The Ukrainian president calls on the allies of his country to “close the sky” or to be delivered to Kiev fighting planes. It restits ready for negotiations without conditions with Moscow.
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VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY, these days the most threatened man on the planet, smiles. “Life is like it is. I am alive and the feeling of being important for others, it’s good. The morale is good, the team works, no one has left.” The Ukrainian leader, of which The fall or assassination is one of Moscow’s war goals, recognizes being “a human being like any other, who wants to live”. “I think all the time in the life of our soldiers. I think of my family members. On the other hand, as a president, I do not have the right to be afraid for myself.”
m. Zelensky has been “war president” for a week when he meets for the first time, Thursday, March 3, a group of international journalists, including Le Monde, for a restricted press conference. His team has arranged an anonymous and “bunkerized” room in a wing of the Mariinskyi Palace, the Ukrainian Presidency, in the city center of Kiev. As when it distributes video messages to the attention of his compatriots, Mr. Zelensky wishes to stage a head of state at work in his usual place, which obviously does not mean that he works there. or live strength permanently.
While Moscow intensifies his military offensive against Ukraine despite a global reprobation and calling calls to a ceasefire, and that Kiev fears an imminent encirclement, Mr. Zelensky wants to pass some messages . It looks like this president, tracked and exhausted, who says they have about fifteen conversations a day with heads of state or government, launches his last bottles at the sea before he thinks to be “the Apocalypse” .
“Close the sky!”
The first message, very concrete, concerns the overwhelming aerial superiority of Russia in this war. Although Ukraine slows down some terrestrial offensives and prepares for guerrillas in cities, he knows that his country has no chance of surviving in the face of Russian aviation. It thus evokes the possibility of a “No-Fly Zone”, an aerial exclusion zone. The Allies of Ukraine have already excluded this hypothesis because, in Europe, only the organization of the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) could implement such a measure, as the Atlantic Alliance had done it in the sky From former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This time, it is, this time, out of the question of directly engaging NATO in a conflict with Russia, hostile nuclear power.
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