Status: 08/04/2022 08:03 a.m
After almost half a year of war in his own country, Ukrainian President Zelenskyj is questioning the global security architecture as a whole. He accused Russia of only pretending to be willing to negotiate and criticized former Chancellor Schröder.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has placed the Ukraine war in a series of international conflicts and criticized the global security architecture as inadequate overall. There are currently headlines about conflicts in the Balkans, around Taiwan and the Caucasus, which is a factor one. “The global security architecture didn’t work.”
In his daily video speech, Zelenskyy again accused Russia of violating international law with its war of aggression. The problem is that the world has long let Russia get away with these violations – be it the annexation of Crimea or the downing of the Boeing over Donbass. The war in Ukraine shows how fragile freedom is. It can “only be protected by collective action, and for this to work in the long term, an effective global security architecture is required that ensures that no state can ever again use terror against another state.”
USA: Russia wants to fabricate evidence on Olenivka
In this context, Zelenskyy referred to the explosion in a penal camp in Olenivka in eastern Ukraine, in which, according to the Russian side, more than 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed and 75 others injured last week.
Moscow and Kyiv accuse each other of deliberately destroying parts of the penal camp to cover up atrocities. Ukrainians captured after the fall of the port city of Mariupol were held there.
China should call on Russia to end the war
In his speech, Zelenskyj also accused Russia of only pretending to be willing to negotiate. Zelensky said that if Russia were really interested in a peaceful solution to the conflict, it would not be piling up more reserves in southern Ukraine.
According to a Chinese newspaper report, Zelenskyy called on China’s leaders to use their political and economic influence on Russia to end the war. “It’s a very powerful state. China has a powerful economy… So it can influence Russia politically and economically. China is also a permanent member of the UN Security Council,” Zelenskyy quoted the South China Morning Post as saying. He is looking for an opportunity to speak directly to Chinese leader Xi Jingping.
Criticism of Schröder: “It’s just disgusting”
Selenskyj harshly criticized former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder without naming his name: “It’s just disgusting when former leaders of powerful countries with European values work for Russia, which is fighting against these values.”
After his trip to Moscow, Schröder presented Russia as willing to negotiate. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba also criticized him for this: “There is nothing more cynical than the claims made by Putin supporters that Russia is ready to negotiate.” The daily shelling of Ukrainian territory says otherwise, he said. “Russia remains focused on the war – everything else is a cloud of smoke,” added Kuleba.
The outgoing Ukrainian ambassador Andriy Melnyk said on ZDF: He sees no sign that Putin is ready to negotiate. “The first sign would be if Putin stopped shooting at civilians and bombing cities, at least now. That would be a better message than what we have just heard from Mr. Schröder.”
Fight with undiminished hardness
Kyiv doubts Russia’s willingness to negotiate because Russia is continuing its attacks unabated. Heavy fighting continues in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk. The Ukrainian military announced that its own troops were able to repel more than a dozen attacks. In the Kharkiv region in the northeast, Russians fired on a dozen towns. Eight communities were also shot at near the city of Kramatorsk in central Ukraine.
conflicting parties as a source
Information on the course of the war, shelling and casualties provided by official bodies of the Russian and Ukrainian conflict parties cannot be directly checked by an independent body in the current situation.