Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky offered a warning to Vladimir Putin, new details about his meeting with President Trump, and a pledge about his own political future in an interview with "The Axios Show."
Inside the room: The interview took place on Wednesday night in New York, immediately before Zelensky departed the UN General Assembly for Kyiv.
- Zelensky agreed to speak in English at the last moment. Despite his frequent self-effacing comments about his lack of fluency, his points came through loud and clear.
- Zelensky's voice quivered with emotion at multiple points during the interview, in particular when he was addressing Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russians — "I am so sorry," he told them — and lamenting that he'd too often been absent as a son, husband, and father due to the war.
- The Ukrainian president said he'd requested a new weapons system from Trump that could hasten the end of the war, and told Axios' Barak Ravid that if Russian officials won't stop the bloodshed they had better locate their bomb shelters.
Driving the news: Zelensky spoke to Axios a day after his meeting with Trump, who subsequently posted to Truth Social that he now believed Ukraine could win the war outright.
- "I was positively surprised, of course," Zelensky said of that post.
- Asked what had changed, Zelensky cited Trump's "relationship with Putin." He said that after the spectacle in Alaska — at which Trump gave Putin "more than he deserves," in Zelensky's view — the U.S. president realized aligning with Putin would not "bring him success."
- Zelensky said Trump had told him Ukraine should conduct tit-for-tat strikes on Russian energy infrastructure and weapons depots, and that he would "work on" getting Ukraine an unspecified new long-range system.
However, he acknowledged that Trump could reverse course again soon.
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