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A “touching” speech, full of patriotism and a warlike tone, this is how the British channel Sky News characterised the speech delivered this Saturday, August 24, by the Ukrainian head of state, Volodymyr Zelensky. He spoke on the occasion of Ukraine’s Independence Day. This Saturday, he promulgated the law banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, remote-controlled by Russia, and he vowed Moscow “reprisals” for seeing its neighbour invaded. These reprisals started on August 6, 2024, with the irruption of Ukrainian troops into the Russian city of Kursk; the only response was the state of emergency in the Voronezh region after a drone attack on August 24.
In a 13-minute film, which he says he registered “in the Sumy Oblast, near the border with Russia,” Zelensky “greeted Ukrainians on the occasion of the 33rd anniversary of the country’s independence,” an independence seized from the Soviet Union in 1991 and which Russian President Vladimir Putin has never digested….
“Whoever wishes to spread misfortune on our land will find it in his own house (…). This is not a prophecy, this is not jubilation, this is not blind vengeance, this is how it happens,” the Ukrainian president declares. Russia “will learn what retaliation is,” he added.
Zelensky also talked of the border with Russia as a border “between Ukraine and oppression, between life and death, between an independent European state and the number one terrorist organization in the world.” Russia sought to “destroy us,” but the war “came home,” like a boomerang, the president told his compatriots from the border area from where Kyiv launched the attack that unsettled the Kremlin.
kyiv “Shocks once again,” the Ukrainian president declared proudly. By launching its massive assault on February 24, 2022, “Russia sought only one thing: to destroy us. Instead, today we are celebrating the 33rd Independence Day of Ukraine (…). Ukraine always pays its debts – with interest.”
He furthermore called Putin “a sick old man from Red Square who constantly endangers everyone with the nuclear red button.” Zelensky said in the aftermath: “Today, the first successful use of our new weapon, the Palianytsia drone missile, took place”…
Ukrainian drones pulverized an ammunition depot in the Voronezh region this Saturday, the offensive is gaining ground but on the other side, Russian troops are also moving in eastern Ukraine, at the cost of heavy human losses on both sides. Moscow sits on 18% of Ukrainian territory, it will be hard for kyiv to do the same on the enemy. But the situation could quickly change if the West, the USA in particular, lifts its veto on long-range missiles to strike Russian soil.
Zelensky’s speech ends with these words: “This is what independence looks like”. Then come pictures of everyday life, as if the sirens were not sounding untimely, as if the Russian bombs were not raining down. Putin could not defeat this resilience more than 2 years after the incursion of his tanks, he will never be able to defeat it, he was obliged to go see his bloodthirsty Chechen vassal, Ramzan Akhmadovitch Kadyrov, to beg for troops to stop the Ukrainians at Kursk.
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