Zelensky says he is ‘always ready’ to step into a ring against Putin

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was “always ready” to get in a ring with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The statement came in a relaxed moment of an interview with the French public channel LCI aired this Saturday (17). “Tomorrow. I’m at his disposal,” continued the Ukrainian leader, laughing.

Zelensky was responding to a question about whether he thought Putin harbored a kind of personal hatred towards him. “When a real man wants to send someone a message, he does it himself, without resorting to an intermediary. If I had a message like that to give Putin, I would do it directly”, said, now more serious, the Ukrainian , who before ascending to power gained fame playing a president in the comedy series “Servant of the People”.

Zelensky’s claim comes a day after Russian troops knocked out more than 50% of Ukraine’s power, in one of the biggest such actions since Moscow began targeting the country’s infrastructure in October. As of Saturday morning, basic Kiev services had resumed, such as water supply and the metro system – but a quarter of the capital’s residents remained without heat, while a third remained without electricity.

Moscow’s ongoing attacks against Ukrainian infrastructure were, incidentally, one of the subjects discussed in the interview — the interviewer, Darius Rochebin, asked whether the strategy represented a “new form of war” against the invaded country.

Zelensky countered that, on the contrary, the tactic had been used at many other times in history, including by the German Army during World War II. “Putin’s strategy is as dirty as Hitler’s in his day, but the world has survived this kind of aggression and will survive again,” he said.

This was not the first time that the Ukrainian matched the two, by the way. In a historically-heavy video released in May, when the Ukrainian War had yet to enter its second month, Zelensky said Moscow is playing a “bloody reenactment, a fanatical rehash of Nazism”.

Putin, in turn, had as one of his justifications for invading the neighboring country the idea that it was necessary to “denazify” it, an allegation that was strongly contested by specialists.

Returning to the interview, the comparison was one of many moments in which Zelensky took the opportunity to personally criticize Putin. At one point, he asserted that Russia and its environs employ policies that “mirror the worst of the Soviet era”, dividing the population between “patricians and commoners”. Afterwards, he said that his nuclear threats prove his “fragility and mental derangement”.

Zelensky has yet again declared that he does not intend to negotiate a peace treaty with the Kremlin. “It is very difficult to accept a dialogue with someone when that person is armed with a machine gun or a nuclear weapon,” he said. “This man doesn’t want peace except his way.”

The official position of the Ukrainian is to only sit at the table with Russia if all the occupied areas of his country are liberated. The crux of this assertion is that it includes Crimea, annexed in 2014, and the areas of Donbass under Russian control since that year, in the wake of the civil war that followed the overthrow of a pro-Moscow government in Kiev.

On the 5th, in the midst of the American effort to try to open channels of negotiation, the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, stated that talks should begin as soon as Russia withdraws its soldiers from the areas it occupied from February 24th — or i.e. excluding Russian-speaking areas under Moscow control since 2014 from the precondition.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian military officials continue to warn the West of renewed Russian momentum for an offensive early next year. In recent interviews, they said Moscow’s idea is to buy time with infrastructure disruption while preparing its 320,000 mobilized reservists.

Also on Saturday (17), the Kremlin announced that Putin had met with his Armed Forces commanders in Moscow to hear their views on how the military campaign should proceed in Ukraine.