MOn April 5, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the UN to act “immediately” in the face of the “war crimes” committed, according to him, by Russia in his country, otherwise the United Nations would only have to “ just close”. The Head of State also called for Russia to be excluded from the UN Security Council and for a reform of the United Nations system, so that “the right to veto does not mean the right to die”.
In his speech by videoconference, Volodymyr Zelensky asked before the UN that Russia be “held responsible” for “the worst war crimes” since the Second World War, according to him. He notably affirmed before the Security Council that the Russian forces had sent “hundreds of thousands” of Ukrainians to Russia since the beginning of the war. The Ukrainian president broadcast a video showing very raw images of people killed in Ukraine, whose violence provoked an indignant reaction from the current president of this body. These are “appalling images,” said British Ambassador Barbara Woodward, saying she was “outraged”. Several bodies or body parts appeared on these images, on a background sound, accentuating the dramatization of the video.
A parallel between the war in Ukraine and Guernica
For its part, Russia has contested the accusations of atrocities perpetrated by its army. “We did not come to Ukraine to conquer territories,” Russian Ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia told the Security Council. According to him, Russia evacuated 600,000 people from Ukraine, who did not leave “under duress or abducted”, as the West puts it.
During a speech broadcast live in the Spanish Chamber of Deputies, President Zelensky compared the war in Ukraine to the massacre of Guernica, a small town in the Spanish Basque Country bombed in 1937 by Nazi aircraft during the Spanish Civil War. “It is April 2022 but it feels like April 1937, when the world learned about what was happening in one of your cities, Guernica,” Ukrainian president said, referring to Condor Legion attack German, which caused, according to historians, the death of 150 to 300 people.