heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world

 

Quoting Churchill and Shakespeare, Ukraine Leader Vows No Surrender

In a dramatic video address to Britain's House of Commons, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he would never capitulate to the invading Russians.

[headline and sub-head on March 8 article in The New York Times]

[article excerpt] -------------------- LONDON -- With Ukraine's outgunned army holding firm despite Russian bombardments that have displaced millions of civilians, the war in Ukraine has become a grim spectacle of resistance, no one more defiant than the country's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who vowed on Tuesday never to give in to Russia's tanks, troops or artillery shells.

In a dramatic video address to Britain's Parliament, clad in his now-famous military fatigue T-shirt, Mr. Zelensky echoed Winston Churchill's famous words of no surrender to the same chamber at the dawn of World War II as Britain faced a looming onslaught from Nazi Germany.

"We will fight till the end, at sea, in the air," Mr. Zelensky said with the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag draped behind him.  "We will fight in the forests, in the fields, on the shores, in the streets."

The speech, the first ever by a foreign leader to the House of Commons, was the climax of Mr. Zelensky's darkest-hour messaging to fellow Ukrainians and the world in what has become a typical 20-hour day for him in Kyiv, the besieged capital.

In his daily speech to the nation, he claimed that Ukraine had inflicted 30 years of losses on Russia's air force in 13 days.  And in an internet video posted Monday night from his presidential office, he all but taunted President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

"I'm not hiding," Mr. Zelensky said.  "I'm not afraid of anyone."

        Nearly two weeks into Russia's war, it was becoming ever clearer that the Kremlin's military planners, not to mention Mr. Putin himself, had dramatically miscalculated not only the grit of Ukrainian resistance but also the calamitous economic consequences for Russia, which on Tuesday faced a major new embargo of its oil exports and a growing exodus of large American companies....

"Everybody can hear that people don't have water," Mr. Zelensky said of those under siege in Mariupol.  Russia's shelling of hospitals and evacuation routes, he said, had killed scores of innocent civilians, including children.

"These are the children who could have lived," he said to the packed and rapt chamber, "but they took them away from us."

However long the odds Ukrainians faced or the horrors they were enduring, Mr. Zelensky said, they had made the decision to endure.  To Shakespeare's elemental question, "to be or not to be," he said, Ukrainians had decided "to be." ------------------------------- [end / excerpt of NYT article, written by Mark Landler and Marc Santora]

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Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?

I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains

I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests

I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans

I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard

And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard

And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall...

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{"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" - written by Bob Dylan}

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