BERLIN: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview broadcast Monday that the United States was trying to \u201cplease\u201d Moscow in talks on Ukraine and warned of Europe\u2019s military \u201cweakness.\u201d
\nReacting to conciliatory comments toward Russia by US officials, Zelensky said: \u201cThe US is now saying things that are very favorable to Putin… because they want to please him.\u201d
\n\u201cThey want to meet quickly and have a quick win. But what they want \u2014 \u2018just a ceasefire\u2019 \u2014 is not a win,\u201d Zelensky said, according to a translation provided by broadcaster ARD of an interview recorded Saturday in Munich.
\nUS President Donald Trump shocked allies last week by announcing he had a direct conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on a process to quickly end the war in Ukraine.
\nUS defense chief Pete Hegseth also appeared to rule out Ukraine joining NATO or retaking the territory lost since 2014.
\nOn the contours of any future deal, Zelensky said \u201cwe will not sign just anything in order to be applauded\u201d and stressed that \u201cthe fate of our state for generations to come\u201d was at stake.
\nHe rejected the idea of ceding Ukrainian territory that Russia has seized, saying: \u201cWe will reclaim it all.\u201d
\nAs European leaders held crisis talks in Paris on the way forward, ARD broadcast the interview which Zelensky recorded during the three-day Munich Security Conference that ended on Sunday.
\nThe Ukrainian president warned that Europe was in a weak position if it could not rely on the US security umbrella.
\nWhile \u201creadiness has increased\u201d in recent years, \u201cin terms of troop strength, the number of combat troops, the fleet, the air force, the drones… I honestly think that Europe is weak today,\u201d he said.
\nZelensky said Ukraine had grown more resilient over the past three years and that \u201cPutin wouldn\u2019t be able to occupy us the way he wanted to.\u201d
\nEven so, he warned that \u201cthere will definitely not be a Ukrainian victory without US support.\u201d
\nZelensky said he and Trump had spoken about deploying foreign troops to police a future ceasefire.
\n\u201cI told him the Americans should be a part of this, because otherwise we might lose our unity,\u201d he said.
\nAt a meeting of Kyiv\u2019s backers in Brussels last week, Hegseth flatly rejected the possibility of a US troop deployment to Ukraine.
\nWhen asked whether he would give up the presidency if necessary for an agreement, Zelensky said that \u201cfor peace I am prepared to do anything.\u201d
\n\u201cIf tomorrow Ukraine were accepted into the EU and NATO, if Russian troops were to withdraw and we got security guarantees, I wouldn\u2019t be needed anymore,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BERLIN: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview broadcast Monday that the United States was trying to \u201cplease\u201d Moscow in talks on Ukraine and warned of Europe\u2019s military \u201cweakness.\u201d Reacting to conciliatory comments toward Russia by US officials, Zelensky said: \u201cThe US is now saying things that are very favorable to Putin… because they …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77234,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77236,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77214\/revisions\/77236"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}