France, Italy, Brazil, Germany, and most friends and allies of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, including some of his die-hard admirers in the West; United States and the Asia- China to be precise stunned by Putin’s sheer audacity and savagery against a sovereign state, Ukraine are squirmed and have no word of support for their old friend. Each one have rather guarded speech which condemns, even subtly, the aggressive action of Russia against its closest neigbour, Ukraine, even as European countries, peeved by Putin’s menacing act have banned Russian airlines from flying their airspace.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally party, and a trusted friend of Putin said, while opposing NATO, denounced Putin’s military aggression Friday, saying, “I think that what he has done is completely reprehensible. It changes, in part, the opinion I had of him.”
In Britain, Nigel Farage, a key proponent of Brexit, had not believed that Russia would invade Ukraine.
“Well, I was wrong,” he wrote on Twitter on Thursday, although he maintained that the European Union and NATO had unnecessarily provoked Russia with expansion. “Putin has gone much further than I thought he would.”
The last major leader to visit Putin before the war, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, who was once told by Putin that he expressed “the best masculine qualities,” has decided instead to hold his tongue. But he perhaps showed his hand when he rebuked his vice president for saying that Brazil opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Silvio Berlusconi, a former prime minister of Italy who wore furry hats with the Russian in his dacha in Sochi and received a “big bed” from Putin as a gift, has condemned the violence but had not said anything publicly about his old pal. It’s not clear whether he had reached out to Putin, but he apparently told his party’s members in a phone call that he was putting his international relations at the service of peace and the defense of Europe.
“I spoke to Berlusconi last night. He is very worried and is almost terrified by what is happening,” Giorgio Mulè, an undersecretary of defense in Berlusconi’s party, said on Italian radio Friday. He added, “He just doesn’t see in Vladimir Putin the person he’d known.”
As a way of showing their disapproval of the Russian Attack against Ukraine, a growing number of countries announced Sunday that they were closing their airspace to Russian planes in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain joined at least a dozen European countries that had made similar announcements.
“There is no room in Dutch airspace for a regime that applies unnecessary and brutal violence,” the infrastructure minister for the Netherlands, Mark Harbers, said on Twitter.
Denmark’s minister of foreign affairs, Jeppe Kofod, said he would push for Russian aircraft to be banned from the entirety of the European Union’s airspace at a meeting of the bloc’s ministers of foreign affairs Sunday.
Low-cost, Hungary-based airline Wizz Air also said Sunday that it would cancel its flights to Russia for at least a week. The airline said that, because of the sanctions imposed on Russia by the European Union and the United States, it would not be able to access spare parts for its planes in Russia.
Britain has banned all flights by Russia’s flagship carrier, Aeroflot, from its airspace, and German airline Lufthansa said Saturday that it would not use Russian airspace for the next week.
Germany banned Russian aircraft, with the exception of humanitarian flights, from its airspace starting Sunday for the next three months.
In response to the measures, the Russian government has banned flights from several European countries, and S7, Russia’s second-largest airline, suspended its flights to Europe.
With Reports From New York Times