President Zelensky Quotes

Ukraine did not seek greatness. But Ukraine has become great.

Within days, Trump admitted that on July 25 he had called the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to enlist his help against former vice president Joe Biden, who was beating Trump in most polls going into the 2020 election season. Zelensky was desperate for the money Congress had approved to help his country fight Russian-backed separatists in the regions Russia had occupied after the 2014 invasion, but Trump indicated he would release the money only after Zelensky announced an investigation into the actions of Biden’s son Hunter during his time on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Dear Ukrainians,” Zelensky said in his inauguration address. “After my election win, my six-year-old son said: ‘Dad, they say on TV that Zelensky is the president…. So, it means that I am the President too?!’ At the time, it sounded funny, but later I realized that it was true. Because each of us is the president. “From now on, each of us is responsible for the country that we leave to our children,” Zelensky said. “Each of us, in his place, can do everything for the prosperity of Ukraine.” He raised his first priority: a cease-fire in the Donbas where Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces had been fighting since Putin’s 2014 invasion. “I have been often asked: What price are you ready to pay for the cease-fire? It’s a strange question,” Zelensky said. “What price are you ready to pay for the lives of your loved ones? I can assure that I’m ready to pay any price to stop the deaths of our heroes. I’m definitely not afraid to make difficult decisions and I’m ready to lose my fame, my ratings, and if need be without any hesitation, my position to bring peace, as long as we do not give up our territories. “History is unfair,” Zelensky added. “We are not the ones who have started this war. But we are the ones who have to finish it. “I really do not want you to hang my portraits on your office walls. Because a president is not an icon and not an idol. A president is not a portrait. Hang pictures of your children. And before you make any decision, look into their eyes,” he said. “And finally,” Zelensky concluded, “all my life I tried to do all I could so that Ukrainians laughed. That was my mission. Now I will do all I can so that Ukrainians at least do not cry anymore.

It was August 24, 2021, the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union. President Zelensky, who previously had criticized military parades, decided it was time to send Putin a message.

Zelensky, who became president in 2019, was a new guy on the political scene. Trump was still trying to feel Zelensky out. So was Putin, Kellogg believed. “To him, Putin, Trump was an unknown,” Kellogg said. “Hell, we didn’t know how Trump would react at times. “Trump was basically Jekyll and Hyde.

During the call, Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky provided damaging information on Hunter Biden, the son of Vice President Joe Biden.

The Ukrainian men should have been smart and told President Zelensky they would defend Ukraine, but not the traditionally Russian part of Ukraine that Russia was invading.

The next day, July 26, one of the White House aides who had listened to the call confided in a CIA official that Trump’s comments to Zelensky had been “crazy,” “frightening,” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security.” The aide added that “the President had clearly committed a criminal act.

But if you weren’t convinced by Mueller’s report, if you believe President Trump’s actions in 2016 did not warrant impeachment, then this book is for you. Because the proven facts of what President Trump has done with Ukraine far eclipse the allegations of his campaign’s coordination with Russia in 2016. Whereas Mueller’s report could not prove collusion, in this case there is no doubt President Trump tried to collude with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine—because we have notes from the call, released by President Trump himself, demonstrating our president doing exactly that.

He remembers giving himself a pep talk that would play in his mind throughout the day. "They're watching," he told himself. "You're a symbol. You need to act the way a head of state must act." As the day wore on, his aides could see Zelensky's posture stiffen. His tone became clipped, and he began to issue a stream of orders from the bunker and from his office on the fourth floor. Most of his decisions had no real basis in experience or planning. Zelensky had neither of these things to guide him at the time, but he didn't seem to mind. His assent to the presidency from the world of comedy would not have been possible without a knack for projecting confidence even when he lacked it. Now that skill went into overdrive, and Zelensky became what one of his aides described as a "decision generator.

Now, when he was truly vulnerable, one Russia missile strike away from death, the president carried an air of invincibility, as though the war had made him grow some stubborn armor that no weapon in the world could break. If this was an act, it looked convincing right down to the details, the way he settled into the seat across from me like a sovereign into a hereditary throne. The presence of all these aides, all these bodyguards, no longer made him feel self-conscious. He saw no need to maintain an ironic distance between himself and the symbols of power around him. The role was his now.

President Zelensky visited Bucha a few days after the Russian retreat, and he would long remember it as the most terrifying moment of that tragic year of war, another turning point for him and his country. It showed him, as he later put it, that the devil is not far away, not a feature of our myths and nightmares. "He's here on this earth," Zelensky said.

The president asked his staff to prepare a bed for him in a little room behind his office on the fourth floor. It was a single, about the same size as his bed in the bunker, with a wooden headboard and a TV suspended on the wall above his feet. In the closet, he kept several changes of clothes from local military outfitters, who gave him an ample supply of the T-shirts and fleeces that turned Zelensky into an unlikely fashion icon. "I had to tell them to stop," he said. "They all wanted me to wear their T-shirts." Hanging next to them in his closet he kept a single business suit, pressed and ready, he said, for the day when the war would end in victory for Ukraine.

Wars are fought in the minds of men and women long before the shooting starts, and Zelensky, the showman turned president, operated on that plane.