Excerpts of the speech of Kira Rudik, Member of Parliament, Leader of the Voice Party of Ukraine, at the Free Iran 2022, is as follows:
Dear friends, thank you so much for this warm welcome. It means a world to me. When I first spoke to you, it was one of the first days of the war. At that moment, I decided to arm myself and bore a gun as a sign of all Ukrainian people willing to defend our country, to defend it with our own lives. The war is not over right now and that we have to continue fighting, and we will continue fighting till the victory.
I’m here today to share some of the lessons that we learned. The first lesson is the pain. The pain that you feel when you learn about how many children are killed every single day. And it’s more than 400 children that have been killed over four and a half months of war. It is the price that we are paying for our country to exist, for our people to continue being free.
And it is in a normal price. It is killing myself every single day. It is like crying inside and out, and I do not know what can stop this pain. The second lesson is the lesson of unity. We learned that you can only fight, and you can only win if you are not alone.
You know, since the beginning of the war, we have received so much support from all over the world, from the people that we never met, from the people we do not know who were sending us their love support, from the countries who were indifferent to us, who now are sending us weapons, money, humanitarian support.
And I want to send to every single person who is sending us good weapons and good thoughts because it all matters equally. Because we know that we are not alone in this world, and we are not fighting for ourselves.
We are fighting for the overall freedom, we are fighting for the democracy. People of free Iran and giving me so much support, so much energy for the strength to move forward. And I was thinking, they are not our allies, they are not even our friends. They are our brothers and sisters because they definitely know what we are going through.
Now, the lesson that I want to share with you is the lesson of the dangerous word peace. Recently we have heard so many times, oh, aren’t you guys willing for a peace? Don’t you want a peace in your country? Well, excuse me, peace is very dangerous word. It implies that at some point we will stop fighting.
I can tell you we will not stop fighting. We are a sovereign country and our territories have been taken from us.
There is another word that I like and another word that I’m aiming and the other words that people of Ukraine are aiming. And this word is victory. And we are fighting till the victory to get the justice for every single Ukrainian who put their own lives to defend our own lives and our democracy, our freedom, our values, everything that we are standing for.
The next lesson that I want to share with you is love. There is so much love every single day that is flowing in the air with all the pain, with the terror, when people are united more than ever, when people give each other their hands, their homes, their food, when people know that we are Ukrainians, and it means that we are extremely brave.
You know, the saying that is so popular right now that I have seen in every single country all over the world be brave like Ukraine. Well, I can promise you, with the love and bravery, we will take our country not only to the win in this war, but as example that every single tyrant in the world can be defeated. Every single tyrant who decides that he can oppose democracy, that he can oppose people’s wills, will be defeated. One of my closest friends said when he went to the front, I want this war to end on our generation.
I do not want our children to go through it again, again and again. Because what we know from the history is this tyranny, if it’s not defeated, it will definitely return. So for us, it is a matter of full victory, because we 100% do not want our children and any next generation to go through the hell that we are going through.
The last question and the last lesson is the lesson of them resolve. Most of you whom I met in Ashraf – 3 were asking me how will we keep him up? What drives us every morning to stand up and have the same energy and same powers, to fight same way and even stronger than we were fighting yesterday? Well, I can only quote here somebody who told me something very wise we can, and we must.
Mrs. Rajavi, I want to thank you for your support. I want to thank all of you for the love and care that you surround all of us and for an incredible support that free people of Iran are giving to free people of Ukraine.
We are standing together, and I can promise you that we will win our war, and you will win your war. For the democracies in the whole world, for the freedom in the holy world. Slava Ukraini, glory to Ukraine, glory to the Free Iran.
