“This is not simply a war, this is much worse,” Mr. Zelensky said. “A global, historical, cultural split has happened over this month.”
Mr. Zelensky’s descriptions of the violence of Russia’s invasion ran directly counter to the Kremlin narrative, which accuses Ukrainians of firing on their own cities and blames them for any civilian casualties and urban destruction. He said that the port city of Mariupol was “littered with corpses — no one is removing them — Russian soldiers and Ukrainian citizens.”
He also accused the Russian government of forcibly taking more than 2,000 children from Mariupol, saying that “their location is unknown.” He said that he had told his officials that Ukraine would halt all negotiations with Russia “if they will steal our children.”
Mr. Putin has received grossly exaggerated reports about the attitude of the Ukrainian people toward Russia and its government, Mr. Zelensky said.
“They probably said that we are waiting for you here, smiling and with flowers,” he said, adding that the Russian government “does not see Ukraine as an independent state, but some kind of a product, a part of a bigger organism that the current Russian president sees himself as the head of.”
After Meduza, Mr. Dzyadko and Mr. Zygar published the interview, the Russian prosecutor general’s office released its own threat. It said it would conduct a “legal assessment” of Mr. Zelensky’s statements and their publication, given “the context of mass anti-Russian propaganda and the regular placement of false information about the actions of the Russian Federation” in Ukraine.
“It would be funny if it wasn’t tragic,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video posted to his account on Telegram, commenting on the Kremlin’s frantic censorship efforts. “This means that they are nervous. Perhaps they saw that their citizens are beginning to question the situation in their own country.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/world/europe/russia-media-zelensky.html
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.