President Zelensky has praised Britain as one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies and accused President Macron of being afraid of Russia.
“Britain is definitely on our side. It is not performing a balancing act,” Zelensky told The Economist magazine. “Britain sees no alternative for the way out of the situation. Britain wants Ukraine to win and Russia to lose.”
He said that the British prime minister was at the forefront of Ukraine’s friends who want to supply weapons to the country. “Johnson is a leader who is helping more,” he added. “The leaders of countries react according to how their constituents act. In this case, Johnson is an example.”
Other key developments:
• A senior adviser to Zelensky promised an investigation into a video purportedly showing Ukrainian soldiers knee-capping Russian prisoners.
• Russian missile strikes continued overnight, hitting targets including Volyn, Lutsk, Kharkiv, Zhytomyr and Rivne, according to the Ukrainian authorities.
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• The names and addresses of 620 FSB officers have been leaked in an apparent data breach of the Russian security agency.
• Sanctioned oligarch Mikhail Fridman complains that he is virtually under house arrest in his home in London.
• Russia is seeking to split Ukraine in two, mirroring the partition of the Korean peninsula, Ukraine’s top military intelligence officer said.
Zelensky contrasted Johnson with the French president. Asked why Macron had ruled out the supply of tanks to Ukraine, he replied: “Because they are afraid of Russia. And that’s it. And those who say it first are the first to be afraid.”
Germany was “trying to be balanced” over the war, he said. “They have a long relationship with Russia and they are looking at the situation through the prism of the economy. They help out at times. I think they are trying to adjust to the situation as it develops. They are also looking at how the situation affects their own country.”
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He added: “The Germans are making a mistake today. I think they make mistakes often. I think the legacy of Germany’s relations with Russia shows this.”
Zelensky voiced mixed feelings about support from the United States “because there are different centres of power” there. “Biden views Ukraine more as a subject [of political activity] than at the start. There have been different moments and different processes, and I recognise that this stance does not benefit everyone in the United States,” he said. The Americans had helped by putting pressure on Europe to support Ukraine, he added.
The Ukrainian leader said that his country desperately needed tanks, armoured personnel carriers and aircraft to fight off the Russian forces and he deplored the reluctance of the West to supply them. “[Our partners] view Russia now through a military-strategic lens and are using Ukraine as a shield. We are the ones who are feeling the pain,” he said. “Far stronger sanctions are needed, including the removal of all Russian banks from the Swift payment system.”
He divided Ukraine’s allies into groups with different interests. “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives,” he said. “This is definitely in the interests of some countries.”
He suggested that Britain might be in this category. “I’m not ready to say whether Britain wants the war to drag on or not,” he said.
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“For other countries, it would be better if the war ended quickly, because Russia’s market is a big one that their economies are suffering as a result of the war. They would like to see Russia keep certain markets.
“Other truly wealthy countries recognise Nazism in Russia and definitely want Ukraine to be victorious,” he added.
Without naming them, he said that there were smaller strong supporters of Ukraine who wanted the war to stop whatever the cost “because people come first”. He mentioned a final category of pro-Russian states in Europe.
Zelensky, who was speaking in person to The Economist’s journalists, said that he needed to talk to President Putin urgently. “We have to speak about concrete things, about concrete months, maybe something about years, maybe something to decide now, maybe to talk if we can’t find a decision and agree not to fight about it. That is my philosophy.”
He added: “He has to understand what is going on and we have to understand each other, if it’s possible. It’s not about respect, about love, or something else. It’s not about feelings. It’s very concrete.
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“I don’t think he visualises in his own mind the same Ukraine we see. He sees Ukraine as a part of his world, his worldview, but that doesn’t correspond with what’s happened over the last 30 years. I don’t think Putin has been [in] a bunker for two weeks or six months, but for more like two decades.”
He said that the Russia military was suffering huge losses, with 15,000 killed so far, and that it was leaving the bodies of its troops lying outside to rot. “They are not burying them at all. Their corpses are left in the streets. In several cities, small cities, our soldiers say it’s impossible to breathe because of the smell. It is the stench of rotting flesh. It’s a complete nightmare.”
Ukraine will fight to the end, Zelensky said. “We believe in victory. It’s impossible to believe in anything else. We will definitely win because this is our home, our land, our independence. It’s just a question of time.”
In an interview with independent Russian media, the president said that Ukraine was looking for peace “without delay” and repeated his willingness to adopt a policy of neutrality and to abandon hopes of Nato membership.
“There is an opportunity and a need for a face-to-face meeting in Turkey ... Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it,” he said.
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Nadhim Zahawi, the education secretary, distanced the British government from President Biden’s declaration that Putin must not remain in power, despite saying there was no doubt that the Russian leader had committed war crimes.
The White House has spent the weekend trying to insist that the US is not seeking regime change in Russia after Biden declared during a visit to Poland that “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”.
This morning, Zahawi stressed that Britain was not trying to oust Putin.
“It’s up to the Russian people to decide who governs them,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today. “I think they’re pretty fed up with Putin and his cronies, because not only are they seeing innocents being killed in the Ukraine in this illegal war targeting civilian areas, but they’ve also seen their livelihoods in their incomes disappear. The Russian economy is on its knees.”
Asked by Sky News whether he agreed with Biden’s description of Putin as a “butcher”, Zahawi said: “I think war crimes have been committed in the Ukraine, there is no doubt in my mind – the evidence is clear on that.”
Zahawi, who arrived in Britain as a child refugee from Iraqi under Saddam Hussein, cited his own experience, saying: “It is important that despots and dictators understand that there will be a reckoning, and that reckoning will come through the international criminal court in the Hague”.
Face-to-face talks between Ukraine and Russia are due to resume today, according to Davyd Arakhamia, one of Zelensky’s chief negotiators, although the Russian delegation said that they would meet tomorrow.
The Kremlin said today that progress in the talks between the two sides had been limited.
“So far we cannot state any significant achievements or breakthroughs,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters, adding that it was “important” that it had been decided to continue the talks in person.
Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that a meeting between the two leaders would be counterproductive if it were held now. He said that they should meet once the sides achieve progress.
Zelensky repeated earlier statements that the question of neutrality must be decided in a national referendum, after Russian withdrawal. The aspiration to join Nato is part of Ukraine’s constitution.
The video interview with independent Russian journalists was immediately banned by the Kremlin, which promised action against domestic media and “foreign media outlets acting as foreign agents”.
“It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky also signed into law a ban on reporting the movement of Ukrainian forces and equipment without military authorisation.
A senior presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, reacted with concern to a video, shared on social media, which appears to show bleeding Russian soldiers, some of them bound and hooded, being shot in the legs by their Ukrainian captors. “The government is taking this very seriously, and there will be an immediate investigation,” he said. “We are a European army, and we do not mock our prisoners. If this turns out to be real this is absolutely unacceptable behaviour.”
In his nightly video address, Zelensky said that although some civilians were leaving the besieged city of Mariupol, many of its residents were being forcibly moved to Russian-occupied areas.
“According to our data, more than 2,000 children were deported,” he said. “Which means they were abducted. Because we do not know the exact locations of all these children. There were children with and without parents. It’s a catastrophe, it’s horrible.”
