Zelenskyy Says a Ceasefire Would Be a Major Compromise, Not Forgiveness

The hardest day Volodymyr Zelenskyy recalls is his visit to Bucha after Ukrainian forces retook the town. He had never seen bodies lying in the street. He describes seeing children, adults and elderly people, some with their hands tied, tortured and buried in pits. He says he asked for journalists to be brought to the scene without disturbing it, so the world could see what had happened.

Bucha, in Zelenskyy’s account, changed the war from a political conflict into a personal horror. Russian forces had occupied towns around Kyiv, he says, looting homes and taking household goods while killing and torturing people. When the towns were liberated, the bodies and accounts of people who had remained made the occupation concrete. Zelenskyy recalls an elderly man in Bucha who had lived through the German occupation during the Second World War and said that the fascists had not treated people that way.

He describes the discovery of the bodies as the point when people understood what the war meant, not merely when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. He says he had not previously wanted to kill anyone. After seeing the bodies, he wanted revenge: to find those responsible and kill them. The feeling was unfamiliar, he says, and difficult to reconcile with the diplomatic role he had to continue performing. He describes it as a desire he had never felt before, not as a policy or an intention he acted on.

That experience did not make him think justice could be set aside in the name of ending the war. He says he cannot simply forgive and resume ordinary relations because Russia is powerful. The prospect of buying and selling gas or diesel, he says, cannot make the experience disappear. Even as president, he has to calm himself and act diplomatically; that does not mean he can forget what he saw.

Zelenskyy says a ceasefire and negotiations are themselves a huge compromise. When foreign leaders, including Donald Trump, speak about finding one, he says, they should understand what they are asking of people who have lost loved ones. Holding the lines where they are would not mean Ukrainians had forgiven those responsible for the deaths and torture. He says people cannot be forced to forgive.

For him, a ceasefire is not the same as forgiveness. Hatred does not disappear when the fighting stops; time and justice would be needed. He warns that if people who have lost everything receive no recognition or justice, their unresolved anger could create risks of further violence. A just peace therefore requires a path to punishment for those responsible, even if that process does not happen immediately. He says he has tried many times to explain to the US president that holding the lines where they are would itself be a major concession.

Justice, in Zelenskyy’s account, is not a substitute for ending the fighting. It is part of what might make peace possible. People who have lost everything need at least some moral solace, he says, and there must be a path to a trial or other justice. He wants the war to end, but says a settlement cannot assume that time alone will erase what happened.

Zelenskyy says he does not sleep. During the war, he speaks every night with air-defense operators, discussing what is needed and whether equipment should be moved from one region to another. The exchanges are practical and immediate; they also keep him awake. Eight hours of sleep, he says, has become something unfamiliar after almost five years of war. “I’m not complaining,” he says. It is simply how he lives.

He describes his own condition as hard but inseparable from the country’s. To ask whether tomorrow will come is, in his words, to ask whether his family, relatives and country will still be there. “You can’t answer it any other way” than yes, he says. He tries to hold on to optimism and to the belief that good will win, while acknowledging that people can be shattered by the loss of a child, spouse or parent. He thinks their burden is harder than his.

That distinction is central to how he talks about leadership: he does not present himself as carrying the greatest pain. When a missile struck a playground, children and adults were killed within seconds, he says. Some parents saw their children die from their homes. At the site, people brought flowers for adults and toys for children. Zelenskyy says his own pain was not even 10 percent of what the parents felt.

He also describes children who go down to bomb shelters when alarms sound, sometimes night after night. Some of those children have died, he says. He contrasts their experience with his own childhood, when there were no sirens and shelling. Some children, he says, have never known peace.

His own exhaustion is bound up with responsibility for those who remain alive. Every night he talks with air-defense personnel; during the first days of the full-scale invasion, he says, he slept in stretches of about 15 minutes while working through calls with leaders, arranging weapons deliveries and trying to keep food, water and payment systems functioning. At first, he was too busy to absorb what was happening. About 20 days into the invasion, when the immediate crisis began to slow, he realized that a terrible war had begun.

He describes the opening weeks as a sequence of immediate problems that had to be solved before he had time to process their meaning. Kyiv was blockaded; roads had to be opened, food and water brought in, and troops moved. Zelenskyy says Ukraine’s digitalized systems helped keep card payments working. He characterizes the first phase as crisis management: act, draw conclusions and address the next urgent need. After Ukrainian forces stopped the advance on Kyiv, he says, Ukraine began moving faster than Russia in the information space and countering disinformation.

The emotional weight arrives, he says, in encounters with bereaved families. When he gives the highest state honor to the parents of a fallen soldier, he looks at their faces and listens to what they ask for. Sometimes a parent asks for a hug. He remembers the strength of a father’s hand and the quiet request: “Can we hug?” In those moments, Zelenskyy says, he feels as if he ceases to exist. The parents knew their child might die as a soldier, but knowing that and losing a child are different things.

He does not claim to be impervious. “I’m a human being,” he says, and he is not ashamed that his eyes fill with tears. He tries to set an example for his children, but that example does not mean hiding pain. Being alive means being vulnerable, he says; that is a weakness and also a source of strength. His children keep him grounded, and he wants them to be proud of him.

That grounding does not make the pressures easy to reconcile. Zelenskyy says the war has changed his sense of what matters: business and other pursuits that once filled a life now seem secondary to the people close to him. He wants to be with his wife and children and to have “a little bit of a life,” but he also describes a habit of focusing exclusively on work, even when family members are nearby. He can miss them while they are in the same place because his attention has been trained on the work.

The distance is not only physical. His daughter has grown up during the war, he says, and is no longer a child. He calls her a close friend and notes that her English is better than his. He says the children of Ukraine have grown up during the war, and that it is sad their childhood has passed under these conditions. He still believes peace will prevail.

He tries to call and talk with his children when time permits. His wife, Olena, is someone with whom he says he shares love and respect, and he says they support each other. He describes her as smart and “real,” emphasizing that partners need to find each other interesting. He does not describe family as a cure for the pressures of office; rather, their closeness reminds him of what those pressures displace. A hug from family matters because it means there are people who love him.

His mother keeps up a daily call. She may call repeatedly until he answers; sometimes, he says, he finds 12 missed calls and tells her he is working. They have arranged to speak once a day. She asks how he feels, how the children are, and when Putin will end the war. Zelenskyy says his answer is that they are doing everything they can. The daily ritual sits alongside nightly military calls: one line of contact is about managing the country’s immediate defenses; the other is a mother checking on her son.

When the invasion began on February 24, 2022, Zelenskyy was with his family. He says he told his wife and children that the war had started, told them he loved them and would call, then ran to the office. He had not expected a full-scale invasion. He understood the pressure Russia had exerted since the occupation of Crimea and parts of Donbas, but not an attack in which missiles would arrive from multiple directions before dawn.

The opening images described in the interview include traffic leaving Kyiv, apartment fires and people sheltering in basements. Zelenskyy remembers missiles falling around four in the morning and people in shock. He says that, at the time, no one had seen anything like it. Years later, Ukraine shoots down drones and fights through attacks, he says, but the first missile strikes were a different experience: people were asking why children were screaming and why the streets were full of people fleeing.

The office had a deep bunker, where Zelenskyy worked and spoke with foreign leaders. Outside, he says, the area was secured by Ukrainian snipers and security personnel; there was shooting nearby. As Russian forces approached Kyiv and the city faced blockade, people around him discussed surrender and foreign leaders offered evacuation. Joe Biden was the first to make the offer, Zelenskyy says. His reply was: “I need ammunition. Not a ride.”

He understood that leaving would have carried a meaning beyond his own safety. Russian messaging claimed he had fled; if people believed their leader had abandoned the capital, Zelenskyy says, they might conclude they were on their own. He went outside and recorded messages, sometimes two or three times a day, to show that he was still in Kyiv. In one self-recorded video shown during the interview, he stands with several men outside at night and says, “We are all here. Our military is here, citizens are here. We are all here defending our independence, our state and it will be so further.”

The military later told him that his presence mattered: soldiers believed they were defending their home and their president, who had not left them. Zelenskyy calls remaining in the capital his duty, not an extraordinary personal choice. He says abandoning Kyiv, his office and the people would have been a betrayal of both human decency and Ukraine’s constitution.

Asked if he was scared, he resists the framing. In the first days, he says, there was no time to dwell on fear. He was making calls, meeting with the military, trying to open roads and get supplies into the city. The work demanded action every second. Only later, as the pace eased, did he begin to understand the scale of the tragedy.

He says the first days were dominated by communication: calls with foreign leaders, conversations with the military, and efforts to coordinate weapons deliveries. He recalls speaking at night with Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, and waking leaders to help arrange logistics. His account of that period is not one of having a settled plan for the whole war. It is a description of successive urgent decisions: unblock routes, bring supplies in, defend the capital and keep people informed.

The Russian plan, as Zelenskyy describes it, depended on a fast seizure of the capital and the collapse of Ukrainian command. Russian forces advanced from Belarus, the nearest route to Kyiv, while attacking from other directions. They aimed to take airports and television infrastructure, disrupt logistics and supplies, and force the country’s leader to run. Hostomel airport, near Kyiv, was a crucial part of that plan: it could have allowed a large landing force to arrive close to the capital.

Zelenskyy describes the battle for Hostomel as brutal and fought back and forth. Ukrainian forces prevented Russia from bringing in the large force it needed, he says; the airport changed hands during the fighting. Had Russia secured it, Zelenskyy says, its forces might have broken through and taken much of Kyiv. Hostomel was not the only place that mattered: he points to towns such as Moshchun and other settlements near Kyiv, where there was a desperate fight for each one.

The famous 64-kilometer convoy on the road to Kyiv was terrifying, Zelenskyy says. The satellite image shown during the interview makes the scale of the line visible: military vehicles stretching along a road toward the capital. But he does not treat the convoy’s length as proof that Russia had enough troops to occupy and hold everything it took. Ukraine’s strongest forces were in the east, where they had been facing the strongest Russian and separatist groupings. Zelenskyy says Ukraine had not expected a major advance through Belarus and did not have a strong force in that direction.

He says the Ukrainian army was smaller then than the 200,000-plus force he later established; volunteers and mobilization eventually helped expand it to about 800,000. In Zelenskyy’s account, Russia also underestimated how many forces it would need. To take Kyiv and hold towns along the route, he says, Russia would have needed substantially more troops—he estimates three to four hundred thousand for Kyiv. If towns resisted, forces would have to be left behind to hold them rather than continue toward the capital.

Russia reached Kyiv and occupied towns nearby, Zelenskyy says, but resistance forced it to divert troops to hold territory. Ukrainian forces struck back, and Russia withdrew from the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions. He says Ukraine had initially lacked enough troops in the north, while Russia ultimately lacked the forces to hold the occupied areas and keep advancing. This is Zelenskyy’s explanation of the failed push: the assault was not simply stopped by a wrong turn, but by the difficulty of occupying a large area in the face of resistance.

Zelenskyy rejects Donald Trump’s later suggestion that a Russian general’s wrong turn into muddy farmland had decided the battle. He says Russian forces had reached Kyiv; their failure came from resistance and from misjudging what it would take to seize and hold the city. People fought back, he says, including by attacking Russian armor as it moved through the towns. In his account, the question was not whether a route had turned muddy but whether the invading force could overcome resistance and keep control of the territory it crossed.

The presence of parade uniforms in Russian vehicles became, for Zelenskyy, an emblem of that miscalculation. Russia had expected Ukraine to fold quickly, he says: the president would run, the public would hide, and the Russian flag would replace the Ukrainian one. He argues that the key mistake was not a single bad maneuver but a refusal to recognize Ukrainians as a separate people prepared to defend their country. Russia had seen how easily it occupied Crimea in 2014 and assumed it could take Kyiv just as easily. In Crimea, he says, there had been little armed resistance; in 2022, Ukrainians fought.

That resistance depended on people staying as well as on military forces holding ground. Many people left Kyiv for western Ukraine in the first days, he says, while others stayed and mobilized. The volunteers and soldiers who remained made it possible to resist the advance and, eventually, to push Russian forces out of the region. The leader’s visible presence and the public’s willingness to defend their homes were connected parts of the same refusal to accept that the capital had already fallen.

Zelenskyy dates the war’s beginning to Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014, though he acknowledges that people may define its history differently. For the independent Ukraine that emerged after 1991, he says, the occupation was the moment the war began. It was a “creeping occupation,” not yet the kind of fighting many people recognized as war: Russia denied that the armed men on the peninsula were its soldiers, while Ukrainian authorities did not give clear orders to defend the territory.

Looking back, he considers Ukraine’s failure to push those forces back a mistake. He says that if Ukraine had received an order to defend the country, he thinks a full-scale war in the form it later took might not have happened. He presents that as his judgment, not a certainty. The ease of the occupation, as he sees it, informed Putin’s later expectations: if the Russian leader had encountered a response in Crimea, Zelenskyy thinks he might have understood that an attack on Ukraine would meet resistance.

The Russian invasion also struck a country whose historical experience, Zelenskyy says, made Moscow’s justification especially offensive. His grandfather fought through the Second World War; several of his grandfather’s brothers and other relatives were killed by the Nazis. Zelenskyy calls it absurd for Russia to describe Ukraine as fascist and claim to be liberating it. Ukraine, he says, knows from its own history what occupation by fascist forces meant. He emphasizes that Ukraine was occupied during the war and that Ukrainians fought against Nazi Germany. For him, the accusation is not merely a political distortion but an inversion of a history his family experienced.

To explain Putin’s aims, Zelenskyy starts with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Empires, he argues, depend on control and unfreedom: they restrict what people can know about the outside world, and they eventually break apart as the nations within them seek independence. He uses the image of a fish tank: the Soviet Union could be vast, but people within it were still kept within a controlled information environment. Ukraine became one of the independent states that emerged when the Soviet Union fell apart.

Putin’s nostalgia for the Soviet Union, in Zelenskyy’s account, is part of a broader ambition to reassemble an empire. Zelenskyy describes Putin as a Soviet figure who viewed the Soviet Union’s collapse as a historic loss. Ukraine is central to that ambition, he says, because it was an important intellectual and industrial center of the Soviet Union. It had universities, scientists and engineers, and produced major military and industrial goods. Zelenskyy argues that an independent Ukraine moving toward Europe would challenge the imperial project and demonstrate that other peoples could choose a different political future.

He describes the occupation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine as efforts to divide Ukrainian society, particularly through the question of language. Putin claimed to be protecting Russian speakers, Zelenskyy says, although no one had taken the Russian language away from them. In his telling, language provided a pretext for presenting intervention as protection. The east of Ukraine borders Russia, and Crimea had many Russian-speaking residents, which made those arguments easier to deploy politically. Crimea, meanwhile, is a multi-ethnic peninsula with indigenous peoples, including the Crimean Tatars, who had themselves experienced deportation.

Zelenskyy disputes Putin’s claim that modern Ukraine was created by Soviet Russia. Putin’s account begins with the 1917 revolution, he says, because it tells a story about the Soviet Union rather than the much longer histories of Ukraine and Russia. Zelenskyy points to Ukrainian churches a thousand years old and describes Ukraine as an heir to Kievan Rus, with its own traditions and history. He sees Putin’s language about Ukraine as a way of denying that it is a distinct nation and of telling Russian audiences that their political horizon should be a return to the Soviet past.

Before the invasion, Ukrainian officials repeatedly raised warnings with the United States, Zelenskyy says. The signals they received were cautious rather than a direct notice of the invasion’s date and form. Ukraine asked for weapons if its partners believed an attack was possible, and Zelenskyy asked Biden to impose sanctions preemptively. Biden’s position, as Zelenskyy recounts it, was that sanctions would follow an invasion. Zelenskyy considers that a mistake, while saying he is not in a position to judge another president.

The warnings did not persuade Zelenskyy that a full-scale invasion was imminent. Russia had used pressure before, and he thought the immediate aim might be to force Ukraine into concessions over Donbas and Crimea. He also believed that if partners understood a full invasion was coming, they would take preventive steps or confront Putin directly. He recalls that European leaders were told by Putin shortly before the attack that Russia would not invade. In Zelenskyy’s account, that assurance was a lie.

He says the warnings were also economically destabilizing: public concern affected the currency and the wider economy. Ukraine sought a clearer signal from its partners, he says. If they believed war was coming, he wanted weapons urgently and sanctions before the invasion rather than after it. But the cautious signals and the absence of preemptive sanctions fed the belief that Russia might be bluffing or trying to force political concessions rather than preparing a full-scale attack. Zelenskyy says he himself did not imagine missiles would begin flying overnight.

Asked whether the invasion would have happened under Trump, Zelenskyy says no one can know. The invasion took place during Biden’s presidency, and it did not happen during Trump’s; both are facts, he says. He allows that Trump’s relationship with Putin might have prevented the full-scale attack at that moment. But he argues that Putin’s larger goal would have remained: as long as Putin remained in power, changing the US president would not have removed the threat to Ukraine.

On a map shown during the interview, Zelenskyy marks Crimea and areas in the east and south, then writes “18 19%” across the map. He estimates that Russia occupies roughly 18 to 19 percent of Ukraine’s territory. He qualifies the figure as approximate and says Russia presents its own version of the map.

Zelenskyy describes Crimea, parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, and areas around the Sea of Azov as occupied. He says Russia took Mariupol and Berdyansk. Kherson, which Ukraine retook, remains exposed to attack across the Dnipro River, he says. The map is not, in his argument, a frozen description of a conflict safely contained to one line: Russia continues striking cities across the country, including places far from the line of occupation.

He points to attacks in Lutsk in western Ukraine, as well as strikes on Kyiv and other cities. He says he had visited Pryluky with a British secretary and seen 23 people killed. Zhytomyr, he says, is under constant shelling; he describes fewer strikes farther west, including around Lviv, while noting the distance from the line of occupation and Russia. His account makes the distinction between occupied territory and the wider reach of attacks: areas not occupied can still be struck.

Zelenskyy says Russia wants additional cities in the east, including Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Druzhkivka, and could use those gains to push farther into Ukraine. He describes the areas as important to the country’s industry and economy, and says they are protected by Ukrainian defenses. He identifies Kryvyi Rih, his hometown, and Nikopol, which he describes as an industrial and engineering center. Withdrawal from these areas would be unfair and leave open the risk of further Russian advances. If Russia wanted to continue, he says, no one could guarantee that it would stop at the next set of cities.

Ukraine is open to security guarantees, Zelenskyy says, and he mentions NATO as one possible framework. But a guarantee has to mean something if Ukraine is asked to pull back. He describes a ceasefire as already a major concession in light of the dead and the areas under occupation. Asking Ukraine to withdraw further, without a credible guarantee, would add risk as well as injustice.

The dispute with Trump over attacks on energy infrastructure turns on competing accounts of cause and responsibility. Trump said Ukraine had been told not to hit refineries because Russian diesel exports mattered to global supply and prices. Zelenskyy disputes that account. He says the volume of Russian diesel exports has no meaningful effect on US prices, and calls the claim that Ukraine’s strikes are driving those prices false.

Zelenskyy says Russia strikes Ukrainian electricity infrastructure, leaving people without power. Ukraine retaliates against Russian energy infrastructure, he says, because energy sales bring Russia money that it spends on weapons. He says his proposal to Trump was an energy ceasefire: neither side should attack energy systems, so civilians could have electricity.

Zelenskyy says Putin rejected that proposal, but Trump blamed him for the consequences instead. If the United States wanted Ukraine to stop striking Russian energy targets, Zelenskyy says, it could help protect Ukraine’s own energy infrastructure by providing air-defense missiles. He says he asked for missiles, not for free, and says European countries were funding the arrangement.

Trump accused Zelenskyy of choosing not to settle the war and of striking infrastructure despite a warning not to do so. Zelenskyy counters that Ukraine’s attacks are retaliation for Russian strikes on its energy grid, and that an energy ceasefire would address the civilian consequences on both sides. He says Trump has a good relationship with him, but calls it wrong and unacceptable to pin Russia’s aggression and killings on Ukraine’s president. In his view, the explanation about diesel prices deflects attention from the failure to secure an energy truce.

Asked why Trump has not brought Putin to negotiations, Zelenskyy says he does not know. He offers possibilities—a special relationship or economic interests—but explicitly says he cannot tell and does not know everything. He also points to sanctions approved by Congress that, in his view, Trump could impose. Zelenskyy argues that Trump could bring Putin to the negotiating table if he used the same kind of rhetoric toward Putin that he uses toward Zelenskyy.

Asked whether Putin might use nuclear weapons, Zelenskyy says the possibility crosses everyone’s mind, but he does not think Putin will take that risk. Doing so, he believes, would leave Russia without allies, including major powers, and could make nuclear use more likely in later conflicts elsewhere. Still, he describes the Russian political system as tightly bound to Putin’s continued rule and cautions that Ukraine is dealing with a leader who has pursued the war despite its consequences.

The interview’s final appeal is not a claim that the dispute has been resolved. Zelenskyy wishes the United States peace and the ability for people to be at home with their children and families. He says Ukraine is grateful for what America has done and will not forget it. That wish for ordinary family life echoes his account of what the war has taken from him: time with his wife and children, and years of childhood for Ukrainian children. It sits beside his argument that peace cannot be reduced to a deal over fuel prices or a negotiation detached from the people killed, the territory occupied and the need for justice.