If NATO and the EU do not protect their member countries from Russian aggression, such alliances are doomed to extinction.
This opinion was voiced by President Volodymyr Zelensky during a conversation with world media representatives at the press center of the Office of the President in Kyiv.
"If you don't show that you are a strong alliance - whether NATO or the European Union - the values, the goals are still the same. It's security, it's economic and cultural unions, and so on. And if you don't defend your alliances, they will disappear. That’s what is happening now," Zelensky said.
He cited the example of the migration crisis on the border with Belarus in 2021.
"What was the pressure? There was pressure on NATO countries when there was a migration crisis in Belarus. They put pressure on the borders with Lithuania, Poland. What was the response of NATO? What? They had to wait," said the President.
Zelensky noted that "the strength of an alliance is that there is no presupposition to war. That you are so strong enough to sit down at the negotiating table, say that there are exact points and it can not be otherwise, because everyone has equal rights ".
As a reminder, the EU accused the Belarusian authorities of deliberately accepting migrants from the Middle East and Africa to Minsk, and then sending them to go by foot to the border with European countries.
At first, the migrants were sent to Lithuania, then they rushed to Poland. The Polish authorities have repeatedly recorded violations of their border. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told an emergency session of the Polish parliament that Russia was standing behind the migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border.