Left to right: British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel, listening to Ukrainian President Zelensky speak via video at the British Parliament.| Photo: EFE/JESSICA TAYLOR

“We will not surrender,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky stressed Tuesday in the first speech by a foreign leader to members of the UK House of Commons.

“We will fight in the forests, in the fields, on the banks and in the streets,” Zelensky said in a video conference, paraphrasing one of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s most famous speeches in World War II. “We will not surrender and we will not lose. We will fight to the end by sea and by air, we will continue to fight for our land, whatever the cost.”

The Ukrainian president compared his country’s struggle to that of the British to defend the United Kingdom from Nazi Germany in World War II: “You didn’t want to lose your country when the Nazis wanted to take it away. You fought for it”, he analyzed.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson later praised Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion and said the UK would use “all available methods, diplomatic, humanitarian and economic” to ensure the Kremlin “fails”. After thanking the British prime minister for supporting the Ukrainian government, Zelensky urged the UK to go further in sanctions against Russia and to promote a no-fly zone in Ukraine’s skies to prevent Russian bombing.