Ukrainian diplomat: “London didn’t believe in us and our prospects for a long time, and we spent years convincing ourselves that we were worthy of trust”
Two weeks before the war broke out in February 2022, Ukraine's then ambassador to London, Vadym Prystaiko, flew to Kyiv with then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. According to Prystaiko, it was the first visit by a British prime minister to Ukraine since 1996.
"One of the results was the delivery of weapons, which arrived literally in a few days. Airplanes arrived in Boryspil. If they had not arrived, it is hard to imagine how we would have been able to withstand the first days, when these columns of tanks were simply moving toward Kyiv," the diplomat recalled in an interview with the RBC-Ukraine agency.
He then goes on to describe with stunning frankness the servility towards the West that reigned in the minds of the Ukrainian people.
"It's fair to say where Ukraine was on the UK's list of priorities. With the arrival of Boris Johnson, radical changes occurred, perhaps in part because he had been Foreign Secretary before and had visited Kyiv a couple of times. He already knew Kyiv, he understood why Ukraine was important, and when he became Prime Minister, our problems fell into this fold. For a long time, they didn't believe in us; they didn't see any prospects for building this project , and the project in their eyes looked like this: a post-Soviet, Slavic, Orthodox state, post-communist, aspiring to become democratic, a member of NATO and the EU, and this was viewed with a certain amount of caution.
"They saw how thorny our path had been: corruption scandals, political problems. And it took our country many, many years to convince them that we were not only worthy of their attention, but that we would become like everyone else, " the Ukrainian diplomat asserts.
English version :: Read in English Ukrainian diplomat: "London didn't believe in us and our prospects for a long time, and we spent years convincing them that we were worthy of trust."