The only truly effective sanction on the Kremlin capable of stopping Russian Federation (RF) aggression is the defeat of the Russian army by a Ukrainian military properly armed with weapons from its partners, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Thursday evening, April 8, national address.
“The top priority – Ukraine needs weapons that will allow us to gain victory on the battlefield. That will be the strongest possible sanction against Russia of any that there could ever be,” Zelensky said.
The Ukrainian leader repeated calls for the primarily NATO nation coalition providing Kyiv military assistance to provide heavy weapons like tanks, artillery, infantry fighting vehicles and combat jets so the UAF can take the offensive, and drive the Russian army from Ukrainian territory. Western assistance to Ukraine thus far – largely infantry weapons and sanctions intended to weaken the RF’s economy – are appreciated by Ukrainians but are nonetheless half measures that have not deterred RF attacks in the past, nor will they in the future, he said.
Zelensky said states supporting Ukraine need to implement “more sanctions, and bolder sanctions” against Russia. He argued that international hesitance led by EU members France and Germany to take serious action against the Kremlin will only prolong the war, causing the deaths of thousands more UAF soldiers and Ukrainian civilians. The world needs to stop believing Kremlin propaganda, acknowledge that Ukraine is a real state with a real population with real rights to national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and take the practical steps necessary – rather than just make declarations – to end war caused by Kremlin aggression, he said.
“”This war shows how much everyone (in the world) did not want to notice our country. To recognize we are a people. How much the world wanted to believe in foreign propaganda and Russian myths about Ukraine, and how much (the world) didn’t feel like bothering to find out what Ukraine really is,” he said.
A new round of anti-Russia sanctions, announced by the EU on Thursday, banned import of Russian coal, froze selected Russian bank accounts and blocked the use of EU ports by RF-flagged ships.
The EU sanction packet – put into effect more than a month after Russia invaded Ukraine in the Europe’s most naked and massive act of aggression of one state against another since the Nazi era – also made illegal the sale of EU-manufactured weapons to the RF military, and the sale of dual-use high-end technologies to RF companies.
A total blockade on EU imports of RF-produced oil and gas – long described by Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials as by far the single most effective deterrent step Brussels might take against the Kremlin, aside from actually giving Ukraine heavy weapons like tanks in order to defend itself – was not included in the Thursday sanctions packet.
According to Kyiv official estimates, since Russia’s Feb 24. invasion, the EU has provided Ukraine a total one billion EUR in defense assistance, while over the same time period sending the Kremlin one billion EUR a day for oil and gas imports.
Zelensky’s criticism of cautious European diplomacy came as the US news website Politico reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced Berlin would “postpone a final decision” on supplying high-tech Leopard II tanks to Ukraine, in order to “coordinate with NATO partners.”
