Over four thousand servicemen, including soldiers from Poland, marched on Thursday along the streets of Kyiv in a festive parade on the Independence Day of Ukraine, celebrated on the 26th anniversary of the state’s Declaration of Independence.
The guests in the official gallery included heads of the defence ministries of Poland and the USA, Antoni Macierewicz and James Mattis, and of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Turkey, Montenegro, Moldova and Georgia, as well as representatives of Romania, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Addressing people gathered on the central square of the Ukrainian capital, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, President Petro Poroshenko said that on the 26th anniversary of independence Ukrainians can be congratulated on many successes, one of them being “the final break with the empire (…) that Ronald Reagan once called the ‘evil empire’”.
“We have won the fight for the ratification of the Association Agreement with the European Union. The Agreement enters into force on 1 September, in a week from now, and becomes a road map of reforms for us. And there is one road ahead of us: a wide Euro-Atlantic highway, which leads to the EU and NATO membership,” he said.
Before the parade, the President announced a minute’s silence for the soldiers and civilians who “died in the war declared by the Russian aggressor”. “More than ten thousands of Ukrainian lives are on the conscience of the Kremlin. We will never forget it or forgive it,” Poroshenko declared.
Soldiers representing all types of Ukrainian armed forces and military units of the Ministry of the Interior paraded along Khreshchatyk Street to Maidan Nezalezhnosti.
A sub-unit of the 21st Podhale Rifles Brigade, affiliated to the Lithuanian-Polish-Ukrainian Brigade with headquarters in Lublin, as well as sub-units from Georgia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Moldova and the USA also took part in the parade, along with colour guards from Estonia, Latvia and Romania.
Źródło: tvn24.pl/tłumaczenie Intertext.com.pl