Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky celebrated his country in an address on Friday marking the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, vowing the war would not end “until the Russian murderers face deserved punishment,” including the “judgment of God.”
Zelensky used the address to congratulate Ukrainians for enduring a year of war, reminding them that most analysts expected the Russian “special operation” to overthrow Zelensky’s democratically elected administration to be brief. He also took a moment to recognize the tremendous loss of life that the country had endured in the past year, particularly of civilian life in areas bombed by the Russian military.
Russia announced a “special operation” to vacate the Ukrainian presidency on February 24, 2022, days after Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced that Moscow recognized two eastern Ukrainian regions known as the Donbass, Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin claimed the move was necessary because Zelensky, who is Jewish, was a “Nazi” illegitimately occupying the presidency as a result of the ouster of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.
Zelensky was a professional comedian in 2014 with no overt political aspirations. He defeated the president who succeeded Yanukovych, Petro Poroshenko, in the 2019 presidential elections, which Poroshenko did not contest as illegitimate. Critics maligned Zelensky at the time as the “pro-Russian” candidate.
“Ukraine has surprised the world. Ukraine has inspired the world. Ukraine has united the world,” Zelensky said in his address on Friday.
Recalling the launch of the operation a year ago, Zelensky called it “the longest day of our lives” and thanked Ukrainians for arming themselves and largely joining the struggle, rather than calling for Kyiv to surrender.
“We did not raise the white flag, and began to defend the blue and yellow. We were not afraid, we did not break down, we did not surrender,” Zelensky said. “The symbol of this was the border guards of Zmiinyi Island and the route they told the Russian warship.”
Zmiinyi Island, or Snake Island, is a small territory Russia temporarily possessed in the early days of the war. Ukraine supporters on the internet spread the rumor that Russian forces killed all Ukrainian soldiers on the island, but the last soldier replied to an incoming Russian vessel, “Russian warship, go fuck yourself” before he died. Russia later confirmed the soldiers were actually alive – after Zelensky himself had claimed they were killed – and ultimately surrendered the island in June. The details of the exchange between Russia and Ukraine on the island remain unclear a year later.
“Our faith has grown stronger. Our morale has been reinforced,” Zelensky continued on Friday. “We endured the first day of a full-scale war. We didn’t know what would happen tomorrow, but we realized for sure: every tomorrow is worth fighting for!”
The president also addressed Ukrainians living in territories Russia annexed. Putin announced the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014, leading to the nine-year-old war in the Donbass region. Days before the “special operation,” Putin announced the annexation of the Donbass itself; in September, Putin added the eastern regions of Kherson and Zaporzhizia to his list.
“Our citizens who are now under temporary occupation: Ukraine has not abandoned you, has not forgotten about you,” Zelensky promised, “has not given up on you. One way or another, we will liberate all our lands. We will do everything for Ukraine to return.”
“And to all those who are now forced to stay abroad, we will do everything for you to return to Ukraine. We will do everything to make it possible,” he concluded.
Zelensky also acknowledged the dead in the invasion, saying of Ukrainian citizens, “Almost everyone has at least one contact in their phone who will never pick up the phone again.”
“We will not erase their names from the phone or from our own memory,” Zelensky asserted. “We will never forget them. We will never forgive that. We will never rest until the Russian murderers face deserved punishment. The punishment of the International Tribunal. The judgment of God. Of our warriors. Or all of them together.”
Zelensky briefly thanked Western powers that have invested billions in gifting his country military weaponry, but stated that Ukraine has so many supporters that he believed they deserved their own speech, which he would deliver shortly.
The war has lasted a year largely due to Zelensky securing European and American weaponry, which has kept Russia from being able to successfully take over the capital. While Putin has insisted repeatedly since the invasion began that the objective is to protect ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the country, his initial speech annexing Donbass indicated that he did not believe Ukraine had a right to sovereignty.
“Ukraine is not just a neighbor to us. … Since ancient times, people from ancient southwestern Russian lands were calling themselves Russians and Orthodox,” Putin said at the time. “Modern Ukraine was completely created by Russia – to be more exact by Bolshevik communist Russia.”
“Ukraine has never had stable traditions of their own statehood,” he insisted. Starting from 1991, they followed the path of the mechanical copying of foreign models that had nothing to do with their history or with the Ukrainian realities.”
By September, when Putin “annexed” Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, he focused more on America and the West than on Ukraine, denouncing Western values as “Satanic” and condemning transgender ideology.
In his speech this week marking the anniversary of the invasion, Putin again focused more on America and Europe than Ukraine, claiming that the greater West was on a mission to eliminate Russian identity.
“The Western elite does not conceal their goal, which is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. It means to finish us forever and grow a local conflict into global opposition,” Putin claimed. “This is exactly how we understand it all and we will react accordingly, because in this case we are talking about the existence of our country.”
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