Zelenskyy: Some will wait for an international tribunal, others will wait “for the night” to take revenge on occupiers
Denys Karlovskyi – Friday, 29 April 2022, 20:49
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has explained that many Ukrainians will want to take revenge on Russian occupiers who have committed mass murders in Ukraine without waiting for them to be convicted by international tribunals.
Source: Zelenskyy in an interview with Polish media
According to Zelenskyy: "I know that there are people in our society who will seek out every [Russian soldier who has committed mass murders of Ukrainian civilians - ed.].
Nothing can be done about it. This is not a threat. I’m telling you frankly, as a father, as a husband. I know that there are many people who feel like that in Ukraine.
How they’ve been fighting and how they’ve held out shows just how many of them there are.
Some will wait for an international tribunal, while others will wait for the night, as we say. That’s all there is to it."
Details: Zelenskyy believes that international condemnation is also very important if Russians are to develop a sense of historical guilt and complicity for the tragedy of the war in Ukraine in the same way as Germans feel historical responsibility for the atrocities committed by Nazis during World War II.
Background:
- In his nightly address on 28 April, President Zelenskyy threatened Russian soldiers who have murdered and tortured civilians in Ukraine with swift punishment by international courts and tribunals. At the same time, he admitted that some will not face trial because they will have received appropriate retribution from Ukrainian defenders on the battlefield.
- The President had also said earlier that the level and scale of atrocities committed by the Russian occupying forces in their attempts to conquer Ukraine are so glaring that history textbooks will have a special word for this phenomenon – "Ruscism".
- In another evening address, Zelenskyy provided a concise summary of the motivation behind Russia’s conquest of Ukrainian territories: to steal a toilet from someone else’s apartment and die from a bullet while carrying it off.
