MUNICH - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered an impassioned plea for more Western weapons and for "real security guarantees," calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a "slave to war" who will threaten Europe if he is not stopped in Ukraine.
In a midday speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Zelenskyy said he hopes a new round of trilateral talks with Russia and the United States next week will be productive, but suggested that US pressure for concessions is often aimed mainly at Kyiv and Russia has shown few signs it is ready for compromise.
"No one in Ukraine believes [Putin] will ever let our people go, but he will not let other European nations go either, because he cannot let go of the very idea of war," Zelenskyy said. "He may see himself as a tsar, but in reality he is a slave to war."
Nearly Four Years Of Ukraine War
Zelenskyy's speech came 10 days before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which set off the deadliest war in Europe since 1945, reaches the four-year mark and the casualty toll on the two sides taken together climbs toward 2 million soldiers killed, wounded, or missing.
In addition, Russia has killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians and pounded the country's energy infrastructure on a near-daily basis. "There is not a single power plant in Ukraine that is not damaged by Russian strikes."
With US President Donald Trump seeking to broker peace since he returned to office in January 2025, Zelenskyy repeated that strong security guarantees for Kyiv are a crucial element of any agreement.
"There must be real security guarantees for Ukraine and for Europe, strong security guarantees." He said that Ukraine is ready to sign security-guarantee deals with the US and Europe and that these should "come before any agreement to end the war."
"We hope President Trump hears us. We hope the Congress hears us. We hope American people hear us," said Zelenskyy, who wants an agreement on security guarantees to be ratified by the US Congress and met with a group of US senators in Munich.
Zelenskyy met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio later in the day on the sidelines of the annual conference, which no high-level Russian official has attended since Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
In his own speech and other comments earlier on February 14, Rubio said that "the issues to end the war have been narrowed, but the bad news is that now it's down to the hardest questions."
Rubio said he does not expect Russia to achieve its initial war objectives, which are widely understood to have included subjugating Ukraine, and that “now it’s largely narrowed down to their desire to take [the] 20 percent of Donetsk they don't currently possess.”
Putin and other Russian officials have repeatedly said that Moscow will capture the rest of the Donetsk region – one of two provinces that make up the Donbas, by force or though diplomacy.
Zelenskyy pointed to the massive losses Russia has sustained in that effort, saying "on the Donetsk front the price Russia pays for one kilometer is 156 soldiers." He said 35,000 Russian soldiers were killed or badly wounded in December and 30,000 in January.
"Putin is not concerned about this now, but there is a level at which he will start to care. Every month Russia mobilizes about 40,000 people," Zelenskyy said. "For our army the mission is clear: destroy more Russian occupiers. The goal is at least 50,000 per month."
Russia is now "losing much more [manpower] than they can refill," Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof told RFE/RL in Munich. He said Western countries should "speed up" deliveries of air defenses and other weapons, and that he hopes "Ukrainian forces will be able to push back Russia more" in the near future.
With a third round of US-Ukraine-Russia talks set to be held in Geneva on February 17-18, Zelenskyy said Kyiv hopes the meetings "will be serious, substantive, helpful for all us," but added that "honestly sometimes it feels like the sides are talking about completely different things."
Russia repeats demands that are unacceptable to Kyiv, he suggested, while "the Americans often return to the topic of concessions, and too often those concessions are discussed in the context only of Ukraine, not Russia. Europe is practically not present at the table. This is a big mistake, to my mind."
At times over the past year, Trump has blamed Kyiv for a lack of progress toward peace. "Russia wants to make a deal and Zelenskyy's going to have to get moving, otherwise he's going to miss a great opportunity," he hold journalists outside the White House on February 13.
Zelenskyy said on social media late on February 14 that he he had spoken by phone with the lead US negotiators.
"I had a conversation with envoys of President Trump, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, ahead of the trilateral meetings in Geneva. We count on the meetings being truly productive," he said.
Speaking to RFE/RL on the sidelines of the Munich conference, British Defense Minister John Healey said that "Ukraine is under strong pressure but Ukrainians are fighting...with extraordinary defiance and courage just as [they]showed four years ago when Putin first invaded."
"The world should remember that this is a war Putin thought he would win in a week," and almost four years later, with Russia is suffering "huge losses, he is under huge pressure," Healey said. "Our job is to step up further for Ukraine with the aid we can give and to step up further the pressure on Putin to bring him the negotiation table."
The Dutch prime minister also said that "Europe and the US should put pressure on Putin to stop the war."
"I don't see any political will and intention [to make peace] on the part of President Putin," Schoof told RFE/RL, adding that "so far, it only looks like he is trying to win time."
