Thursday, 5 March 2026

 Michael GALEA (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (10:03): Yesterday we marked a very solemn anniversary: four years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Indeed we also acknowledge 12 years since the terrorist regime in Moscow first invaded the Ukrainian lands of Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. Over the past few months cities across Ukraine, including Kyiv, have been subjected to intolerable conditions in the peak of their winter through deliberate, targeted and barbaric attacks on energy infrastructure. It is a city that I was proud to visit just under a year ago – a modern, forward-looking democratic city under siege and under attack. Its energy network was crippled. It has thankfully now been restored but remains under bombardment from drones which were made and supplied by another terrorist regime, in Tehran. Those drones and bombs that were being used and practised with on Ukraine are now being used across a much larger scope of the world, and I extend my sympathies to all the people in that region as well who are going through incredible hardship and indeed to all those people who are fighting valiantly against extreme persecution for their freedom in places like Tehran, just as the Ukrainians did in the Maidan over a decade ago. May Ukraine continue to prosper, and may it win this war. Slava Ukraini.