poland for a minute. this is something that often politicians don t understand. it is something that americans sometimes don t quite grasp because politicians aren t walking them through it. you take a country like poland who over the past five, six years or so have had policies that we have found to be anti-democratic or illiberal. there s been a back and forth with the judiciary, and yet we have maintained a strong relationship with poland despite everything else. here you have on the other side of all of that, you have the pols doing extraordinary things, welcoming the 82nd airborne in. ambassador brzezinski says that
surrounding it. we have heard a corridor would be opened up for civilians. that sounds good but it is not. what it says is if you remain behind you can be a target. you have a deliberate move by russian forces, while ukrainians are rallying to the front, you have refuges heading to the west. you have young soldiers who never held a weapon before heading to the east of the country. all the while you have president zelenskyy who has emerged as a real leader of the resistance, someone who tapped into the idea ukrainians are desperate to defend their way of life whereas russians, he says, don t know what they re fighting for. later today we will hear from president zelenskyy. he will address the european parliament by some sort of telecommunications. he is not giving away his
translator listened to his president deliver that message from a bunker. the churchill comparisons are exhausted perhaps at this point, but the president of ukraine addressing the country and the world and europe from a bunker while his country is under attack was an extraordinary, extraordinary war-time moment. he said we re fighting for survival but more than that we are fighting for freedom. we have a desire to see our children alive. i think that s fair, you said. now, david ignatius, turning the page and pushing it forward he said, you have seen who we are, we have shown you who we are. now we want to officially be part of your union, receiving a standing ovation from the european parliament. what does the european parliament do from here? do they admit ukraine to the eu? how could they say no after what he just said. it was an electric moment. as ed said earlier, there s a bottom-up movement. that s what has been decisive. the europeans were strongly
against adding new members. they were fed up with the ever-expanding union. i think volodymyr zelensky and the way the ukrainians have exhibited courage will be irre-sisible for them. i think what starts today is a real process. how accelerated it will be i don t know for ukraine to join the european union. in that moment vladimir putin will have failed. whatever suffering comes after that, however many buildings get shattered by these bombs, he will have failed. yeah. i think that s part of what we just saw in that remarkable speech. there s this man in a gray tee shirt in a bunker, you know, speaking with such power. anybody who heard that i think takes it away and says, what can i do to help bring this man, this country into the circle of nations. and really saying we re fighting for ukraine, but ukraine is you.
with that essay that he published last year and in speeches where he talked about russia and ukraine being brothers and he believed in the unity of the two countries, that they are one country, well, that idea that ukrainians would welcome the russians, that according to western officials was baked into the russian military strategy. so that tells us a number of things. it tells us, as we know, that president putin is very much leading this, that he planned this strategy, and also that he was misinformed, terribly misinformed. not just about the reaction of the west or the reaction of president zelenskyy, but the way that ukrainians would respond to this onslaught. one other piece of news, by the way, the leader of belarus, alexander lukashenko, telling state media today that his forces will not join russian troops in the invasion of