Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday predicted Russia would “wage war against Nato” if the US stepped back from its support of Ukraine – and that he had seen intelligence suggesting that the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, was building up troops for a possible military invasion of another European country.
The Ukrainian president made the claim on the NBC show Meet the Press in a wide-ranging interview ahead of an emergency summit of European leaders in Paris to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine – and peace talks between US and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia.
“It can happen in summer, maybe in the beginning, maybe in the end of summer. I do not know when he prepares it,” Zelenskyy said. “But it will happen. And at that moment, knowing that he did not succeed in occupying us, we do not know where he will go.”
Zelenskyy added that he believed Putin’s next targets could be Poland and Lithuania – which were occupied during the second world war by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – “because we believe that [Russian president] Putin will wage war against Nato”, the international military alliance formally known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Zelenskyy said he had viewed documents indicating that Putin was “preparing to train 150,000 people” in Belarus, a staunch ally of Moscow – and that he had shared that intelligence with allies.
The Russian leader, Zelenskyy said, wanted to “show it for the world that it is just training” and would claim “that these are exercises that are always ongoing” in Belarus.
“But it’s not truth,” Zelenskyy said. “From such point, he began the occupation [of Ukraine] three years ago. Full-scale war he began from some symbolic trainings. The missiles the first night flew from Belarus, and the invasion came from Belarus.”
Zelenskyy insisted he still had trust in Donald Trump’s ability to negotiate with Russia after beginning his second US presidency in January. But Zelenskyy said he would not accept any peace agreement that excluded Ukraine from the negotiating table. He also said that some of the “messages” coming from the US in recent days, such as Vice-President JD Vance’s speech in Munich denouncing European leaders, and Trump’s comment that Ukraine “may be Russian some day”, were “a disappointment”.
In a recent exclusive interview with the Guardian, Zelenskyy stressed that Europe could not guarantee Ukraine’s security without US help – and he returned to the theme in his Meet the Press interview.
“There is no leader in the world who can really make a deal with Putin without us about us,” he said, speaking in English.
“Of course, the US can have a lot of decisions, economical partnerships, etc. We’re not happy with it, but they can have [them] with [the] Russians. But not about this war without us.
“There are messages, which, you know, make disappointment for a lot of leaders of Europe, because they also feel sometimes that they are out of decisions.
“They have to be in unity with the US otherwise, not only [can the] US lose Europe as a strategic partner, Europe also can lose the US.”
His comments mirrored the alarm of European leaders at the US’s backpedalling over support for Ukraine, and Trump’s cozying up to Putin in a recent phone call, which many have portrayed as a capitulation.
In advance of Vance’s divisive speech at the Munich Security Conference, European powers including Britain, France and Germany said there could be no lasting peace in Ukraine without their participation in peace talks.
After it, some, including the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, took Vance to task for his comments questioning the future of the decades-old US-European alliance. Scholz also accused the US of “unacceptable interference” in its upcoming election after praise from Vance and the billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s “special government employee”, for the far-right nationalist party AfD.
Zelenskyy, who in Munich on Saturday called for the formation of an armed forces of Europe, told NBC that any weakening of US support for Europe or Nato would open the door to Putin’s plans for a territory grab.
“What is he waiting for? For a weakening of Nato by, for instance, policy of the US, that the US will think to take its military from Europe,” he said.
“Yes, Putin thinks of that. But I will believe that the US will not take its forces, its contingents from Europe, because that will severely weaken Nato and the European continent. Putin definitely counts on that, and the fact that we receive information that he will think of the invasion against former Soviet republics.
“The risk that Russia will occupy Europe is 100%, not all Europe, they will begin [with] those countries who are our friends, small countries who’ve been in the USSR, in the Soviet Union. Forgive me, but today these are Nato countries.”
