Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, where they viewed Pablo Picasso’s iconic Guernica – a move laden with symbolism.
The Guernica painting depicts the horrors of the bombing by Nazi German and Italian war planes of the small Basque town of Guernica in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War.
In a 2022 address to the Spanish House of Deputies, Zelenskyy compared the bombing of Guernica to the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Zelenskyy’s tour of European capitals underscores Ukraine’s urgent need to reassure allies and continue to shore up support, amid growing pressures as a damaging corruption scandal and other domestic strains threaten to divert attention from the war effort.
