‘Evil has been reborn’ seventy-seven years after the Nazis were defeated in Europe, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky declared today.
Today is VE Day, marking the surrender of German forces and end to World War Two in Europe.
But Mr Zelensky said today Europe is again seeing war, as evil has returned ‘in different uniform, under different slogans but for the same purpose’.
He spoke in front of a bombed residential block in Borodyanka, one of the Kyiv suburbs pummelled before Russian troops withdrew, wearing a t-shirt saying ‘I’m Ukrainian’ in a black and white video released today.
‘Every year on May 8, along with the entire civilised world, we honour those who defended the planet from Nazism in World War Two,’ he said.
‘But we have not made it even a century. Our “never again” lasted only 77 years. Evil has been reborn.’
He continued: ‘Decades after World War II, darkness returned to Ukraine. It became black and white again.
‘A bloody reconstruction of Nazism was organised in Ukraine.’
But he promised: ‘We will overcome the winter. The Ukrainian sun will melt it. No more black and white dreams, only a blue and yellow dream. Finally again.
‘Our ancestors proved that no evil can avoid responsibility. It will not be able to hide in the bunker. There will be no stone left of it.
‘So we will overcome everything, and we know this for sure because our military and all our people are the descendants of those who overcame Nazism.
‘They will win again and there will be peace again.’
His address comes as Boris Johnson also spoke of the Russian invasion in his address to mark the date.
‘On VE Day, as we remember those who sacrificed their lives in WW2, we also think of those who have died and suffered in Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,’ he said in a video shared online.
‘Our respect for those who fought strengthens our determination to support Ukrainians today.’
Russia is due to celebrate Victory Day tomorrow, its own annual celebration of the defeat of the Nazis in World War Two.
Putin is thought to have wanted a symbolic win to declare tomorrow when he addresses crowds at Moscow’s Red Square.
‘They have nothing to celebrate tomorrow,’ Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US ambassador to the United Nations, told CNN.
‘They have not succeeded in defeating the Ukrainians. They have not succeeded in dividing the world or dividing Nato. And they have only succeeded in isolating themselves internationally and becoming a pariah state around the globe.’
Putin’s forces have been rushing to seize the steel plant in Mariupol which is the last Ukrainian hold-out of the city.
However, the defenders were still holding out today.
Meanwhile, dozens of Ukrainians are feared dead after a Russian bomb hit a school sheltering about 90 people in its basement.
The governor of Luhansk province, part of the eastern industrial heartland known as the Donbas, said emergency crews had found two bodies and rescued 30 people at the school in the village of Bilohorivka after Saturday’s bombing.
‘Most likely, all 60 people who remain under the rubble are now dead,’ governor Serhiy Haidai wrote.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said that she consider this likely to be a ‘war crime’ today.
She tweeted: ‘Horrified by Russia’s latest attack on a school in Luhansk, resulting in the deaths of innocent people sheltering from Russian bombardment.’
She said the deliberate targeting of civilians and infrastructure ‘amounts to war crimes’ and ‘we will ensure Putin’s regime is held accountable’.
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