Zelenskyy Refused to Speak Russian. Then He Explained Why a Pause Is Not Peace

Lex Fridman opened with a practical request. The two men share only one fluent language, Russian, and an interpreter added a two- or three-second delay that swallowed humor, anger, and pain. Zelenskyy understood the request and answered in Ukrainian: not for the whole interview. On that day, he said, Ukraine had taken 73 missile strikes and more than 100 drones, and people had been killed.

The attackers, he said, speak Russian. They had been told they were defending Russian-speaking people, and they were killing those same people. "When they were saving Russian-speakers, they killed Russian-speakers," he told Fridman, many of them in the east, where houses and lives were destroyed. He said he still respects people who speak Russian. He does not respect the language today because of Russians.

Russian was Zelenskyy's primary language for most of his life, and it was the language he used at the start of the war to address Russians. He said the appeal had zero effect. Those people are mute, he argued; they do not listen. Some are afraid, some have other reasons, but for the person drowning it does not matter why the passersby keep walking. The conversation that followed mixed Ukrainian, English, and occasional Russian, with Fridman trying Russian so Zelenskyy could hear him without a delay.

Fridman asked about Zelenskyy's grandfather, a graduate of a military academy who went to the front at the start of World War II and fought in the infantry through the entire war. He was wounded often. His chest, in the old phrase, was covered in medals: more than 30, Zelenskyy said. The boy asked the question children ask. The old man never answered how many fascists he had killed, and he never boasted. He treated the war as a tragedy for Ukraine, for Europe, and for the Jewish people.

The tragedy had a local address. The grandfather's brothers and the rest of the family were executed after fascists occupied their village. His father, the head of the village, was shot. Some people in the mass grave were killed outright; others were buried alive. All four brothers went to war as soon as it began. Only the grandfather, the one with a military education, came home. He found Zelenskyy's grandmother at an orphanage for wartime children, including "difficult" children who had watched their parents die.

After the war the grandfather became a police colonel in criminal investigation and, in his grandson's telling, spent the rest of his life fighting bandits and looking for justice. Fridman had visited Babyn Yar the day before, where a large part of his own family is buried, and he quoted the old line about Kyiv being bombed at four o'clock on June 22, 1941. Zelenskyy would not start the story there. The war, he said, began earlier, in the world's weakness, the carving up of European states, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

People who looked closely, he said, already knew Hitler would not stop. Others looked away and said he could be negotiated with, that he was only more right-leaning, only more nationalist. Zelenskyy called that nonsense, and not the first such case in history. "We're dealing with a person who is allowed to stick to this desire to destroy. He was consumed by it and enjoying it." He was talking about Hitler. He was also setting up Putin.

The missiles on February 24, 2022, also fell around four in the morning, closer to 3:40 or 3:45, Zelenskyy recalled. He believes the intention was the same as in 1941. Before the invasion he had asked the United States for two things if Washington was sure war was coming: send weapons, or, better, use preventive measures so there would be no war. What he wanted most, he said, was sanctions in advance. Do not wait to say that if he crosses the border and kills, then the sanctions will come. He called that complete nonsense.

Help, if words count as help, arrived in abundance. The strikes still came. He looked at his wife and children. The children were asleep; his wife was awake; they could hear the missiles. As a living person, he said, you cannot quite believe it, and you cannot understand why it is happening after World War II killed millions. He told his wife to get the children ready, that they would probably need to go to his office, and he left. From that moment he was no longer a father in his own family. She would handle the children and their safety. He would handle the state.

On the second or third day, Alexander Lukashenko called and apologized. The missiles had been launched from Belarusian territory, he said, and Putin was the one launching them. Zelenskyy told him he was a murderer too. Lukashenko said Ukraine could not fight the Russians. Zelenskyy answered that Ukraine had never started that fight, and asked how Belarus had allowed missiles to leave its land. Lukashenko's reply, as Zelenskyy remembers it, was that Ukraine should retaliate and hit a refinery. Zelenskyy asked what kind of retaliation that was supposed to be.

As supreme commander he issued orders quickly, stood up a headquarters that covered the military and energy, and thought first about food for blocked cities and about handing out rifles on the street so ordinary people could defend Kyiv. Digital systems kept banking, internet, and television alive. He went outside the office to show he had not fled, and he addressed Russians in Russian, asking them to stop Putin. If a person does not want to listen, he told Fridman, the language will not matter.

Fridman kept returning to a dream of Zelenskyy, Putin, and Donald Trump in one room, signing a ceasefire with strict security guarantees. Zelenskyy pulled the conversation back to December 2019 at the Élysée Palace in Paris, where he, Putin, Emmanuel Macron, and Angela Merkel struck three deals. Germany needed a gas-transit agreement. Zelenskyy wanted an all-for-all hostage exchange. They also agreed on a ceasefire. The United States was not in the room, a weakness he flagged for later.

Putin wanted a withdrawal from the line of contact. Zelenskyy ran the numbers on the length of that line and the square kilometers involved and told him the Russian plan would take 20 years. He was deep in the file. Putin, he said, was not. He did not know where the border was or how long disengagement would take. "If you are not deeply involved in the issue," Zelenskyy said, "then you don't really need the result." That, for him, is the key to 2019. Putin was never going to do those things.

The gas contract was signed because Putin needed it. Ukraine took the first step on the exchange. The killing, Zelenskyy said, resumed in about a month. He called Putin and told him the ceasefire was not "a piece of toilet paper." Merkel, Macron, the two of them had agreed. He called two or three times in all. Putin said they would figure it out. The front could look quiet while people were still being shot. After a few months the Russians stopped answering the phone.

He wanted another Normandy-format meeting. Moscow refused, offering excuses through European capitals. Meanwhile, he said, Russian snipers were training in eastern Ukraine, using Ukrainians as living targets, in the very region Putin described as Russian-speaking. Some of those snipers later appeared in Syria and Africa. Ukraine sent pictures and evidence to the United Nations and anywhere else that would listen. Few people, he said, were paying attention to Ukraine then, or to the illegal occupation of Crimea.

Zelenskyy asked Fridman to stay in the same information space. In occupied Mariupol, he said, American and Ukrainian journalists will tell you that 20,000 or 30,000 civilians were tortured and buried. The number is still unknown. Then he switched into Russian so Fridman would hear the next question without a delay: what about the millions of children in the occupied territories? If there is only a ceasefire, and no one knows what happens next or what Ukraine's security guarantees are, what is he supposed to tell those children? "Hey, all of you over there... See ya"?

Since 2014, he said, children of draft age in Donetsk and Crimea, and now in Melitopol and Berdyansk, are being sent to fight. If they do not go, they are killed. A ceasefire, in that setting, is not a pause that can stand alone. It has to come with a guarantee that Putin will not return to the territory Ukraine still controls. Otherwise the people left behind, and the tens of thousands already buried, are written off.

He warned that Trump could be dropped into the same position Zelenskyy occupied in 2019: wanting an end to the war, a ceasefire, an exchange of people, and a later diplomatic return of territory. If that ceasefire has no serious security guarantees, and Putin attacks again three months later, Trump looks weak, Ukraine looks broken, and Putin has been handed a pass. In Putin's head, Zelenskyy said, the plan is to make Zelenskyy fight Trump. "Don't wait for Putin to want to stop the war. Pressure him so that he is forced to stop."

Asked for the path, Zelenskyy named a strong Ukrainian position first. A fast piece of that, he said, is NATO, even partial membership. He knows Trump's skepticism. The invitation, as a legal matter, is issued to all of Ukraine, including occupied land, but NATO can operate only in the part Kyiv controls. That, he said, can be negotiated. It would not be a great success for Ukraine. If it is a diplomatic way to end the war, it is still a way.

The second piece is an arms package that would sit unused if a ceasefire holds. He does not want a repeat of the Biden years, when weapons arrived after the blow. He wants sanctions now and weapons now. He also wants Russian energy pushed off the market so cheaper American oil and gas take the revenue Putin uses for the war. Fridman asked about security guarantees for Russia. Zelenskyy answered that the war is on Ukrainian soil, started by one army and one man, and that even governments in the Global South that try to balance both sides still call it Putin's war and Putin's mistake.

Then he turned the Russian-security question around. NATO for Ukraine, he said, is also a security guarantee for Russians, and not because he cares what happens to them after the war. Imagine a father who lost a child, the war ends, there is no justice, no one goes to prison, sanctions come off, and support is frozen. Ukraine has thousands of such people. Why would they not find a way into Russia and kill soldiers there? "It's human nature." Read American writers, he said. After a war, if there is no justice, people come back with hate.

So NATO, in this argument, stops Russia and stops Ukraine. It is a defensive alliance, he said, not the offensive bloc Putin describes. He does not want guarantees that leave the United States out. Without American troops, industry, and money, he argued, Hitler could have won World War II, and without Washington there is no NATO. When Fridman asked whether Trump might walk away from the alliance, Zelenskyy called that the death of NATO. Bilateral aid, bomb shelters for schoolchildren, and financing matter. They are not enough to prevent another Russian attack.

Fridman's dream date was January 25, or sometime at the end of January, with three men signing a deal. Zelenskyy noted that January 25 is his birthday, then rejected the seating chart. First he wants to sit with Trump and agree how to stop Putin. Then Europe must have a voice, because Ukraine is part of Europe and intends to be in the European Union. European leaders, he said, now ask him after every Trump call how it went, a level of attention he had not seen with earlier American presidents. Only after that would he talk to the Russians. Not the three of them at once.

He gave a history lesson on why paper guarantees failed. Ukraine once had nuclear weapons. He would not call giving them up good or bad in the abstract. Today, the fact that Ukraine does not have them is bad, because a nuclear power is at war with it and can do what it wants. The Budapest Memorandum listed the United States, Russia, and Britain, then France and China. The English word, he stressed, was *assurance*, not guarantee. Ukraine was pressured by Washington and Moscow to disarm in exchange for confidence that its territory and sovereignty would hold.

After the occupation of Crimea and part of Donbas, Ukrainian diplomats sent official letters three times to every signatory, asking for the urgent consultations the paper required. Did anyone come? No. Did anyone reply? No. Did anyone consult? No. "They didn't give a fuck," he said, and he wanted Fridman to hear it in a language that made the meaning obvious. Russia did not care, and neither did the other guarantors. Letters went out again in February 2022. Again, no one answered.

He put Minsk on the same train of waste paper. The United States was not a party; he said the Obama administration was simply not interested in where Ukraine was. In 2008 in Bucharest, President George W. Bush, a Republican, said Ukraine should be in NATO. Everyone looked at Washington. Merkel opposed the invitation and forced the others to withhold it. Republicans, Zelenskyy said, were not afraid then, and Russia was a different country. He has wanted a ceasefire since 2019, with a mandate he put at about 70 percent. The meetings still have to be prepared with people who actually want peace: Ukraine and the United States first.

Zelenskyy said he trusts Trump's words and believes Putin is afraid of him. He also noted that Trump is the president of a democracy, not a man who stays for 25 years. Suppose Trump serves four years and in the fifth year Putin returns with a war. Will it comfort Trump that there was no war on his watch, and that Ukraine was destroyed after him? Putin is a killer, Zelenskyy said, but not a fool. He will study how his army was beaten, pour everything into weapons, and come back with a much larger force. After that humiliation, he will not fight only Ukraine. "He will destroy everything around."

If the United States left NATO, he added, Putin would destroy Europe. Do the arithmetic. Ukraine has the largest army in Europe, about 980,000. France, in second place, has about 200,000, four times smaller. Europe will not assemble two or three million people and does not want to. North Korea, by contrast, has already sent 12,000 soldiers, of whom 3,800 have been killed or wounded, and can send 30,000 to 40,000 more, or even larger numbers. Their faces, he said, are burned so the dead cannot be identified. Those men are not counted as people.

Last year Europe gave Ukraine a million artillery rounds, and Ukraine produced more. North Korea, he said, gave Putin 3.7 million. Putin still has a deficit. What he needs is time. Fridman offered other leverage: partnerships with India and Saudi Arabia, oil-price punishment, Ukrainian tech firms. Zelenskyy said those answers already assume huge amounts of money. One security guarantee he has put to Trump is to take $300 billion in frozen Russian assets, buy American weapons, and make Russia pay. More sanctions, including on the shadow fleet, stay on. Taking them off is not a gift he is offering.

Fridman said a compromise is still required. Zelenskyy asked whether leaving Putin unjailed after the murders is a small compromise, and whether forgiveness is. No one will forgive, he said. If someone takes your child, you do not ask who did it and then relax. You go and "bite their head off." NATO, in that frame, is itself the compromise: after a time, Ukraine does not go after Russia, and Russia does not go after Ukraine. Israel is not in NATO, he noted, and still got American, British, French, and Jordanian help against a barrage of missiles. If the word NATO is what irritates "Uncle Vova," he said, the real irritation is the people still living in Ukraine.

Fridman asked Zelenskyy to look at Putin as a serious man who loves his country. Zelenskyy asked what country that is, if Putin happens to consider Ukraine his. He pointed to Chechnya, a different people, faith, and language, and to the way he described Russian love: strangling by hugging. A man who loves his people, he said, does not send 18-year-old boys to die on someone else's land in Chechnya, Syria, Africa, Georgia, and Ukraine. He put Russian killed and wounded at about 788,000. Russia is already larger than America. How much land does he need?

He contrasted that with leaders who show up where it is hard. He was sure Trump would appear after an American earthquake or hurricane. He goes where Ukrainians are in difficulty. Putin, he said, had not been to Kursk in the four months of Ukraine's operation there. Asked whether Ukrainians and Russians will someday travel, marry, and be friends again, he said history's pattern is clear. The aggressor has to recognize guilt, as Germany did, pay reparations, accept security arrangements, and apologize. Silence, in his view, is also a form of participation.

What does he admire in Trump, and why did Americans choose him so clearly in 2024? "He was stronger" than Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, Zelenskyy said, intellectually and physically. The volume of rallies was not a small thing. He looked young enough, his mind worked, and he answered domestic questions on prices, the economy, and immigration. For Zelenskyy the main line was the promise to finish the war. He thinks Ukrainians support that idea, and that they now give Trump the highest rating of any American president. Before any decision, he wants Trump on the same facts: what the battlefield looks like, and what Putin actually wants.

The idea of the war, as he reads Putin, is to keep Ukraine from developing as an independent country. Frozen conflicts, as in Georgia's Abkhazia, block EU and NATO paths. He expected a push for Moldova's parliament, and he listed Syria's prisons beside Bucha. Ukraine, he said, is a wall in front of Europe. The two outcomes Putin would like are a weak NATO without Trump and a Ukraine too weak to survive or to build a strong relationship with Washington. North Korean troops are already taking home skills in drones, missiles, and cyber operations that will matter for Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. That is how, he argued, this war reaches the United States.

After a break, and a joke that the interpreter had become a three-headed dragon, Fridman asked about the freedoms cut by martial law. Zelenskyy said the war is still a war for freedom, and that freedom is an opportunity: home, children, work, a grave to visit. War restricts those opportunities. Martial law, in his account, is not Pinochet. An aggressor crossed the border, and the statute required it. Business still functions. Taxes could not fall; a military tax rose instead. Partners sent a great deal, he said, and it was still not enough to pay a million-strong army. Those salaries come from money Ukrainians had already accumulated.

Presidential elections were due in the spring of 2024, parliamentary elections in the fall. They did not take place, he said; they were not merely delayed. The constitution forbids them under martial law. Society, in his telling, opposes a legal change because people want an election they can trust. Some 8.5 million Ukrainians are abroad and would need voting infrastructure. Millions more live in occupied territory, not counting 2014. A million soldiers would have to vote. Online voting is discussed and feared because of cyberattacks.

If the war can end in 2025, he said, parliament can vote as soon as martial law lifts, and elections can follow in about 90 days. Will he run? "Even I don't know, really." It depends on how the war ends, on what people want, and on his family. They have not had time to talk about it. Fridman listed possible names: Petro Poroshenko, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Oleksiy Arestovych, Kyrylo Budanov, Vitali Klitschko. Zelenskyy said there may be more, and they have the right to run. What matters now is that famous people do their jobs instead of opening a campaign that would split the country in wartime. Ukraine's system, unlike America's two parties, lets anyone enter.

Fridman turned to the charge Americans hear most: that war breeds corruption. Zelenskyy said Ukraine now has the most elaborate anti-corruption architecture in Europe, built to meet EU conditions, with independent bodies and a judicial reform demanded by Washington and Brussels. He will not claim there is no corruption. He says Ukraine talks about it and fights it. Ihor Kolomoyskyi, described as the most influential oligarch since independence, is in prison. Russian-linked oligarchs were sanctioned or expelled. Viktor Medvedchuk, whose daughter has Putin as a godfather, was exchanged for Ukrainian soldiers.

What one part of the world calls corruption, he added, another part calls lobbying. During the war Ukraine received weapons, not piles of cash. Across the whole war, about $177 billion in American aid was voted for or decided upon. "Let's be honest. We have not received half of this money." He offered a smaller example. Ukraine had Antonov cargo jets parked in Europe and asked to fly the American weapons itself, to spend less on freight and buy more arms. Washington said no. American cargo jets did the lift, and the expensive bill was paid. He asked whether that was corruption or lobbyism, and said he could not shout about it at the time for fear of freezing support.

If the figure was 177 and Ukraine got half, he asked, where is the other half? "If you will find the second half you will find corruption." Trump and Elon Musk, Fridman said, care about this. Zelenskyy's answer was that Ukraine mostly received weapons, cracked down where it saw risk, and did not profit from the war. Russia pushed the story that Ukraine was selling arms. The reply, he said, was that soldiers would kill such people with their own hands, without a trial. Who, he asked, steals weapons by the truckload when the front does not have enough? The harder fight, in his view, is the disinformation that burns trust and then burns support.

Asked about Musk, Zelenskyy started with respect for a self-made builder. He ran a large production company himself and knows what it means to pick talent, invest, and make something people can use. He does not compare himself to Musk. He thanks him for Starlink, used after strikes on energy infrastructure, at the front, in kindergartens, and in schools. His request is that Musk stand with Ukraine as much as possible and come to see the country. Musk has not visited. Zelenskyy hopes Kyiv's airport can reopen only after a durable peace and enough air defense that cities are not stripped of Patriots to protect a runway. People, he said, matter more than planes.

He thinks the war will end, and that Trump may be the first leader to fly into Kyiv, a symbolic landing. January 25, Fridman suggested again. Zelenskyy would like to attend the January 20 inauguration if the front allows it, but not without a personal invitation. He is not Putin, he said; Putin came to Ukraine uninvited. Asked who really holds power in Kyiv, oligarchs, American politicians, or Andriy Yermak, he said he is hard to manage and submits only to rules and laws. The one person who can lift his arms, he once told reporters after a Trump call, is his son. Oligarchs who used to steer cash and politics have fled or gone to prison. Yermak, in this account, is a manager on a vertical, not a handler.

Looking five, ten, and twenty years ahead, he put digitalization first. Ukraine has a Ministry of Digital Transformation and a suite of services called Diia. The point is not only convenience. A phone tap, he said, removes the personal connections that feed future corruption. He calls the system the best in Europe. Some African Union countries have asked for the same service, which Ukraine can sell after the war. He also wants tax reform to bring business home, and American investment in oil, gas, solar, Black Sea reserves, and what he described as Europe's largest gold and uranium deposits. Russia, he noted, has pushed France out of Africa, and France needs uranium. Ukraine has it.

He does not want cheap labor. He wants people who can contribute and earn, and a reason for eight million Ukrainians to return. Culturally, the choice is to stay open and not turn back. Aligning with Russia is one idea; aligning with Europe is another, and he said the nation has chosen Europe. Fridman said the war has to end first. Zelenskyy agreed. People will tell a visitor they cannot forgive the murderers who took their lives, and that they still want peace. Trump's approval, he added, is now highest in Ukraine. They believe he can support Ukraine, stop Putin, and keep Putin from getting everything he wants. That is why, Zelenskyy said, the chance must not be lost.