Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sharply criticised remarks made by US President Donald Trump, who likened the war between Russia and Ukraine to a playground fight between children.
Speaking in an interview with ABC News journalist Martha Raddatz, Zelenskyy dismissed the analogy as inappropriate and offensive, stating: “We are not kids with Putin at the playground in the park. He is a murderer who came to this park to kill the kids.”
The comments came during a wide-ranging discussion due to air in full on Sunday morning on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Zelenskyy used the opportunity to counter what he portrayed as a fundamental misunderstanding of the war’s human cost by the former US president. Trump’s remarks – describing the conflict as a fight between “two young people fighting like crazy” and suggesting that “sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while” – drew immediate criticism from Kyiv.
Zelenskyy made clear that such portrayals do not reflect the reality on the ground in Ukraine, where, according to official Ukrainian figures, 631 children have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022. He stated that Russia continues to target civilians, and that the Ukrainian population is enduring a level of suffering difficult to grasp from afar.
“It’s not about President Trump,” Zelenskyy told Raddatz. “It’s about any person who is not here in the country, who is some thousands of miles away — [they] cannot feel fully and understand this pain.”
The Ukrainian leader recounted a recent meeting with a bereaved father whose wife and three children had died in a Russian missile strike. The man, Zelenskyy said, spoke not in terms of numbers or military losses, but from a deeply personal place of grief: “He just said, ‘Every morning when I wake up, I’m just looking for my family — I’m looking everywhere in the flat … I still feel that it was a nightmare … a bad dream.’”
Zelenskyy’s remarks come amid ongoing hostilities in Ukraine, where fighting remains intense along multiple fronts. A report published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimates that between 60,000 and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the conflict, alongside as many as 250,000 Russian troops. Civilian casualties continue to mount, and Ukrainian officials accuse Russian forces of deliberately targeting non-military infrastructure.
The Ukrainian government maintains that its military operations are defensive in nature and aimed at repelling a foreign aggressor. Russia, by contrast, continues to justify its actions as part of a so-called “special military operation,” a term rejected by Western governments, most of which classify the invasion as illegal and unprovoked.
Zelenskyy also used the interview to reiterate Ukraine’s position on peace negotiations. While Kyiv remains open to dialogue, he said, attacks will continue as long as Russian forces remain on Ukrainian territory. “We will continue to defend ourselves. If they do not stop their offensive, we will not stop ours,” he stated.
The ABC interview comes just days after Ukraine launched a series of drone strikes against targets in Russian territory, part of what Kyiv describes as a strategy to extend the battlefield and disrupt the Kremlin’s capacity to sustain the war.
Russia continues its daily assaults on Ukrainian cities, systematically targeting civilian areas with Shahed drones, cruise and ballistic missiles, glide bombs, and heavy rocket artillery.
For now, Zelenskyy is focused on keeping the war – and its human cost – visible to the outside world.
“He is a murderer who came to kill the kids,” he said of Putin. “That’s the reality we live with every day.”
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