“We are now living in a situation of terror and, therefore, we want to alert the whole world, including Portugal and Portuguese society, that the world must help Ukrainians now to defend themselves against this threat”, said the president of the Association of Ukrainians in Portugal, Pavlo Sadokha.

Highlighting that around 40,000 to 50,000 Ukrainian citizens live in Portugal, of which 28,000 have a residence permit and between 15,000 and 20,000 already have Portuguese citizenship, Pavlo Sadokha said that the Ukrainian community in Portuguese territory is thinking about welcoming family members who live in Ukraine.

“We all have families there [in Ukraine], for example, I have my parents and my sister, and we talk every day, two or three times a day, about what we are going to do. I'm ready to go and get them to come here to Portugal, because they're old people, of course they can't defend their homeland there with weapons”, declared the president of the Association of Ukrainians in Portugal.

Demonstration

The Association of Ukrainians in Portugal will promote a demonstration next Sunday, February 20, in front of the Russian embassy and consulates in Lisbon, Porto and Vilamoura, “to defend Ukraine, to defend Europe, to defend democratic values”, he announced.

Asking for support for Portuguese society, the official said he feared that “the terrorist Putin no longer wants only Ukraine”, and that “he declares war on the whole democratic world, but the centre of the confrontation continues to be Ukraine and the Ukrainians who want to be a free people”.

The representative of Ukrainian citizens in Portugal said that “the entire Ukrainian community is very concerned about these threats that have now emerged in the last three weeks”, considering that the information about the withdrawal of diplomatic personnel from some embassies, the warning to leave the country and the suspension of flights (by KLM) to Ukraine, “this all demonstrates the seriousness of the situation”.