War has “returned” to Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech broadcast on Saturday to mark Independence Day, in which he said Moscow “will know what retaliation is” for invading his country in 2022.
Russia wanted to “destroy us” but the war “came home,” he said in a video recorded, he said, in the border area from where Ukrainian forces launched a large surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region on August 6.
Ukraine celebrates its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 on Saturday. On the same day, Zelensky signed a law banning the Orthodox Church linked to Russia in Ukraine.
The country has been trying to distance itself from the Russian Church since 2014, and efforts have accelerated since the Russian invasion in February 2022.
Zelensky signed the law into law on Saturday, which was approved by the Ukrainian parliament on Tuesday and harshly criticized by Moscow.
The move will strengthen his country’s independence, the Ukrainian president said in a speech: “Ukrainian Orthodox Christians today take a step towards liberation from the demons of Moscow”.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church officially separated from the Moscow Patriarchate in 2022, but Ukrainian authorities repeatedly accuse its clerics of remaining loyal to Russia.
The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, a staunch ally of President Vladimir Putin, has backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In his video on the occasion of Ukraine’s 33rd Independence Day, Zelensky said that with its offensive in Kursk, in southern Russia, kyiv “once again surprised” Moscow and promised that Russia “will know what retaliation is.”
“Whoever wants to sow evil in our land will reap the fruits of the evil in their own territory,” he added. “This is not a prediction, nor gloating, nor blind revenge. It is justice,” he added.
The Ukrainian incursion in Kursk surprised Russian forces and authorities but has not stopped their advance on the eastern Ukrainian front.