To London MPs, he channeled Churchill and Shakespeare. In the American Congress, he brings up Pearl Harbor and 9/11. For the Bundestag, it was the Berlin Wall; for Canada’s legislators, their large Ukrainian community. MEPs in Brussels were reminded of Ukraine’s place in the continent’s family of nations.
Each of Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s addresses to Western legislatures contains carefully chosen historical references to please the audience; everyone was greeted with a standing ovation. While he found national fame as an actor and comedian, it was the Ukrainian president’s oratorical talent that earned him recognition abroad.
Addressing German MPs via video on Wednesday, the 44-year-old leader again displayed his usual mix of passion, pride and defiance; brutally vivid depictions of the suffering of his people; direct and heartfelt pleas for more help; and inspiring invocations of common ideals and shared pasts, presents and futures.
But it was his references to each country’s history – and the suggestion that all of this could happen to them – that hit hardest. “Dear Mr. Scholz, tear down this wall,” he implored German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, echoing former US President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 appeal to his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev from a Berlin Split.
Russia, Zelenskiy said, was now building “not a Berlin Wall, but a wall in Central Europe between freedom and servitude, and this wall is getting bigger with every bomb that lands in Ukraine.” Germany’s own history, he said, meant it owed it to Ukraine to support the country’s efforts to join the EU.
Thousands of people had already died, he said in his address, including 108 children. “And we are talking about the center of Europe, in the year 2022,” he said, before adding, in another pointed historical reference: “Once again attempts are being made to annihilate all a people”.
In a speech to MEPs on March 1 that brought an interpreter to tears, Zelenskiy said Ukrainians were literally fighting for a European future. ‘Thousands of people killed, two revolutions, a war and a five-day full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation’ is a ‘very high price’ to pay for EU membership, he said declared.
“We have proven our strengths,” he said. “We’ve proven that at the very least, we’re just like you. So prove you’re with us, prove you won’t let us go. Prove that you are indeed Europeans. Freedom Square in Kharkiv, the target of a recent deadly attack, could have been any square on the mainland, he said.
For British MPs in London, Zelenskiy echoed Winston Churchill’s words of war and invoked the fight against Nazism, telling a packed house: “We will continue to fight for our land, whatever the cost. . We will fight in forests, fields, shores and in the streets. Ukraine “will not lose” to Russia, he promised.
The president also quoted Shakespeare to describe his country’s plight. “The question for us now is to be or not to be,” he said. “Oh no, that Shakespearian question. I can give you a definitive answer. It’s definitely yes, to be… The same way you didn’t want to lose your country when the Nazis started fighting you.
On March 9, he asked Canadian lawmakers to imagine the impact of such a war on their own country, directly asking Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “Imagine that [at] 4am… you start to hear bomb explosions. Justin, can you imagine – you and your kids are hearing all those low-pitched explosions? »
He reminded Canadians that 1.4 million people of Ukrainian descent live among them, the largest Ukrainian diaspora outside Russia, and days after the television tower in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, was hit by a missile, asked, “Can you imagine the famous CN Tower in Toronto if it were hit by Russian bombs? It is our reality in which we live.
In a virtual address to both houses of the US Congress on Wednesday, Zelenskiy also addressed key events in the country’s history, including the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
“Just like no one else expected, you couldn’t stop it,” he said.. “Our country has been going through the same thing, right now, right now, every night, for three weeks now.” Quoting civil rights activist Martin Luther King, he added: “’I have a dream’ – those words are known to all of you today. I have a need, a need to protect our sky.
According to Ukrainian officials, Zelenskiy’s speechwriters produce a first draft from which he freely deviates as he speaks. Some of his calls, notably for a no-fly zone, which NATO and the EU will ignore for fear of provoking a direct conflict with Russia, may not have succeeded. But none fell flat.