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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reproached Germany for prioritizing the economy and the supply of Russian gas while warning that with the invasion of his country, Moscow is “building a new wall” between “freedom and lack of freedom.”
“We warned them that Nord Stream 2 was a weapon. And their answer was economy, economy, economy, economy,” Zelensky said, in a virtual speech in the Bundestag (lower house of Parliament), alluding to the German-Russian gas pipeline and sanctions that, in his opinion, “are insufficient and late.”
“Every bomb that falls, every decision that is not taken is a stone with which that wall is built,” added the Ukrainian president, whose intervention by videoconference had been greeted with a standing ovation from the entire plenary.
Zelensky then turned to the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, whom he asked to “be the leader that Germany needs” and to support his country decisively, something which, in his opinion, cannot be limited to the economic sanctions so far imposed against the entourage of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin.
The Ukrainian leader listed in his message from the shelling of the besieged city of Mariupol to the rest of the attacks that his country suffers “day and night”, uninterruptedly, and “every day of the week.”
“It is difficult for us to survive all this without the help of the rest of the world, to defend Ukraine and to defend the free world of Europe,” he added, to insist on the metaphor of the wall, in allusion to the one that for decades divided Berlin.
He paraphrased there the historic speech delivered in 1987 by then US President Ronald Reagan in front of the Berlin wall when he asked Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear it down.
“Mr. Scholz, destroy that wall,” he said, going on to lament that his country was receiving “more support” from across the Atlantic than in Europe itself.
