President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged the Parliament of Canada to support his appeal to create a no-fly zone over Ukraine. He did so by asking Canadian deputies and officials to imagine that cities like Vancouver or Toronto were being bombarded.
“Imagine that you hear explosions at 4 am. Justin (addressing the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – LB.ua), can you imagine that you hear them. Your children hear missile strikes on the Ottawa airport. And dozens of other cities in the whole territory of Canada. Cruise missiles. Before dawn. Your children hug you and ask: what happened? And you’re getting the first reports of which objects have been damaged. Where people died,” he announces. “Imagine that you’re searching for words to explain. To explain it to your children that a large-scale war has begun. The war that you know is meant to destroy your state. That you know is meant to conquer your people”.
“They (the enemy’s forces – LB.ua) are approaching Edmonton. And they are firing with artillery. Right on residential quarters and civilian people. They burn schools, blow up kindergartens. As in our Sumy. As in our Okhtyrka,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy continued. “They block Vancouver – and keep it besieged. Hundreds of thousands of people are besieged. Like in our Mariupol. It’s their second week under shelling, without electricity, almost without food or water. In basements”.
Once again, Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on the West to help Ukraine close its airspace or provide weapons to defend against Russian bombardments.
“When you phone your friends and ask them to close our skies. To stop the shelling. The bombardments. How many more missiles have to fall on our cities? And you hear in response that they don’t want to do that, but they are deeply concerned,” Zelenskyy says. “Well, then give us planes. They say: yeah, we’re almost there. You’ll have them very soon. But they are deeply, deeply concerned. They just don’t want to and are looking for reasons”.
The President thanked Canada for their truly powerful help and called for leadership and further active assistance for Ukraine, in particular regarding economic pressure on Russia.
“You can force even more companies to leave the Russian market. So they don’t have a single dollar for war. If they are staying in Russia and sponsoring the war, then they don’t have the right to work in Canada. Let it be so, and it will give us peace,” he says.
As a reminder, today, President Volodymyr Zelanskyy announced to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and leaders of the Baltic and Northern European states that the sanctions imposed on Russia by the world community are not enough for Moscow to stop the war against Ukraine.
Prime Minister of the UK Boris Johnson is convinced that the West committed a horrible mistake by allowing Vladimir Putin to not be held responsible for the Annexation of Crimea and for launching the war against Ukraine in 2014. That is why, in his opinion, Russia should be left without income from the sale of oil and gas.