President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine with President Trump in New York on Tuesday. Just months ago, Mr. Trump berated Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office, telling him he had “no cards” to play.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine issued a stark warning at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, saying the weapons being developed to fight the war raging in his country pose a grave threat to humanity.
“We are now living through the most destructive arms race in human history,” he told world leaders at their yearly meeting.
Mr. Zelensky gave his speech a day after meeting with President Trump, who then suddenly reversed his stance on the war, declaring that Ukraine could not only win it, but could reclaim the territory Russia already seized. That statement was a diplomatic win for the Ukrainian leader, and Mr. Zelensky used his talk to once again tell global leaders that their fates are linked at a time in which Russia is sparking a new era of global instability.
Even as he spoke of the dangers of the arms race, he said his country needed more weapons to defend itself, given the failure of international institutions to maintain peace. “The only guarantee of security is friends and weapons,” he said.
Seeking to convince his fellow leaders that they should not see the war against his country as a distant threat, the Ukrainian leader painted a dystopian picture of a world awash in deadly drones, ones that he said could eventually carry nuclear warheads.
Ukraine has become a world leader in developing inexpensive drones and testing its innovations in real time on the battlefield. Russia is also deploying drones and anti-drone systems, as well as electronic warfare, in its military offensive against Ukraine.
The future, Mr. Zelensky said, will be even more dangerous as A.I. is integrated into drones. The regulation of that technology is as urgent as stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, he said.
But the first step, he said, is stopping Russia’s war in Ukraine.
It is unclear what caused Mr. Trump to reverse his public assessment of the war on Tuesday, a change so dramatic that it left many Ukrainians unsure of what to make of it. Even Mr. Zelensky, while welcoming the statement, said he was “a little bit” surprised by its strength.
In the past, Mr. Trump had castigated Mr. Zelensky in public and pressed Ukraine to agree to a deal to end the war or risk losing even more territory. But on Truth Social on Tuesday, he said, “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”
Image Evacuees from the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine arriving last month in Pavlograd, Ukraine, which is farther from the front. Credit... Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
Still, Mr. Trump’s statement did not include any new offers of support, including once again providing the Ukrainians powerful weapons at no cost, instead of allowing European countries to buy American arms for them.
And even Ukrainian military commanders have said that, under the current circumstances, it is nearly impossible to drive Russia fully from the approximately 20 percent of Ukraine that it controls.
A member of the Ukrainian Parliament, Mykola Kniazhytsky, said that Mr. Trump’s statements contained “nothing new that could affect the end of the war.”
“Nothing about the role of the United States,” he continued. “Nothing about expanding military or economic assistance.”
Other Ukrainians seemed not to take Mr. Trump’s social media post seriously. Given his other flip-flops on policies, they said that his views could change at any moment.
“What happens next may be as written, or it may be the other way around,” Viktor Shlinchak, the head of the Institute of World Policy, an analytical research group, said on Facebook.
The Kremlin dismissed Mr. Trump’s comments, including his assessment of Russia as a paper tiger. “Russia is more associated with a bear — and there are no paper bears,” the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said.
Just months ago, Mr. Trump berated Mr. Zelensky in the Oval Office, telling him he had “no cards” to play. Since then, there have been many twists in Mr. Trump’s public comments on the war.
When he greeted Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, on a red carpet in Alaska this summer, breaking years of diplomatic isolation, it seemed Moscow had shaped his view. After a three-hour meeting with Mr. Putin, Mr. Trump insisted that Ukraine would ultimately have to give up territory.
But after his meeting on Tuesday with Mr. Zelensky in New York, Mr. Trump said he now fully understood the military and economic dynamics of the war and had changed his outlook. He said that this was “the time for Ukraine to act.”
Mr. Zelensky said after his meeting with Mr. Trump that he had spoken about battlefield developments.
Before leaving Kyiv for the United Nations, Mr. Zelensky said Ukraine had taken back about 140 square miles in September, a claim supported by combat footage verified by military analysts. “It’s not a big victory, but it means we are not losing,” Mr. Zelensky said on Fox. “This is important.”
Image A Ukrainian soldier on the outskirts of the eastern city of Kupiansk in May. Russia’s summer offensive made only marginal advances, at great cost. Credit... Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Still, Russia has occupied more than 1,150 square miles of land in Ukraine so far this year, according to DeepState, a Ukrainian group that charts battlefield movements. It also drove Ukrainian forces out of its own Kursk region.
In a war of attrition, Russia’s larger population from which to draw military recruits gives it an edge. And even as Ukrainian forces pushed Russians back in some areas of the front in recent weeks, Russian soldiers pressed forward elsewhere.
On Wednesday, the two armies continued to conduct long-distance strikes at targets far from the front, including critical infrastructure.
The Ukrainian military said it had targeted important facilities in Russia, including the Gazprom Neftekhim-Salavat oil refinery about 750 miles east of Moscow, oil pumping stations in the Volgograd region and a drone production facility in the Belgorod region.
Since early August, Ukraine claims to have carried out at least 25 successful strikes on Russian oil refineries, many captured in videos posted on social media. The locations have been verified by military analysts.
Russia on Wednesday continued to bombard towns and cities across Ukraine, hitting both civilian and military targets. The Ukrainian military said that a military training ground was hit by two Iskander ballistic missiles. There were casualties, the military said, but would not provide details.
The course of the war will depend on economics as much as on weapons. Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that he believed Ukraine was inflicting damage on Russia on this front, referring in his social media post to long lines at gas stations. Russia, he wrote, is “in BIG Economic trouble.”
Mr. Putin has dismissed claims that the economy is in trouble.
Though the economy is not “crashing,” as Mr. Trump said in his meeting with Mr. Zelensky, Russia’s military spending has strained the budget. The deficit has reached $50 billion, bringing proposals to raise taxes for defense funding.
Late on Wednesday, the Russian foreign ministry issued a statement after Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The statement did not directly refer to Mr. Trump’s Truth Social remarks, but sounded conciliatory and emphasized that Russia was still willing to “adhere to the course worked out by the leaders of Russia and the United States in Alaska.”
Mr. Trump’s current view that Ukraine can prevail and reclaim its lost territory may not endure. And even if he has changed his thinking, he has made it clear that he does not view the war as critical to America’s national security interests.
Ukrainians have learned to be wary.
Mr. Zelensky, during an appearance before the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday, talked about the failure of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which was designed to protect Ukraine’s security in exchange for nuclear disarmament. He cited it as evidence that “international promises can turn into blabbering.”
Mr. Zelensky said Ukraine continued to expand the coalition of nations willing to provide it with military assistance and some security guarantees. “We count on the United States of America as a backstop," he said.
An American backstop is probably the best Kyiv can hope for at the moment.
When Mr. Trump ended his Truth Social statement outlining his views on the war, he signed off in a way that signaled that he may see himself as something of a bystander.
“Good luck to all!” Mr. Trump wrote.
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.
[SRC] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09/24/world/un-general-assembly-ukraine
