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He reaches for Churchill when rallying British MPs. In his speech to the United States Congress, he mentions Pearl Harbor. When he is projected into the Bundestag, he conjures up the prospect of a new European Wall. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has received standing ovations in parliaments across the West for a series of impassioned addresses tailored to each audience from wartime Kyiv. We look back at the highlights of his virtual world tour as he prepares to address French and Japanese lawmakers on Wednesday.
‘Prove you’re on our side’
A haggard-looking Zelensky addresses the European Parliament on March 1, less than a week into the war. The 44-year-old former TV actor frames the conflict with Russia as a struggle to defend the European ideals for which Ukrainians have staged two revolutions in the last two decades.
“Prove you’re with us,” he says to MEPs. “Prove you are not abandoning us and that you are truly Europeans,” he says, a day after Ukraine requested fast-track EU membership.
‘We will fight on the shores,’ says one
On March 8, as the number of Ukrainians fleeing the fighting approaches two million, he invokes British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s wartime defiance by pledging a fight to the end.
“We will fight in the forests, fields, shores, and streets,” he tells the UK House of Commons, echoing Winston Churchill’s historic “We shall fight on the beaches” speech in the face of Nazi German advances in June 1940.
‘Would you please close the sky?’
On March 15, as Kyiv’s residential neighborhoods are bombed, he asks MPs in Canada, which has the world’s second-largest Ukrainian diaspora, to imagine their cities and children being bombed.
“Please close the sky,” he begs Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, requesting a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
‘Recall Pearl Harbor.’
On March 16, he brings participants of the US Congress to their feet with a rousing speech in which he compares the bombardment of Ukrainian city areas to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which drew the US into World War II.
