Russia-Ukraine war live updates: Russian soldier convicted of war crime; ‘scorched earth’ in east Ukraine
“Ukraine is short on time,” President Volodymyr Zelensky told the assembled attendees at the World Economic Forum. Clad in a T-shirt and speaking virtually from Kyiv, he urged the forum’s political and business elites to set “new precedents” by punishing Russia’s aggression in his country.
“This year, the words ‘turning point’ are to become more than just a rhetorical phrase,” Zelensky said, referring to the forum’s 2022 theme. Rather, he said, this is “a moment to decide whether brute force will rule the world.”
Zelensky urged business leaders to carry out a “complete withdrawal of foreign businesses” in Russia and relocate their enterprises to Ukraine. He called for international assistance to unblock the country’s Black Sea ports to speed Ukrainian agricultural exports to countries around the world, and he floated the idea of a diplomatic “corridor” to move these goods.
The Ukrainian president expressed thanks for the military aid and equipment rushed to the country, as well as to the “hundreds of millions of people in democratic countries” who he said were putting pressure on their governments to confront the Russian invasion. But he added that if Ukraine’s long-standing pleas for better weaponry and stiffer sanctions on Russia had been heard earlier, Russia probably would not have been able to invade.
Zelensky said Ukraine has sustained at least half a trillion dollars in losses.
Referring to the Russia House in Davos, which activists have turned into a “Russian War Crimes House,” he said, “Russia has done it to itself by becoming a state of war criminals.” He also stressed that, whenever the war ends, Ukraine’s allies need to help create the security and political conditions that will dissuade Russia from invading again.
“With a neighbor like this, anything can happen any time, and the war may repeat itself,” he said.
No representatives from Russian businesses or the country’s political authorities were invited — a consequence both of the Western sanctions that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as the principled stand taken by the World Economic Forum. That’s a significant departure for a gathering that prides itself on convening a diverse range of global actors.
In the forum’s opening plenary on Monday morning, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis said that, no matter his nation’s tradition of neutrality, “there can be no neutral attitude” toward Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Switzerland has joined the European Union’s program of sanctions against Moscow and will host a conference later this year on aiding Ukrainian reconstruction.
At the same session, the forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, asked members of Ukraine’s delegation in Davos — including lawmakers, the country’s foreign minister and the mayor of Kyiv — to stand up and be “welcomed” by the Davos crowd. They received a standing ovation.
On Sunday evening, a group of Ukrainian members of parliament called on the West to furnish more “NATO-style weaponry” to the Ukrainian military.
“You don’t need to die for us,” Yulia Klymenko, one of the lawmakers, told journalists. “But we are dying for you.”