Meeting with reporters after he returned from Kyiv, Tomasz Grodzki told the media on Friday: “Our impressions... they are dramatic.”
The previous day, Grodzki led a delegation of Polish senators to the Ukrainian capital, accompanied by their Czech colleagues headed by Senate Speaker Miloš Vystrčil, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
'Golgotha of the 21st century'
Speaking to reporters on Friday at a train station in the southeastern Polish city of Przemyśl, Grodzki stated: “When seen live, the cruelties … turned out to be much more terrible than could have been imagined.”
The Polish and Czech lawmakers had visited the destroyed Ukrainian towns of Borodyanka, Irpin and Bucha, where Russian troops are reported to have killed hundreds of civilians.
During the visit, Grodzki called Ukraine’s suffering under Russia’s brutal assault “the Golgotha of the 21st century.”
‘Putin underestimated Ukrainian people’
On Friday, he told reporters that the Polish and Czech senators had been “impressed by the heroism of the Ukrainian people,” describing how “city officials, shopkeepers and entrepreneurs turn into snipers and mortar fighters.”
Grodzki added that this fighting spirit was precisely what Russian President Vladimir Putin had “underestimated,” as he planned "to conquer Ukraine in 48 hours.”
“Well, day 50 of the war has passed and we hope the Russians will be driven out of Ukraine, just as they had been driven out of the area around the capital Kyiv,” Grodzki told a news conference in Przemyśl.
While in Ukraine, Grodzki also addressed the country’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.
Speaking in Ukrainian, he said there that Russia’s “genocide” of the Ukrainian people “must not go unpunished.” He added that the world had "a duty to help rebuild Ukraine.”
Friday was day 51 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, senat.gov.pl