KYIV - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Saturday for NATO to offer guaranteed protections to parts of Ukraine controlled by Kyiv to “stop the hot stage of the war.”
Zelensky also implied he would be willing to wait to regain almost one-fifth of his country that Russia’s army has seized if such a deal could offer security for the rest of Ukraine and end the fighting.
The comments came amidst escalating tensions in the nearly three-year war. Russia has this week threatened to strike government buildings in Kyiv and launched a massive aerial attack on Ukraine’s energy sector -- something it called a response to Ukraine firing US and British-supplied missiles on Russian territory.
“If we want to stop the hot stage of the war, we should take under NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control,” Zelensky told Britain’s Sky News, according to a voiceover translation of his remarks from Ukrainian into English.
“That’s what we need to do fast, and then Ukraine can get back the other part of its territory diplomatically,” he added.
Talk of a possible ceasefire or peace deal has ratcheted up since Donald Trump won the US presidential election earlier this month.
The Republican has criticised US aid to Kyiv and claimed he could halt the conflict within hours, without saying how.
Russia controls around 18 percent of Ukraine’s internationally recognised territory, including the Crimean peninsula which Moscow annexed in 2014. Since invading in 2022, Moscow has claimed four more eastern and southern regions of Ukraine -- Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia -- as its own, despite not having full control over them.
Kyiv has repeatedly ruled out ceding territory in exchange for peace, while Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded Ukraine’s army withdraw from swathes of more land.
