Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday compared Russia’s devastating assault on Ukraine to the Nazis’ 1937 bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica in an address to Spain’s parliament.
“It’s April 2022 but it seems like April 1937 when the whole world heard about one of your cities, Guernica,” he said of the carpet-bombing of the northern town by Nazi aircraft during Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war in support of Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces.
Hundreds of people were killed, many of whom were at a weekly market in the town centre, in an atrocity that shocked the world and was immortalised in Picasso’s haunting anti-war painting.
Historians give an estimated death toll of between 150 and 300 people, while the Basque authorities give a much higher figure of 1,654.
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He compared the Guernica assault to the situation in the southeastern port city of Mariupol which has been under siege by Russian forces for over a month.
“Just imagine more than 100,000 residents are living without water, food or medicine because the Russian army has cut off the city of Mariupol,” he told lawmakers
“They are destroying the city, there’s nothing, it’s all in ruins… the people are dead, buried in their own gardens. The Russians were bombing Mariupol knowing people and children were hiding there.”
The city’s mayor told AFP on Tuesday that an estimated 120,000 residents are believed to have stayed behind and were existing in a situation that went “beyond a humanitarian disaster”.
‘Outrage and revulsion’
The Ukrainian leader’s 10-minute address followed a wave of global outrage over the harrowing discoveries of civilian victims in Bucha and other towns near Kyiv after Russian troops pulled back.
So far, Ukrainian officials say over 400 civilian bodies have been recovered from the wider Kyiv region, many of which were buried in mass graves.
Zelensky spoke immediately after he addressed the UN Security Council for the first time, demanding it expel Russia over its brutal invasion and that Moscow be held accountable for its atrocities against civilians.
“We never thought that we would once again see shocking images of bombings and massacres of innocent people on European soil,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said after Zelensky’s speech.
“Atrocities like those in Mariupol and Bucha give us the greatest feeling of outrage and revulsion. They are war crimes that cannot go unpunished.”
The Kremlin has denied any civilian killings and claimed that the images from the Kyiv region are fakes produced by Ukraine forces, or that the deaths occurred after Russian soldiers pulled out of the areas.
Europe’s worst conflict in decades has killed as many as 20,000 people, according to Ukrainian estimates.
Nearly 4.25 million Ukrainians have fled the country during Russia’s invasion, while a further 7.1 million are thought to be internally displaced within Ukraine, the UN said Tuesday.
