Lisbon Chamber joins the “global solidarity erasure”
The Lisbon Chamber will join today in the late afternoon the “global solidarity erasure with Ukraine” and turn off the lighting of Praça do Município and Marquês de Pombal, announced the municipality.
In a message released on the social network Twitter, the municipality indicates that it will still allow the lighting of the Castelo de São Jorge and the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, as well as the Christmas tree of Terreiro do Paço.
The solidarity campaign was launched by the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and is entitled “#LightUpUkraine”, calling for the switching off of lights in support of the Ukrainian people affected by blackouts caused by Russian attacks on energy infrastructure.
On Tuesday, the Porto Chamber also announced that it will join the campaign, turning off the lights in the City Hall and the Christmas tree.
In the middle of the Christmas season, monuments from all over the world, such as the Rockefeller Center, in New York, Trafalgar Square, in London, or Paris City Hall, are expected to join the initiative, according to a statement released by the Ukrainian Government cited by the agency Efe.
The campaign also intends to raise at least ten million dollars (about 9.4 million euros) to finance the purchase of 1,000 electric generators, to allow the operation of Ukrainian hospitals.
On Monday, in a call for solidarity, Zelensky underlined that when blackouts plunge people into darkness for hours, it means that the enemy not only wants to take away the light, but “everything that is part of life” of citizens.
“This is how we live in Ukraine now, defending ourselves against an enemy that came to destroy us,” he said.
On that day, the city of Kiev and ten regions of Ukraine were supported by cuts in the electricity supply, after a new wave of ‘drone’ attacks by Russian forces, advanced the Ukrainian operator Ukrenergo.
In recent months, Moscow has been attacking power infrastructure, leaving millions of Ukrainians without electricity, a situation that raises concerns about winter.
The military offensive launched on February 24 by Russia in Ukraine caused at least 6.5 million internally displaced people and more than 7.8 million refugees to European countries, so the United Nations classifies this refugee crisis as the worst in Europe since World War II (1939-1945).
Right now, 17.7 million Ukrainians are in need of humanitarian aid and 9.3 million recipients of food aid and housing.
The UN presented as confirmed since the beginning of the war 6,755 dead civilians and 10,607 wounded, underlining that these numbers are far below the real ones.