“Some European countries are making blood money”: Volodymyr Zelensky speaks to the BBC

the ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky accused European countries that continue to buy Russian oil of “making money with other people’s blood” during an interview with the BBC.

Zelensky directly accused Germany and Hungary of preventing the agreement of a European blockade on energy sales, from which Russia is expected to make profits of US$326 billion in 2022.

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There has been growing frustration from the Ukrainian leadership with the government in Berlin, which has supported some sanctions against Russia but has so far resisted calls to support stronger action against oil sales.

“Some of our friends and associates understand that this is a different era, that it is no longer a matter of business and money,” Zelensky told the BBC from his office in kyiv on Thursday. “It’s a survival issue.”

Volodymyr Zelensky and Clive Myrie

Here are some excerpts from the interview with the Ukrainian president.

Europe has been handing over $1 billion a day to Russia for oil and gas. It has given you and your people $1 billion since the start of the war. How do you assimilate that?

We do not understand how money can be made from blood. Unfortunately, that is what some countries have been doing. European countries.

For example, and I would like us to be frank, I think that the oil embargo is one of the key issues that we know has been blocked between European countries by Germany and Hungary.

And we have to talk to those countries to establish how it is possible that there are different attitudes towards this issue, the oil embargo, within the European Union.

How is a peace negotiated? How does one sit face to face at the table to try to stop the war?

A woman among the rubble of her house near kyiv. (GETTY IMAGES).

How can this war be ended? Does the president of a country at war have options to end the war? Fighting to the last Ukrainian, as some people in some countries want?

Or better yet, doing everything possible not to lose tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people? Preventing World War III? Doing everything possible to end this as soon as possible? Doing everything possible so that Ukraine is not 100% destroyed? How is that achieved?

I don’t think anyone has a 100% correct answer, because it would have already been implemented.

Are you getting the weapons you need to fight that war in the east of the country? Because it is going to be a very different campaign from the more urban and street struggle that we saw here in the north and on the outskirts of the capital? Are you getting the right weapons from the West?

Ukrainian forces attack Russian positions in the Donbas region. (GETTY IMAGES).

We need to fight the war today and we need weapons today. We cannot wait for this or that country to decide to give or sell them to us and it can be in any way, [entregándolas] in two or three weeks or in a month, some have not decided.

Still, when we talk about the US, the UK and some European countries, they have been trying to help us and they have been helping us.

However, we need them sooner and we need more of them. Do we have enough of everything? We don’t think so. The priority word is “quickly”. The priority word is “now”. Because we are fighting now. It is not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

It will be, it will last.

And how long the war is will depend on all this equipment, on all these weapons.

And the situation in Mariupol, where everything has been destroyed and thousands of lives have been lost?

A residential building affected by shelling in Mariupol. (REUTERS).

95% of all buildings, 95%, have been destroyed. In one of the largest cities, not only in Ukraine but in Europe, with 500,000 people.

How many lives were lost? What is said there are lies. Nobody knows. No one knows how many people are still there. Nobody knows.

Source: Elcomercio