President Volodymyr Zelensky has slammed NATO as “weak” for refusing to enforce a no-fly zone in Ukraine, saying it will bear responsibility for future Ukrainian deaths.
Speaking at a public press conference, the Ukrainian president branded a recent NATO summit on the war in Ukraine “weak” and “confused” and evidence that “not everyone considers the struggle for freedom to be Europe’s number one goal.”
“Knowing that new strikes and casualties are inevitable, NATO deliberately decided NOT to close the sky over Ukraine,” he railed.
“We believe that NATO countries themselves have created a narrative that the closure of the sky over Ukraine would provoke Russia’s direct aggression against NATO. This is self-hypnosis. Of those who are weak, underconfident,” he claimed — although it is difficult to imagine how NATO could “close the sky over Ukraine” without directly confronting and destroying Russian warplanes, and likely Russian ground forces tasked with engaging hostile aircraft as well.
“All the people who will die starting from this day will also die because of you. Because of your weakness. Because of your disunity,” Zelensky accused.
The Ukrainian premier further claimed that “All the [NATO] Alliance has managed to do so far is to carry fifty tons of diesel fuel for Ukraine through its procurement system” and warned that it would “not be able to buy us off with litres of fuel for litres of our blood.”
Both NATO’s Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, and U.S. President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, have been fairly blunt in underlining the point that, contrary to Zelensky’s claims, a no-fly zone cannot be imposed without launching an air war against Russia.
Stoltenberg, a former Prime Minister of Norway, explained at a Friday press conference that “[t]he only way to implement a no-fly zone is to send NATO planes — fighter planes — into Ukrainian airspace, and then impose that no-fly zone by shooting down Russian planes,” which “could end in a full-fledged war in Europe involving many more countries and causing much more human suffering.”
“The only way to actually implement something like a no-fly zone is to send NATO planes into Ukrainian airspace and to shoot down Russian planes, and that could lead to a full-fledged war in Europe. President Biden has been clear that we are not going to get into a war with Russia,” Blinken echoed at a separate press conference in the European Union capital of Brussels the same day.
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