In an exclusive interview, the president of Ukraine talks about his outreach to Trump, stalled Ukraine aid and Russia’s growing influence in the U.S.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine warned in an interview that Russian influence had pierced the American political system and rejected the idea, backed by allies of Donald Trump, that Ukraine could swiftly end the war just by making massive territorial concessions.
But Zelenskyy said Tuesday that he had privately urged Trump through intermediaries to travel to Ukraine and that Trump had expressed interest but had not yet committed to making a trip. Zelenskyy said he was open to hearing Trump’s proposals for the war, while making clear he was highly skeptical.
“If the deal is that we just give up our territories, and that’s the idea behind it, then it’s a very primitive idea,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with Axel Springer media outlets. POLITICO is owned by Axel Springer.
Zelenskyy continued: “I need very strong arguments. I don’t need a fantastic idea, I need a real idea, because people’s lives are at stake.”
Any deal that merely gave up land to Russian President Vladimir Putin in exchange for an end to hostilities, Zelenskyy said, would just open the way for more Russian wars of conquest in the future. A negotiated peace, he said, had to leave the Russian despot “no room to carry out his plans.”
In the interview, Zelenskyy swerved at times between expressing impatience with Western allies that have not delivered military aid readily enough — he faulted Germany most explicitly — and admitting that Ukraine is under considerable pressure to show new progress in the war. The interview was conducted in a combination of English and Ukrainian, partially using translators.
Trump has been a consistent skeptic of the war effort and a critic of Zelenskyy, and he recently said he would encourage Russia to act with impunity against members of the NATO alliance who do not spend large sums of money on defense. President Joe Biden has attacked Trump in the campaign as a threat to world stability and a stooge of Putin and other foreign dictators.
Zelenskyy’s textured approach to Trump represents the latest effort by a major world leader to calibrate his handling of the former American president who is now the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for the 2024 election. While disagreeing with Trump emphatically on war policy, Zelenskyy spoke respectfully about Trump as a leader with whom he is eager to build a constructive partnership.
Those comments came a day after David Cameron, the British foreign secretary and former U.K. prime minister, met with Trump at his Florida estate, in part to plead the case for supporting Ukraine despite having denounced Trump in the past as a bigot.
The fate of Ukraine may well hang in the balance in the U.S. election. And as a massive aid package languishes in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, Zelenskyy predicted that Putin would demolish Ukrainian cities and butcher hundreds of thousands of people if the Russian military were to prevail in the war.
In recent weeks, two Republican lawmakers who support aiding Ukraine — Reps. Mike Turner of Ohio and Mike McCaul of Texas — have declared that pro-Russian propaganda has filtered into the thinking of some members of Congress.
Asked about that claim, Zelenskyy said it understated the problem of Russian influence in democracies like the United States.
“They have their lobbies everywhere: in the United States, in the EU countries, in Britain, in Latin America, in Africa,” Zelenskyy said of Russia. “When we talk about the Congress — do you notice how they work with society in the United States?”
Russia, he said, had succeeded in warping “the information field of the world.” Without naming names, Zelenskyy claimed that American citizens were effectively doing Russia’s work within the U.S. media.
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/09/zelenskyy-invites-trump-ukraine-russia-00151310