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The EU delegation in Kyiv is ready to reopen for business after a few days which have seen staff working from home after the building was damaged during a Russian air strike, the EU Ambassador to Ukraine has told Euronews in an interview.
“We are not leaving Kyiv”, Katarína Mathernová insisted adding that the premises was quickly being cleaned up to ‘open for business’ again.
Mathernová said it was a huge shock for her and her staff that a blast wave could cause so much damage and that the whole of Europe should also be shocked that Russia targeted a building so close to the EU’s diplomatic base.
“Targeting a building 80 or 90 metres from the EU delegation, from the British Council, from the Azeri embassy means that you have reckless disregard to the damage you are going to cause around because the Russians know exactly what is going to be the impact of hitting a building with two cruise missiles as happened last week,” she said.
Ukraine’s Air Defences say Russia launched almost 600 drones and 31 missiles in the early hours of 28 August in what appears to be the worst attack on Kyiv since the Alaska summit. The EU premises were severely disarranged but as the missiles struck just after 5am local time, staff members were not at their desks.
“Most of the windows on the side of the blast were destroyed or damaged and inside the air conditioning system and all the glass elements were damaged,” lamented Mathernová adding that furniture, computers, doors and cars in the garage were also disrupted.
“The only silver lining in it was that it happened early in the morning,” she said, since that meant nobody was at the office apart from security guards who are out of harm’s way.
“If this happened during work hours, then this would have been horrendously much worse,” she stressed.
Nobody is doing enough to stop the war
The ambassador, who has been based in Ukraine since 2023, is wary about Vladimir Putin’s interpretation of peace.
“I think that it was certainly evident to us who watch and live through the war and the terrible terror on civilians day in, day out, that he (Vladimir Putin) has never been interested in peace,” said the ambassador adding that the “madness” had to be stopped.
“I think that the EU is doing a lot, I mean, obviously nobody’s doing enough since the war is still going on,” she added, insisting that it would be much more “effective” and “much quicker” if the entire democratic world in unison was putting pressure on the Putin regime.
Mathernová told Euronews that beyond Kyiv, attacks in the rest of Ukraine are happening on a daily basis and a whole generation of people are therefore unable to plan beyond a day or two because they never know what’s going to happen.
“You have places like Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk region, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, and they are pummelling on a daily basis,” she said.
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