Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Donald Trump should present his plan to quickly end the war with Russia and warned that any proposal must not violate the country's sovereignty.
“If Trump knows how to end this war, he should tell us today,” Zelensky said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Kyiv on Wednesday. “If there are risks to Ukrainian independence, if we lose statehood – we want to be prepared for that, we want to know.”
The former US president, who’s leading President Joe Biden in polls ahead of the November election, has boasted that he’ll end the war by his inauguration in January. In last week's televised debate, Trump denounced the billions of dollars spent on Ukraine's defense and said that Kyiv “will not win the war.”
In a virtually hour-long interview, the Ukrainian president lamented delays in arms deliveries from Western allies and said he was “potentially ready” to fulfill with Trump to listen to his team's proposals.
“You cannot plan my life and the lives of our people and our children,” he said. “We want to know whether we will have the powerful support of the United States in November or whether we will be completely alone.”
And while he praised the $61 billion aid package that the U.S. Congress passed this 12 months – after a six-month delay – he said it was taking too long for military equipment to achieve the front lines.
“This is the greatest tragedy of this war. There is a really long, long, long wait between the decision and the actual implementation,” Zelensky said.
The Ukrainian president also said China could play a “huge role” in resolving the conflict because Moscow is so depending on its marketplace for exports. He suggested that if the US and China resolve their differences, they might act together to finish the war.
(With assistance from Volodymyr Verbianyi and Olesia Safronova.)
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