Volodymyr Zelensky has sent videotaped addresses with a plea for assistance to the Parliaments of Western democracies, but none was accompanied by the uproar triggered by Zelensky’s decision to include messages from ethnic Greek members of the neo-Nazi linked Azov Brigade.
It should be noted that the Azov Brigade is fully incorporated in the Ukrainian Army and serves under its command, and there are many ethnic Greeks in its ranks.
Opposition parties roundly lambasted the government for its failure to review the tape before playing it on a large screen in a special session of Parliament attended by President Katerina Sakellaropoulou.
Zelensky commenced his address to the destruction of the city of Mariupol, and area that is home to a 150,000-strong Greek minority.
“What is happening there [in Mariupol] has not occurred since WWII. There are 100,000 people who remain in Mariupol, but without a single building led standing,” Zelensky said in his speech, which like previous ones aired in other legislatures struck all the emotional chords of the national history of the nations he addresses.
“The peaceful city of Mariupol is experience the violence of Russian forces. It was for centuries the cradle of the Greek community, which lived peacefully with the rest of the residents. The co-existence of our communities is a given Zelensky said, underlining historic Greece-Ukraine ties and the fact that Ukraine in the ninth century received the Orthodox Christian faith from the Greeks [in fact Kievan Rus embraced Orthodox Christianity from the linguistically and culturally Greek Byzantine Empire and the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the first-ranking i8n Eastern Orthodoxy].
‘Freedom or death’
Attempting to strike a deeply emotional chord in the Greek people, Zelensky likened his country’s war with Russia to the Greek Revolution, and in an emotional crescendo said that the Greek revolutionaries’ famed declaration “Freedom or death” 200 years ago constitutes a strong message for Ukraine today.
In a rather curious, ahistorical assertion, he maintained that there is a need to once again create a Filiki Etaireia [the secret society that in a building still standing in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa organised the Greek revolution] that will save the Greeks of Ukraine.
