The People of Ukraine
At the 2022 Captive Nations Summit, VOC was honored for Mrs. Olena Zelenska, the First Lady of Ukraine, to accept the Dissident Human Rights Award on behalf of the people of Ukraine for their brave fight for freedom against Russia’s brutal war of aggression.
Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska remarked that, “Communism is just another form of totalitarianism. The system that attacks you can have different names, but we always recognize totalitarianism by its main features; aggression, violence, and complete disrespect and devaluation of human life. That is exactly what Ukraine is facing today because of Russia’s aggression…Ukrainian authorities who refuse to cooperate with the invaders are tortured. In a town near Kyiv, the Russians shot a local mayor just for distributing bread and medicine to the people. Over a million of Ukrainians were forcibly deported to Russia already.”
Speaking of VOC’s newly opened Museum, the First Lady commented, “There are three photographs of Ukrainian dissidents who are exhibited in the halls of this museum…Ukrainians are going through all this pain again as a result of Russia’s aggression. The 20th century is repeating this in its worst and ugliest forms.”
The First Lady closed by saying, “We send a strong warning to the world: Remember the darkest past can be easily repeated. In certain places the darkness has never faded away. It just figured out how to operate more advanced weaponry and use social media. We are not only fighting for our freedom today, we are also fighting so that Stalin’s great terror will no longer be repeated anywhere in the civilized world.”
