In his speech, Volodymyr Zelensky alluded to the Berlin Wall and former US President Ronald Reagan’s famous appeal to the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to tear down the structure, the Reuters news agency reported.
Zelensky told lawmakers in the German Bundestag: "That's what I say to you dear Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz: destroy this wall.”
He urged, as quoted by Reuters: “Give Germany the leadership role that it has earned so that your descendants are proud of you. Support freedom, support Ukraine, stop this war, help us to stop this war."
After Zelensky’s speech, MPs from Germany’s three ruling coalition parties, the Social Democratic SPD, the Greens and the liberal FDP, rejected a motion by the conservatives CDU/CSU to hold an hour-long debate on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Poland’s PAP news agency reported.
Support from opposition parties on both sides of the political spectrum was not enough and the CDU/CSU’s motion was voted down, PAP said.
The conservatives’ parliamentary leader Friedrich Merz was quoted as saying that three weeks after Scholz's first statement on the war in Ukraine, he wanted the chancellor to state “where we stand” and if “any decisions can be improved.”
But Bundestag deputy Speaker Katrin Göring-Eckardt, who chaired Thursday’s proceedings, decided against holding a debate and moved to the next item on the agenda: a debate on compulsory vaccination, PAP reported.
Thursday was day 22 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, Reuters