Zelenskyy warns Russia has penetrated US politics, invites Trump to Ukraine

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.

Trump previously declined a public invitation from Zelenskyy to visit Ukraine, saying in a statement that he had “great respect” for the Ukrainian leader but did not want to create a “conflict of interest” while Biden was in charge of American policy.

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.

“They pump their narratives through the media,” Zelenskyy said. “These are not Russian citizens or natives of Russia, no. They are representatives of certain media groups, citizens of the United States. They are the ones in the media with the appropriate messages, sometimes very pro-Russian.”

Still, Zelenskyy said he expects that a new tranche of American aid will ultimately arrive for his country. Asked if he was optimistic about that prospect, the Ukrainian president replied: “Yes, of course. I have to be.”

In the interview, Zelenskyy acknowledged that Ukraine’s attempted counteroffensive against Russia last year was “not so successful,” and vowed that the next attempt to strike back against Russia would show more progress. Without elaborating, Zelenskyy implied that Ukraine had been sabotaged from within in its last offensive, noting that “the Russians knew where we were going to attack” and promising “history will tell” how they knew.

The next Ukrainian counteroffensive, Zelenskyy said, “must give us some results.”

But it would be a grave mistake, Zelenskyy insisted, for Ukraine’s allies to back away from their commitment to the war effort.

The Ukrainian leader expressed concern that irrational thinking and delusional fantasies of peacemaking might lead other Western allies into making damaging political and diplomatic mistakes. Zelenskyy repeatedly took aim at German politicians, including voices within Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, for withholding TAURUS missiles from Ukraine and dreaming of a “frozen” war that would bring an end to hostilities without clipping Russia’s warmaking capacity for the future.

“A frozen conflict is like a pause, like in a film,” he said. “Only it's not a film, it's reality. It's just a pause, but it's a pause for Putin.”

Scholz, he said, had declined to provide TAURUS missiles to Ukraine for reasons that did not make strategic sense. The German chancellor, Zelenskyy said, “shared messages with me saying that he cannot leave his country without such a powerful weapon.” That thinking, Zelenskyy said, seemed to stem from fear of Russia’s firepower as a nuclear-armed state: Germany, he said, was clinging to the idea that having a special missile would help it in the event of a full-scale war with Russia.

“But I don't think it will save the world from the nuclear threat from Russia either,” Zelenskyy countered. “Any missiles, TAURUS, ATACMS, F-16s will not protect a single person from nuclear strikes, if a nuclear war breaks out, God forbid. It won't.”

Though Trump and his allies in Congress are seen as the primary obstacle to new American aid, Zelenskyy said he had made a persistent effort to reach out to Trump.

While many world leaders are mapping out strategies for dealing with Trump, he and Zelenskyy have had an especially fraught relationship over time, starting with Trump’s attempt in 2019 to prod Zelenskyy to announce an investigation into members of the Biden family for doing business in Ukraine — an underhanded scheme that triggered Trump’s first impeachment.

For several months now, Zelenskyy has extended a public invitation to Trump to come to Ukraine and make good on his boast that he could help end the war. In the interview, Zelenskyy revealed that his courtship of Trump had been even more determined in private.

“We conveyed the messages and the context through the appropriate people,” he said. “We said that we would like Donald Trump to come to Ukraine, see everything with his own eyes and draw his own conclusions. In any case, I am ready to meet him and discuss the issue.”

Zelenskyy said that Trump had conveyed his interest in accepting the invitation but had not set a date.