Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy opened his speech not just with a message targeting Russia after more than four and a half years of open war, but also aimed squarely at the sensibilities of his host in New York.
– “This morning on my way to New York, somewhere in the sky over the big and beautiful Atlantic Ocean, I read President Trump’s post on Truth Social,” Zelenskyy began.
– He relayed how Trump had written that Russia lost control of its diesel oil industry due to its war with Ukraine, an embarrassment for a UN Security Council member so proud of its oil industry.
– “And this is true, Russia messed up,” Zelenskyy said. “And the conclusion of the post is also right: this ridiculous and never-ending war with Ukraine must be ended. I do not know a single world leader who would say otherwise. I do not know anyone who is openly for this war: except one man.”
– He said that Russia had been trying to carry out what he called Putin’s “crazy orders” to seize eastern Ukraine for more than four years.
– “Just this year, from January through August” the Russian army “lost” 248,964 people on the battlefield in Ukraine, Zelenskyy said. He later clarified that this constituted military casualties — so soldiers “killed and badly wounded” and said “we have video confirmation for every one of these losses.”
– He said that amid these losses, Russia had only managed to capture “around 1,000 square kilometers (380 square miles) of our land this year,” adding that “we have already liberated a significant part of it.” He compared this to Russia’s own vast territory spanning some 17 million square kilometers.
– He said of the continued fighting: “It’s madness, but they still keep going there to die, because that is what Putin wants.”
Zelenskyy calls Putin ‘patient zero,’ from whom ‘this idea of war keeps spreading further’
– Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also addressed the ways the war in Ukraine had spread, not least North Korea sending troops to fight on Russia’s behalf.
– “Recently we sent two North Korean prisoners of war the the Republic of Korea,” Zelenskyy said, referring to South Korea by its formal name. “And these guys are not easy to capture alive. One of them, when he realized he was going to be taken prisoner, tried to kill himself.”
– He said this spoke to how personnel in North Korea were trained and an attitude that “they must die, no matter what.”
– “Do you really want to give such a force more time to learn how to wage war?” he asked.
– Zelenskyy said that North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un provided troops to Russia in a transactional way. He said he presumed North Korea’s neighbors must have noticed what he said was the country’s recently-improved missile capabilities.
– Zelenskyy alleged that Putin never seemed satisfied in his territorial ambitions and argued that this pattern applied beyond Ukraine.
– He said that many around the world, in the south Caucasus, in Syria and across Africa “also know very well what Russian killers are.”
– “After all of this, can you even imagine [Putin] without war?” Zelenskyy asked. “He is patient zero, the one from whom this idea of war keeps spreading further. And wherever it spreads, it brings only pain, instability, new risks and of course new crises.”
– The more space Putin has to operate, he argued, the more dangerous the world became for everyone else.
– “That is why patient zero must be stopped. He must be denied the space to act and the space to spread this evil further,” Zelenskyy said.