Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered an impassioned plea for more Western weapons and for “real security guarantees,” calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “slave to war” who will threaten Europe if he is not stopped in Ukraine.
In a midday speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Zelenskyy said he hopes a new round of trilateral talks with Russia and the United States next week will be productive, but Moscow has shown few signs it is ready for compromises.
“No one in Ukraine believes [Putin] will ever let our people go, but he will not let other European nations go either, because he cannot let go of the very idea of war,” Zelenskyy said. “He may see himself as a tsar, but in reality he is a slave to war.”
Nearly Four Years Of Ukraine War
Zelenskyy’s speech came 10 days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which set off the deadliest war in Europe since 1945, reaches the four-year mark and the casualty toll climbs toward 2 million soldiers killed, wounded, or missing.
In addition, Russia has killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians and pounded the country’s energy infrastructure on a near-daily basis. “There is not a single power plant in Ukraine that is not damaged by Russian strikes.”
With US President Donald Trump seeking to broker peace since he returned to office in January 2025, Zelenskyy repeated that strong security guarantees for Kyiv are a crucial element of any agreement.
“There must be real security guarantees for Ukraine and for Europe, strong security guarantees.” He said that Ukraine is ready to sign security-guarantee deals with the US and Europe and that these should “come before any agreement to end the war.”
Zelenskyy is expected to meet with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio later in the day on the sidelines of the annual conference, which no high-level Russian official has attended since Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
RFE/RL Brussels correspondent Zoriana Stepanenko contributed to this report from Munich
Discover more from PressNewsAgency
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.