In remarks commemorating the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, the Ukraine president promised victory over “mad man” Putin, who is “repeating the horrific crimes of Hitler’s regime today.”
BY ERIC LUTZ MAY 9, 2022 (vanityfair.com)
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s Jewish president once again undercut Vladimir Putin’s attempt to rewrite history and justify his war as an effort to “deNazify” Ukraine. Speaking in a video address Monday, delivered while walking the fortified streets of Kyiv, Zelenskyy described the Russian president a “mad man” who was “repeating the horrific crimes of Hitler’s regime today,” in a video address Monday, delivered while walking the fortified streets of Kyiv. “On the Day of Victory over Nazism, we are fighting for a new victory,” Zelenskyy said. “The road to it is difficult, but we have no doubt that we will win.”
“He is doomed,” Zelenskyy continued, referring to Putin, “because he was cursed by millions of ancestors when he began to imitate their killer. And therefore, he will lose everything. And very soon, there will be two Victory Days in Ukraine.”
The remarks came shortly before Putin’s own speech, and undermined the propaganda the Russian dictator has used as the pretext for the onslaught, which observers worry he could soon intensify. “This has not gone well,” as Kurt Volker, former United States ambassador representative for Ukraine negotiations and a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told NBC News ahead of the holiday commemorating the defeat of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. “So he’s looking to try to put some kind of gloss on it and say, you know, this is justified and it’s working.”
Putin didn’t announce an escalation of the war on Monday, but he did once again attempt to rationalize it as “necessary, timely, and the only right solution.” “Danger was increasing every day,” Putin claimed in his speech. “Russia repelled this aggression in a preventative way.”
This Victory Day has proved a big stage for smaller scale rebellions against disinformation and the war more broadly: In Russia, there were antiwar protests that resulted in at least three arrests, as well as the apparent hack of Russian television platforms to broadcast antiwar messages. “The blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of murdered children is on your hands,” a message reportedly read. “TV and the authorities are lying. No to war.”
Meanwhile, at a Victory in Europe Day gathering in Poland, which has taken in large numbers of Ukrainian refugees, protesters showered Russian ambassador Sergey Andreev in red paint as they blocked him from laying down flowers at a Soviet cemetery in Warsaw. Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau called the incident “regrettable,” but the country’s interior minister, Mariusz Kaminski, wrote that the protest against “genocide” was “legal” and “understandable.”
As officials in the U.S. and the West braced for a further escalation from Putin, First Lady Jill Biden made an unannounced visit to the southwest of Ukraine, to meet with her Ukrainian counterpart, Olena Zelenska, who has been in hiding and has not been seen in public since the invasion began in February.
“We thought it was important to show the Ukrainian people that this war has to stop, and this war has been brutal,” Biden said. “And the people of the U.S. stand with the people of Ukraine.”
“We feel it,” Zelenska said.
