Speeches

Madam President, dear High Commissioner, dear colleagues, I think that we tend to have this debate or take it from the bad end. And, you know, we sometimes tend to discuss who is the one to be blamed, who is the one behind this conflict. And many people say it's Israel. Israel who is stealing land from the Palestinians, who is preventing them from enjoying their freedoms and all that. I think the one who is to blame is Hamas, not Israel. Hamas started the war. Hamas was the one. Or they were the ones who attacked on 7 October. They are the ones who are hiding behind civilians. They are the ones who are using schools and hospitals as shelters for their fighters. They are the ones who are stealing humanitarian aid from the people who need it. They are the ones who are still keeping Israeli hostages in Palestinian, in Gazan tunnels. There is nothing to discuss.

Mr President, dear Commissioner, dear colleagues, I can see that the debate about freedom of speech and all the freedoms that we value and cherish can be pretty tough. I would say that the Radio Free Europe is a matter of the heart for people from Central and Eastern Europe and from the Balkans as well, because it served as a window into the free world for the people of countries that were under communist regimes and under communist and totalitarian suppression. And it serves as such a tool for us even today, not into the countries which are in Europe, but which are outside of Europe. Some of them are geographically in Europe, some of them are more distant. For me, actually, this debate is not only about Radio Free Europe and how it's going to be financed. It's about our approach and relationship with the United States as such. The world is changing. We have a president of the United States who denies what the United States have been building for the last 80 years. He's stepping out from many, many things that we have achieved together, and the US is actually becoming an unreliable and unpredictable partner, and we must be ready for that. I think that it's time for Europe now to stand up and be the one who has the duty and knows that he has the duty to defend all the freedoms that we are talking about, and for that we must be proactive, determined and courageous.

Mr President, dear colleagues from Bosnia and Herzegovina, I admit to you that I am amazed that there are still people among us who claim and are convinced that Russia is not our enemy, that it does us no harm, that we are not at war with it. Unfortunately, we are at war with him, we are at war with him in a hybrid war that is being fought, among other things, in the Balkans. And I wonder if the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina reminds us of anything. A political representative of one entity in a European country, a country that aspires to become a member of the European Union, openly asks Russia for help. He asks Russia to vote against the Dayton Agreement and what is actually keeping the peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As far as Ukraine is concerned, we all know. We experience it every day now. We are now in a situation where we have to send troops to Bosnia and Herzegovina so that what I watched as a little boy on TV news in the mid-1990s does not happen again. And if anyone doesn't realize that Russia is trying to weaken us with this, they are, I apologize, either completely out of line, or they are taking sides with Russia and its subordinate Milorad Dodik. I don't want to have to send troops to Bosnia. I want us to be able to send funds there for the construction of schools, kindergartens, hospitals, infrastructure, and that is why, among other things, my colleagues from the European Parliament and I are going to travel to Bosnia at the beginning of April to see for ourselves what the state of affairs is and to continue working on Bosnia and Herzegovina successfully becoming a member of the European Union accordingly.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, four years ago, Aliaksandr Lukashenka stole the election from the Belarusian people and proclaimed himself a president for the sixth time. Since then, the repressions against his own people have hardened. The regime brutally suppressed all protests. Freedoms which we enjoy and are used to in our society simply ceased to exist in Belarus. Many of Lukashenka's opponents had to leave the country. Those who didn't ended up behind bars, tortured and deprived of their basic rights. Some have even disappeared. Lukashenka has made Belarus a puppet state completely in the hands of Russia's barbaric regime, which abuses Belarus in many ways, including its brutal war against Ukraine and hybrid pressure on the European Union. And I am more than sure that Lukashenka will steal the election – if we may call it so – again this week. We all know that, yet we have been unable to find ways how to counter this. We've been unable to find ways how to help those Belarusians who want to live in freedom. And we need to change that. We must impose effective sanctions on the Belarusian regime and companies, and prevent their circumvention, we must find effective visa policies that would help those who are unsafe in Belarus, and much more. Please let the tabled resolution be a guidebook on what needs to be done.

Madam President, dear colleagues, I think we are very good in producing various resolutions and condemning everything that we can. But I remember or recall that there were times in the past, not too long ago, when these resolutions and proclamations of outrage and condemnation were somehow backed up by concrete, real action. And what about now? As I said, we have numerous proclamations, we have various resolutions, we condemn, we are outraged, we stand by someone, we change pictures on our social networks. Yet we let the aggressor push us back. We see Russia siding with Iran, siding with North Korea, and all we do is produce another resolution condemning whatever they do. I think that we must stop shouting, you know? We must find the lost courage and finally back up the resolutions by serious action.

Madam President, dear colleagues, I have to be honest that I hate listening to lamentations about things being too complicated or impossible. We cannot on one hand assert electromobility and on the other overlook floating ecological time bombs which Putin sails across the seas. We repeatedly put ourselves one step behind those who endanger us and our friends by being unable to adopt solutions that may seem harsh or even radical at the moment, but which are in fact very much needed. While we hesitate to effectively prevent or even stop Russia from smuggling oil and whatever else around the world, the UK has imposed sanctions on another 22 Russian shadow tankers last week. Let me quote a first‑ranked Ukrainian Navy captain, Andryi Ryzhenko, who said that it is necessary to identify the shipping companies and vessels, impose sanctions on them that will prohibit them from insuring these tankers, accepting them in ports and paying them. Wouldn't it be nice to come up with one bold solution instead of fabricating hundreds of resolutions? It would not only help us, but also Ukraine, where Putin is continuing his killing spree, financed, among others, with the money he earns on smuggled oil.

Mr President, dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, I would firstly like to remind my colleague that it's actually Russia that is interfering with Georgian affairs, because Russia is occupying one fifth of Georgian territory. Anyway, two years ago, when I was in Georgia with our national parliamentary delegation, during the meetings that we had with officials, members of the opposition and the civic society, I unfortunately gained an impression that the ruling party is actually playing games with us and that the opposition is helping that by being unable to unite and to really oppose the ruling party's actions. Despite their assurances, the ruling politicians had set up on a path which leads away from Europe and towards Russia. Much has been said about the legislation, which is more or less a copy-paste version of Russian anti-freedom and anti-democracy laws. During my aforementioned visit, I always referred to the EU as a space of freedom, democracy and prosperity and I feel that it is our duty to stabilise this space and to enlarge it: the bigger we are, the stronger we are. That is the truth. Sometimes I hear that we are not at war with Russia. Unfortunately, we are fighting a hybrid war with Russia – a war for, among other things, influence. And if we lose Georgia, we lose one of the battles for our space of freedom and shared values, and we will be left with another state at our doorstep which is hostile to us and mainly to its citizens. Georgia cannot afford that and we cannot afford that.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, I am very grateful that we are speaking about this topic, because these types of declarations and resolutions are very necessary and most needed because they show that we care. The only thing I'm asking myself from time to time is if they are enough, if we are doing enough, and if everything that we do works. Because whenever I talk to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya or her colleagues, they are very grateful for everything that we do, for all the support that they are getting from us, but they always say that we should be more specific – for example, in naming those whom we want to impose our sanctions on, like the Belarusian KGB – that we should rethink our visa policies towards the families of Belarusian political prisoners, and that we should stop believing that such campaigns as, for example, sending letters to Lukashenka's opponents in prison, to some effect, work. In fact, the letters never get delivered. That's what I'm getting from my Belarusian friends. Please let us bear this in mind when we negotiate with the exiled representatives of Free Belarus.

Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, I'm sure you've all heard or read about Ulysses, a Greek king who took part in the siege of the city of Troy, which lasted for years and was very exhausting. Now, Ulysses is the one who found a solution to this never-ending war. His master plan was to build a big wooden horse which was hollow on the inside and presented to the Trojans as a token of Greek appreciation and surrender. The Greek armies have falsely left the shores of Troy. Yet the big horse which was left behind was too big to fit through the gates of the city, and the Trojans had to dismantle parts of the fortification in order to get the horse through and inside the city walls. After the celebrations of Troy and victory, when the Trojans fell asleep, the hollow horse opened and Greek soldiers climbed out to signal the hidden armies, which then burned Troy to the ground. Now, thousands of years later, we have one of our own who is opening our door to our enemy. Yet it's happening at the same time, when the Czech Foreign Minister, Jan Lipavský, has come up with an initiative to actually ban Russian diplomats from moving freely around the EU. And I regret to say that Viktor Orbán's government is currently letting Vladimir Putin's Trojan horse inside EU walls.

Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, I'm very grateful for all the help we've been delivering to Ukraine since February 2022. I've been to Ukraine three times myself since that time, to Khmelnytskyi, to Kyiv, to Kharkiv. I've seen the amount of destruction. I've seen the fates of the people. And it's horrible, in one word. However, although we are sending large amounts of help, we tend to draw red lines to ourselves, and we tend to play by Vladimir Putin's rules, and that is something we need to stop. We need to stop drawing these red lines to ourselves and stop pretending that talking about peace is something forbidden. We must lift absurd restrictions that we've imposed on ourselves and the Ukrainians as well. We must let the Ukrainians shoot with whatever they need, whenever they need and wherever they need. They need our weapons for defence, not for parades.