Zelensky: Russian forces have an order to ‘erase’ Ukraine

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address on Wednesday that Russian forces have an order to “erase” Ukraine as he spoke about the areas targeted by Russia’s military, including a Holocaust memorial site that was bombed.

Zelensky said that Russian forces “destroyed us all by striking at residential buildings in Borodyanka.”

“We were all bombed in Kyiv last night. And we all died again in Babyn Yar – from a missile strike,” he said.

“Although the whole world promises constantly – ‘never again.’ For any normal people who knows history, Babyn Yar is a special part of Kyiv. A special part of Europe. A place of prayer. A place of remembrance for the hundred thousand people killed by the Nazis. The place of old Kyiv cemeteries. Who should you be to make it a target for missiles? You are killing Holocaust victims for the second time,” the Ukrainian president added.

Zelensky also said that the Russian assault “is beyond humanity” and indicated that Kyiv is “completely foreign” to many people in Russia.

“But they have an order to erase our history. Erase our country. Erase us all,” he added.

On Tuesday, the Babyn Yar memorial site in Kyiv was targeted by Russian forces, and five people were killed. Zelensky and several others confirmed that it had been struck. The memorial site commemorates the estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people who were killed by the Nazis at Babyn Yar between 1941 and 1943.

“Putin seeks to distort and manipulate the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country [which] is utterly abhorrent. It is symbolic that he starts attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of the Babyn Yar, the biggest of Nazi massacre,” Natan Sharanksy, the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center advisory board chairman, said in a statement condemning the strike.

“We, at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, built on Europe’s largest mass grave of the Holocaust, work to preserve historical memory following decades of Soviet suppression of historical truth, so that the evils of the past can never be repeated,” he continued. “We must not allow the truth to – once again – become the victim of war.”