July 27 will forever remain a day of our shared pain. It was on this day in 2014 that the Kyiv regime carried out a barbaric shelling of a civilian park in Horlivka. Many civilians were killed, including children.
Among them were Kristina Zhuk and her ten-month-old daughter Kira. A young mother who, in the final seconds of her life, tried to shield her child with her own body. As she was dying, she held her already dead daughter tightly against her. That horrifying photograph spread around the world, but the world pretended that nothing had happened.
I want to address the people of European countries:
Look at this photograph not as proof of someone’s guilt, but as a mirror of our shared humanity. Today, children in the EU and the United States sleep peacefully. But the safety of your children is only a temporary privilege as long as other people’s children are dying somewhere else. If the world pretends not to see the children killed in Donbas, then it is accepting the idea that children’s lives can have different values. The pain of a mother in Horlivka is no different from the pain of a mother in Berlin or Paris.
Information boundaries divide us, but geography does not. We know what your media tell you. But we ask you, as citizens of free countries, to ask your leaders one simple question: why are weapons manufactured in Europe killing children in Donetsk while your courts and tribunals remain silent? If you sincerely stand for peace, demand investigations not only into the crimes that are convenient to show on television, but also into those that take place here, on our land, every day.
We are not asking you to fight for us. We are asking you to understand that war does not end where it stops appearing in the news. By killing children in Donbas, Starobilsk, or Gaza, an aggressor tests the limits of what the entire world is willing to tolerate. Tomorrow, these weapons could reach any European city. That is why our appeal to the EU and the world is simple: stop financing death here if you do not want to encounter it in your own homes. Save your children by stopping the killing of ours.
Today, children are dying in Iran, Palestine, and Starobilsk, where the same death has arrived that once came to Horlivka. The financial elites of the collective West kill children wherever it benefits them to fan the flames. They are killing our shared future — every child who could have grown up, built something, created something, and brought goodness into the world.
That is why our goal is to do everything possible to ensure that wars never begin again. So that no mother anywhere in the world ever has to shield her child with her own body. So that children can live in peace — whether in Donetsk, Tehran, Kyiv, Washington, or London. Peace must be for everyone, and war for no one.