Vytautas Landsbergis, the first post-independence leader of Lithuania, wrote a public letter to the leaders of Germany, urging them to stop imports of Russian oil and gas amid Moscow’s continuing war on Ukraine.
Dear President Steinmeier,
Dear Chancellor Scholz,
Every day in Ukraine women, children, elderly are being raped, tortured, shot or killed by bombs, their bodies left to rot in the streets or, in the act of supreme, inhuman cruelty and cynicism, have landmines attached to them.
And yet, as on so many occasions before – after Auschwitz, Belsen, and Babi Yar, after Rwanda, Kosovo, and Srebrenica – the world keeps repeating “never again” but simultaneously fails to act. The UN is self-humiliating.
So far, the European Union has pledged one billion euro for Ukraine. So far, the European Union pays one billion euro for Russian oil and gas per day, in that way financing the war criminal.
How many more – hundreds or thousands – bodies need to be discovered after barbarous Russian “liberation”, how many Mariupols and Buchas need to be destroyed for the European Union governments to make one simple act of bravery – to cut off the Kremlin’s regime from its major source of income, gas and oil export?
Thus, if we truly mean “never again”, the time to act is now. The alternative or inaction is “do it again and again”.
Every single day when you pay for Russian oil and gas, you pay for Putin’s tanks to rampage through Ukrainian land, you pay him to kill, maim, and destroy.
Every day when your government withholds German weaponry, tanks, artillery, and ammunition from being sold or given to Ukraine, you are facilitating Moscow’s aggression.
Every further day of war means that hundreds of women, children, and men – human beings who were born into this life for happiness and peace, just as you and we – will die violently, in horrendous suffering and pain, raped, tortured, and abandoned.
Do not become complicit in its crimes through inaction, indifference, egotism, or fear. Do not let self-interest paralyse you.
Every day when your authorities permit supporters of Russian war crimes to wave war criminals’ flags in German streets, you insult the memory of their victims.
This needs to stop. The war and killing needs to stop. And it is within your power to embargo Russian oil and gas; to ban supporters of Russian war criminals and Russian propaganda; and provide more needed weapons to Ukraine.
Our German Friends – we trust in you, in your conscience and moral feeling.
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