Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky has stated he would not negotiate with Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Speaking on Friday February 24, the one year anniversary of the Russian invasion, Zelenskyy was asked by a reporter if he would join negotiations mediated by Turkish president Recep Erdogan if Russian President Vladimir Putin came to the table, and Zelensky said, “I don’t accept it.”
“Erdogan knows my view,” Zelensky said. “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,” Zelensky said Friday.
Explaining why he can’t speak to Putin, Zelensky added;
“It is not the same man. There is nobody to talk to there,” he said.
When asked if NATO countries should increase their defense spending given the war in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia’s invasion has forced the world and NATO countries to rethink their security systems.
“A lot of countries in the world (have) started increasing their defense budgets,” he told reporters on Friday. “The war in Ukraine has pushed the reset button on NATO.”
When thinking of defense spending, Zelensky said it’s about more than just ammunition and weapons, and pointed to drones, IT, information sharing and defense against cyber attacks.
“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.