russian troops from the Ukrainian territory. However, we don’t see Russia’s wish to stop this was and start real negotiations. We do not refuse to resolve the end of the war in a diplomatic way, but we will not accept ultimatums presented by the Russian side.
The civilized world can see that the tremendous “efforts” of the Russian dictator to “save” the expanse of the former empire, which exists in his personal fantasies, to go down in history as “the unifier of the Russian lands”, are actually turning into hundreds of thousand of innocent victims among Ukrainian families, and thousands of maimed people and ruined life paths and families in the Ukrainian cities and villages.
There is no alternative today to democratic development as a guarantee of global stability and to our common path towards a single family of European nations.
We believe in Ukraine, in its glorious future, and in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and we thank all our partners and friends for their support for the Ukrainian people in its heroic fight for the right to life and freedom. You cannot imagine how important it is to feel that you are not alone before an inhumane onslaught.
This article was authored by HE Volodymyr Tolkach, Ambassador of Ukraine to Serbia