A few days after two years of the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned allies in Munich this Saturday that “keeping Ukraine in an artificial arms deficit, especially in a “Deficit in artillery and long-range missiles allows Putin to adapt to the current intensity of the war,” Zelensky said.
“Please do not ask Ukraine when the war will end; “Ask yourselves why Putin can still continue it,” asked the Ukrainian leader at the Munich Security Conference (MSC), in which he defended that “Ukraine has been resisting for 724 days,” something that many ruled out when on February 24, 2022, the Russian President Vladimir Putin launched military aggression.
“Our actions are only limited by the effectiveness and reach of our force; Avdivka is the proof,” Zelensky said. In fact, over his speech hovered the withdrawal of the Ukrainian army from Avdivka, a city in the east of the country whose defense had until now been the priority of the new commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Olexándr Sirski. Ukrainian soldiers struggled to resist the Russian advance in the area.
“It has been a professional decision to save as many lives as possible; “It has been a correct decision,” Zelensky assured of Avdivka in this informal forum for debates on defense and security, which is held every year in February in the Bavarian capital, and which in this edition brings together heads of State and Government and ministers of the branch of a hundred countries. It started on Friday and continues until this Sunday.
“Human life has no value for the Russian state. Putin kills whoever he wants, be it an opposition leader or whoever he targets; Dictators do not go on vacation,” emphasized the Ukrainian president, who was received and dismissed with ovations, and interrupted several times with applause. “Just yesterday Putin sent us a message here at the Munich Security Conference; “Putin murdered another opposition leader,” he said, referring to the Russian opponent Alexei Navalny, whose death was reported on Friday by the Russian penitentiary.
“If there are enough air defense systems in Ukraine, we will be able to bring home millions of Ukrainians,” Zelensky insisted to renew the request that the allies supply weapons to Kyiv. In this regard, he mentioned the two bilateral security agreements that he signed on Friday: one with Germany, signed in Berlin with the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and another with France, which he signed together with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, in A whirlwind trip to Paris.
“If we do not act now, Putin will make the next few years catastrophic for other nations as well,” he said in a speech that concluded: “May our rules-based world never become the world of yesterday. Slava Ukraini!” This is the third time that Volodymyr Zelensky has spoken at the Munich Security Conference (MSC): in 2022, shortly before the start of the Russian invasion, he also attended in person, while in 2023 he spoke by videoconference from his country.
