- Putin maintains there will be no talks while Ukraine occupies parts of Russia
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country is ‘closer to the end of the war’ with Russia after more than two and a half years since the invasion.
‘I think that we are closer to the peace than we think,’ he told ABC News on Monday. ‘We are closer to the end of the war.’
The Ukrainian leader said that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’.
Ukraine has fought back defiantly, able to make significant gains in Russian territory in recent weeks, having endured daily strikes with allied support.
Zelensky arrived in the United States on Sunday for the UN General Assembly and urged continued support from the West in order to ensure ‘a shared victory for a truly just peace’.
Zelensky speaks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on September 23
Ukrainian rescuers work at the site of a shelling on a high-storey residential building in Kharkiv on September 24
A Police officer examines the debris of an apartment building destroyed during an airstrike in Kharkiv, on September 24
Ukrainian firefighters work to extinguish a fire at the site of a drone attack in Kharkiv, May 4
A destroyed building in background and seen trough a broken window of a damaged residential building in Myrnohrad on August 26
Ukrainian servicemen drive in a military vehicle on a road near the town of Chasiv Yar in March
A Ukrainian serviceman drives a British FV103 Spartan armoured personnel carrier in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, March 30
In the interview, he urged Washington and other partners to continue supporting Ukraine.
The full-scale Russia invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022 as what Moscow called a ‘special operation’, has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, uprooted millions more and devastated Ukrainian towns and cities.
The war has been ongoing since February 2014.
Washington and its allies have provided a multi-billion dollar assistance program to Ukraine since the Russian invasion began while also imposing several rounds of sanctions against Moscow.
Russia reopened its counter-offensive in Kharkiv in May as allies debated allowing Ukraine to use their long-range missiles on military targets within Russia.
The assault was Russia’s biggest gain in 17 months, the Telegraph reported, swallowing up 250sq-km. Russian troops made it six miles before Ukraine stabilised the situation.
The sudden incursion invited the US to concede the restrictions it had placed on only using its supplied weapons on Russian targets within Ukraine.
Soon followed Ukrainian attacks with foreign missiles over the border, drawing outrage from Putin and his cronies – and threats of nuclear annihilation towards Ukraine’s western backers.
Ukraine was able to launch an offensive back into Russia on August 6, taking scores of villages in Kursk and Belgorod oblasts. Ukraine says the action intended partly to prevent Russian forces in the area from launching their own incursion across the border into Ukraine.
The assault was launched in part to ease pressure in the north-east by forcing Russia to divert its forces.
Russia is waging a war of attrition, relentlessly bombing towns and cities while trying to tear holes in Ukrainian defences at places along the 600-mile front line, especially in the eastern Donbas region.
Putin still maintains that peace talks can begin only if Kyiv abandons swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine to Russia and drops its NATO membership ambitions.
But Zelensky has called repeatedly for a withdrawal of all Russian troops, and the restoration of Ukraine’s post-Soviet borders.
Zelenskiy told ABC News Putin was afraid of the Kursk operation.
‘He’s afraid very much,’ he said. ‘Why? Because his people saw that he can’t defend – that he can’t defend all his territory.’
Ukraine and the West say Russia is waging an imperial-style war. Putin cast the Ukraine invasion as a defensive move against a hostile and aggressive West.
Damage to residential buildings in Toretsk, eastern Donetsk region, on June 25
War-displaced people spend time in a centre for displaced people in undisclosed location in Kursk region on August 29, following Ukraine’s cross-border offensive
Ukrainian servicemen drive an armoured military vehicle past destroyed border crossing point with Russia on August 14
People embrace as they wait to board an evacuation train at an undisclosed location in Donetsk region on August 26
A woman carries a girl next to a heavily damaged building of the Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital
The hospital was hit during a Russian missile attack in July 2024
Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to grind down Ukraine’s appetite for the fight and sap the West’s support for Kyiv by drawing out the conflict.
Russian forces have been creeping forward on the battlefield this year, but the progress has been costly.
The UK Defence Ministry estimates more than 1,000 Russian troops are being killed or wounded each day.
Amid the bitter fighting, Ukrainian troops engaged in hand-to-hand combat as they drove Russian forces out of a huge processing plant in the town of Vovchansk in Ukraine’s northeast that had been occupied for four months, officials said.
The plant, a partly steel structure with some 30 buildings, had been a Russian stronghold in the Kharkiv border region since May when Russia sought to further stretch Ukraine’s weary forces by launching a fresh push in the area.
Taking back the plant was likely intended to demonstrate that Ukraine is not giving up the fight despite being outmanned and outgunned by the Russian army.
A statement from Ukrainian Military Intelligence said its units recaptured the Vovchansk plant after fierce fighting ‘in densely built-up conditions’.
The Russian onslaught has reduced Vovchansk, and many other Ukrainian towns and villages, to smoking piles of rubble and bombed-out residential buildings.