Kyiv, from our correspondent: “Reading Donald Trump’s latest post addressed to Vladimir Putin? It was like hearing the sound of a gunshot,” says Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, seated at the short side of a large white meeting table. The meeting takes place in a modern hall with LED lights and rows of screens on the walls, used to monitor live movements at the front and facilitate secure conversations with generals in the field. This is the Kyiv situation room. Zelensky wears his usual exhausted expression but speaks with the energetic tone that has become his trademark. The day before our meeting, the new U.S. president, via social media, had warned Putin that if he did not end this “ridiculous war,” then “IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE”. Zelensky noted, “When Trump says ‘worse,’ he means worse for Russia. It is important for a strong leader to send this message to Putin. The American president says he really wants to end the war.” For now, however, no one knows Trump’s peace plan. We ask Zelensky if he believes that Trump himself has a clear strategy. “I think he’s not clear on the details. Almost everything depends on what we Ukrainians can secure to protect ourselves, because we will not make the mistakes of the past again. And it also depends on Putin—if he wants to stop the invasion. I think he doesn’t.” The past mistakes Zelensky refers to are twofold, and in one case, he acknowledges his own responsibility. The first mistake is the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine agreed to surrender its nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees from the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom that they would protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Those guarantees, however, proved empty. “We discovered at great cost how dangerous it is to exchange something real—atomic weapons—for words written on water. We should have exchanged our weapons for concrete security guarantees, which at that time meant one thing: NATO. Today, it still means one thing: NATO.” Zelensky points out that NATO countries do not suffer invasions, while Ukraine, having trusted in weak security assurances, has suffered two. “Our recent history is why we are no longer willing to surrender what belongs to us without a serious assurance of peace in return. In exchange for surrendering our nuclear weapons, we got war.” Zelensky explained to Trump how the Budapest Memorandum failed Ukraine in the 1990s, and he described what happened during the Normandy-format peace talks with Russia in the 2000s. His message to Trump was clear: don’t let yourself be deceived. He believes Trump, who dislikes being outsmarted or losing, is particularly receptive to this kind of argument. In 2019, the year Zelensky was elected, peace talks under the Normandy format were frozen. Yet the new president dedicated his first, heartfelt address to the nation to the importance of negotiating with Russia and ending the fire in Donbas. The talks resumed, but once Zelensky found himself seated between Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin, he had a sinking feeling: the German chancellor and the Russian president seemed more focused on ensuring that Russian gas continued flowing through Ukraine to the European Union than on securing a prisoner exchange and a ceasefire agreement in Donbas. That ceasefire would, in fact, be short-lived. From the Ukrainian perspective, the 2019 pact—on which Zelensky had staked his political capital despite fierce domestic opposition—benefited Russia, ensured Europe got its gas, and left Ukraine with nothing but ongoing war. That was the second mistake. If the conflict were frozen today—already a difficult goal—Ukrainians would find themselves once again living beside danger, next to an active volcano, “with a serial killer in their backyard.” To achieve a lasting truce, Zelensky insists on stronger guarantees than those that failed in the past. For him, these guarantees have only one name: NATO. But NATO membership entails more than words; it requires military arrangements, American bases on member territory, U.S.-made weapons, and American soldiers. The prospect of the Trump administration investing heavily in bases, weapons, and troops for Ukraine seems unlikely, even in the event of a truce. We ask Zelensky whether he would trust an alternative guarantee, such as a joint defense pact with the UK, Poland, and the Baltic countries. According to him, “If the Americans are not involved, the Europeans will under no circumstances take responsibility for stopping the Russians.” He points to the example of UNIFIL, the international peacekeeping force that failed to prevent a new war on the Israel-Lebanon border. We also ask Zelensky if he envies Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for Israel’s robust international defense network. Zelensky responds with a half-smile. He emphasizes that achieving a ceasefire requires simultaneously building practical conditions to avert a new invasion three months—or three years—later. “With President Trump, I talked in detail about the 2019 meetings and about how Putin often breaks his word. This is the most important thing to keep in mind during negotiations. If the other side doesn’t keep its promises and often lies, then you need exceptional conditions to ensure Putin understands that breaking promises and restarting the war is no longer an option.” Zelensky also spoke with Trump about the Budapest Memorandum. “If I could go back to 1994, I would only trade our nuclear weapons for something that could truly deter any aggressor, regardless of their political power, territorial size, or military strength. Trump said, ‘Yes, I understand what you’re saying.’ You cannot make the same mistake three times.” Zelensky also noted that Giorgia Meloni was the only European leader invited to the U.S. president’s swearing-in ceremony: “This is good news for Italy. Perhaps this privileged channel of dialogue will benefit Europe, and I hope it will benefit Ukraine too. Beyond the roles we play, we are all people—Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, and I—and the relationships we establish matter. I have a wonderful relationship with her. I consider her loyal and a friend. I know that Trump trusts her, and I only hope Meloni’s relationship with the American president isn’t better than the one she has with me!” Zelensky says this with an actor’s smile. We ask the Ukrainian president if three years of war, bombings, and assassination attempts have killed the comedian in him. Laughing, Zelensky notes that he’s never heard himself referred to as an “old man” before. He grows somber as he admits that war consumes all time for feelings, leaving little room for anything but pragmatism. However, twice during our hour-long interview, emotion crept into his voice. The first time was when he spoke about his grandfather, Semyon Ivanovich Zelensky, a Jewish infantryman in the Red Army during World War II who fought real Nazis in Ukraine and was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, which killed a million Ukrainian Jews, including his parents and three brothers. The second time was when he spoke about the soldiers of today, the young men and others currently fighting in trenches 700 kilometers east of Kyiv, enduring sub-zero temperatures and Russian artillery. These soldiers, Zelensky says, have borne the brunt of the casualties—70 percent of all Ukrainian combat deaths. These soldiers, more than the new U.S. administration, want the war to end—but only if they can say that this time, it is truly over.
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