Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday called on NATO to increase military assistance against Russian forces, warning that eastern members of the alliance could be Russia’s next target.
“I am sure you already understand that Russia does not intend to stop in Ukraine. Does not intend and will not,” Zelensky said in a translated video address at the NATO summit in Brussels. “It wants to go further. Against the eastern members of NATO. The Baltic states, Poland — that’s for sure.”
He said that Ukraine does not have powerful anti-missile weapons and holds a smaller aircraft fleet than Russia, calling for NATO help in these areas.
“Therefore, their advantage in the sky is like the use of weapons of mass destruction,” Zelensky said. “And you see the consequences today — how many people were killed, how many peaceful cities were destroyed.”
Zelensky restated his plea for NATO to shut down the airspace over Ukraine or to provide aircraft to aid Ukrainian forces.
“You have thousands of fighter jets! But we haven’t been given any yet,” he said. “We asked for tanks, so that we can unblock our cities that are now dying … cities where Russia is keeping hundreds of thousands of people hostage and artificially creating famine.”
“You have at least 20,000 tanks! Ukraine asked for a percent, 1 percent of all your tanks to be given or sold to us! But we do not have a clear answer yet. The worst thing during the war is not having clear answers to requests for help.”
While he said he was grateful for the support Ukraine had received from individual NATO member states, he said that “NATO has yet to show what the alliance can do to save people.”
“It feels like we’re in the grey zone between the West and Russia, but we’re protecting all our and your shared values,” he noted.
“We just want to save our people. We want to survive.”