Zelensky demands strong security guarantees, calls Putin a "war slave"
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for more weapons from the West and for "real security guarantees," calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a "war slave" who will threaten Europe if he does not stop in Ukraine.
In a speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Zelensky said he hoped the new round of trilateral talks with Russia and the United States next week would be productive, but suggested that US pressure for concessions is often mainly directed at Kiev and that Russia has shown few signs of willingness to compromise.
“No one in Ukraine believes that [Putin] will ever let our people be free, but he won’t let other European countries either, because he can’t free himself from the idea of war,” Zelensky said. “He may think he’s a tsar, but in reality he’s a slave to war.”
Zelensky's speech comes ten days before the fourth anniversary of the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is the deadliest war in Europe since 1945 and has left - on both sides - almost 2 million soldiers killed, wounded or missing.
Russia has also killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians and strikes Ukraine's energy infrastructure on an almost daily basis.
With US President Donald Trump aiming to broker peace since returning to office in January 2025, Zelensky reiterated that strong security guarantees for Kiev are an essential 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 agreements with the US and Europe and that these must “come before any agreement to end the war.”
"We hope that President Trump will listen to us. We hope that Congress will listen to us. We hope that the American people will listen to us," said Zelensky, who wants a security guarantee agreement to be ratified by the US Congress and he also met with a group of US senators in Munich.
Zelensky is also expected to meet with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the sidelines of the conference, which no high-level official from Russia has attended since Putin ordered the invasion on February 24, 2022.
During his speech at the Munich Conference, Rubio said that "the issues for ending the war have narrowed, but the bad news is that now the hard questions remain."
Rubio said that "I don't think it's possible for Russia to even achieve the initial objectives that they had at the beginning of this war."
"I think now [the issue] has largely narrowed down to their desire to take the 20 percent of Donetsk that they don't currently own. And that's difficult," Rubio added.
Putin and other Russian officials have repeatedly said that Moscow will take the remainder of Donetsk — one of the two provinces that make up Donbas — by force or through diplomacy.
Zelensky noted the massive losses Russia has suffered in this effort, saying that “on the Donetsk front the price Russia pays for one kilometer is 156 soldiers.” He said 35.000 Russian soldiers were killed or seriously wounded in December and 30.000 in January.
"Putin is not worried about this now. Every month Russia mobilizes about 40.000 people," the Ukrainian leader said. "For our army, the mission is clear: destroy more Russian invaders. The goal is at least 50.000 per month."
Russia is now “losing far more [manpower] than it can replace,” Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof told Radio Free Europe in Munich. He said Western countries should speed up deliveries of air defense and other weapons, adding that he hopes Ukrainian forces will be able to push back Russia further in the near future.
With the third round of US-Ukraine-Russia talks scheduled in Geneva on February 17-18, Zelensky said Kiev hopes the meetings "will be serious, substantive and useful for all of us," but added that "sometimes I feel that the parties are talking about completely different things."
He suggested that Russia repeats demands that are unacceptable to Kiev, while "the Americans often return to the topic of concessions, and very often these concessions are discussed only in the context of Ukraine, not Russia. Europe is practically not present at the table. This is a big mistake, in my opinion."
Over the past year, Trump has suggested several times that the onus falls primarily on Ukraine to take the necessary steps to reach a peace agreement, and his critics have pointed this out. “Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelensky is going to have to act, or he’s going to miss a big opportunity,” he told reporters at the White House on Feb. 13.
Speaking to REL on the sidelines of the Munich conference, British Defense Secretary John Healey said that “Ukraine is under enormous pressure, but the Ukrainians are fighting back… with extraordinary courage and determination, just as they showed four years ago when Putin launched the invasion.”
“The world needs to remember that this was a war that Putin thought he would win in a week,” and nearly four years later, with Russia suffering “huge losses, he is under great pressure,” Healey said. “Our job is to increase aid to Ukraine and increase pressure on Putin to bring him to the negotiating table.”
The Dutch Prime Minister also said that "Europe and the US must put pressure on Putin to stop the war."
"I see neither political will nor intention [to make peace] on the part of President Putin," Dick Schoof told REL, adding that "so far, it seems he is just trying to buy time."/REL/
