Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, has said that he will not engage with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion, Zelenskyy was asked by a reporter if he would attend negotiations mediated by Turkish President Recep Erdogan if Russian President Vladimir Putin came to the table, and Zelensky said, “I don’t accept that.”
Zelenskyy said, “Erdogan knows my view. We discussed this before the war. I told him to put Putin at the table for negotiations. ‘Can we please do that? We must avert a full-scale war.’ But [Erdogan] was not able to do that. Not only him — he is powerful — but he is not able to do it. And now he thinks that he is? Now we can’t.”
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Explaining why he can’t speak to Putin, Zelenskyy added: “It is not the same man. There is nobody to talk to there.”
When asked if NATO countries should increase defence spending in light of the Ukraine conflict, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that Russia’s invasion has caused the globe and NATO countries to reconsider their security arrangements.
“A lot of countries in the world (have) started increasing their defence budgets. The war in Ukraine has pushed the reset button on NATO,” he told reporters on Friday.
Zelenskyy stated that when considering defence spending, it’s not just about ammo and weapons, highlighting drones, IT, information exchange, and defence against cyberattacks.
“There is a lot of state-of-the-art technology, and it is not universally effective. Of course, some people may be increasing spending. But on the whole, this is also a reform of security systems. I believe that this is right. Because everybody has seen what you can expect of the Russian Federation,” he said at a news conference to mark one year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.