Arab News Japan

TOKYO: Ukraine’s Ambassador to Japan Sergiy Korsunsky on Friday says that aid from friendly countries has been vital to his country’s survival and that its infrastructure is being rebuilt to help people regain some sense of normality in their lives.

Talking to journalists at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he said: “Even for you, it is a huge surprise that we have found that the Ukrainian infrastructure is much more resilient than expected. For example the railway system – it is amazing the operation of it – and it works and we are open to the community of nations, and this is something you could not expect in a country to which 5,000 missiles have been coming.”

The ambassador said it was difficult to estimate how many homes had been destroyed but settled on 150,000 as a current figure. He also noted that hundreds of hospitals had been destroyed and thousands more targeted by and hit by Russian artillery. In addition, he said that dozens of universities had been hit.

“The problem is not in figures,” he said. “The problem is that we have begun to restore things and we are surviving this winter with financial help from the world. Generators – this word ‘generators’ has probably reverberated in every capital around the globe. Specifically, the EU the US and Japan sent hundreds of them, big and small, for different purposes.”

“When you go now in Kyiv you will see that offices are open, restaurants are open, small bakeries bake food and all of them have a generator outside. It is very noisy, polluting the air, but this is a small problem compared to staying without electricity. We were able to repair our major utility grids.”

Korsunsky was both impressed and grateful that Yokohama sent major water-cleaning equipment to his country. He also gave a shoutout to other countries such as Lithuania and Poland that were contributing to the rebuilding process.

“We want to rebuild Ukraine, we want to modernize it becausewe are on the way to membership in the EU,” he said. “It’s not the number of what has been destroyed, but the number of what has been rebuilt.  For us it is more important now.”

US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel shrugged off Russian claims that NATO was intent on expanding east. He said EasternEurope is expanding west: “Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Sweden and Finland was not because NATO went east. They saw a future, a set of values and a set of ideas.”

Rahm also said the US was fighting for nuclear non-proliferation: “The US has been in the forefront of the battle for nuclear non-proliferation and the consequences of the spread of nuclear weapons whether it is here or North Korea. We are dealing with China, trying to get it into some sort of international system, as well as Iran.”