The Ukrainian leader’s speech in Budapest came as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin called Donald Trump ‘courageous’ and called for a ’neutral’ Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said it would be “unacceptable” for Kyiv to make concessions to Russia and “suicidal for Europe.”
His comments at the European Political Community summit in Budapest, on Thursday, come two days after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election.
Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine within “24 hours” and has said Kyiv should have made concessions before Russia invaded in Feb. 2022.
But Zelenskyy said, “There has been much talk about the need to yield to Putin, to back down, to make some concessions. It’s unacceptable for Ukraine and suicidal for all Europe.”
Ceasefire Talk is ‘Dangerous’
The Ukrainian leader said: “Talk of a ceasefire is dangerous when there are no security guarantees for Ukraine clear, real, ones that we can trust, not merely rhetorical assurances.”
“Such a ceasefire prepares the ground for continued occupation of Ukraine and the destruction of our independence and sovereignty,” he added.
Zelenskyy said, “A simple ceasefire is a model we are hearing about from some leaders here, from Brazil, from China, and importantly, we are definitely hearing it from Russia. This is a great model for Russia. A ceasefire and then the rest? We need to clearly understand what ‘the rest’ is.”
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The Budapest summit is being hosted by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Unlike most of the other leaders at the summit, Orban doesn’t believe the West should continue to supply Ukraine with weapons and financial assistance.
Speaking on state radio, Orbán, who is close to both Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, reiterated his long-held position that an immediate cease-fire should be declared, and predicted that Trump will bring an end to the conflict.
“If Donald Trump had won in 2020 in the United States, these two nightmarish years wouldn’t have happened, there wouldn’t have been a war,” Orbán said. “The situation on the front is obvious, there’s been a military defeat. The Americans are going to pull out of this war.”
Zelenskyy pointed out ceasefires had been agreed after the war broke out in the Donbas in 2014 but he said, “There was not even an exchange of prisoners. People have been in prison for 10 years. After the ceasefire, the conflict was frozen.”
He said more than 140 countries support Ukraine’s “stand against Russian aggression” and recognized the territorial integrity of his country.
In the same speech, Zelenskyy said some of the 11,000 North Korean troops who Russia has deployed in the Kursk region had suffered their first casualties in combat after clashing with Ukrainian troops.
Putin Calls For Ukrainian Neutrality
Putin had earlier made a speech to a conference, hosted by the Valdai Club think tank in Sochi, in which he derided NATO and called for Ukraine to be a “neutral” country, a buffer between Russia and the West.
A few hours after Putin’s speech, dozens of Russian drones struck the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
In his speech in Sochi, Putin “If there is no neutrality, it is difficult to imagine the existence of any good neighborly relations between Russia and Ukraine.”
Putin said Russia had only recognized Ukraine’s borders in 1991, after the break up of the Soviet Union, because it never believed it would ever join NATO.
He said if Ukraine was not neutral, it could be, “constantly used as a tool in the wrong hands and to the detriment of the interests of the Russian Federation.”
Putin said, “We are determined to create conditions for a long-term settlement so that Ukraine is an independent, sovereign state, and not an instrument in the hands of third countries, and not used in their interests.”
He added, “The borders of Ukraine should be in accordance with the sovereign decisions of people who live in certain territories and which we call our historical territories.”
On June 14, Putin set out his terms for an end to the conflict and they included dropping its ambitions to join NATO and withdrawing Ukrainian troops from the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, or regions, which Russia claims.
During his speech in Sochi, Putin blamed NATO for its expansion” into eastern Europe and claimed it had lost its reason for existence after the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact collapsed.
Putin said of NATO, “They basically forced us to take actions and respond [in Ukraine] until they got what they wanted. And the same is happening in Asia on the Korean peninsula.”
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
