KYIV, Ukraine — Russia is putting up a desperate fight in the face of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told NBC News on Thursday, saying he believes that if the Kremlin loses this battle, it will ultimately lose the war.
“Our heroic people, our troops on the front of the front line are facing very tough resistance,” he said in an interview in Kyiv. “Because for Russia to lose this campaign to Ukraine, I would say, actually means losing the war.”
Zelenskyy said the news from the front lines was “generally positive but it’s very difficult.”
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The interview comes days after the start of the long-awaited counteroffensive, aimed at driving Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces out of occupied territory.
Kyiv has claimed incremental gains in the opening stages of its campaign, but no breakthrough yet against tough Russian defenses in Ukraine’s south and east.
The destruction of the Kakhovka dam last week added a stunning new dimension to the conflict, more than 15 months after the Kremlin’s invasion.
In Zelenskyy, Russia has found a dauntless opponent whose refusal to leave the capital has boosted his international image and helped secure billions of dollars of military aid, most of it from the Biden administration.
The counteroffensive could prove crucial not just to Zelenskyy’s hopes of retaking seized land, but also to maintaining allied support, which could be strained by the complexities of the battlefield and domestic politics.
Training for Ukrainian pilots to fly American-made F-16 fighter jets has already begun, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday, a potentially powerful tool in defending the country’s skies that has long been desired by Zelenskyy. But this will be no quick fix, with any training likely to take many months and come too late to blunt Russian dominance of the skies in the counteroffensive.
Meanwhile Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with NATO defense ministers in Brussels, for the first meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group since Ukraine launched its counteroffensive. A key question for NATO is Ukraine’s strong desire to join the alliance, something that has divided its members and drawn fierce opposition from the Kremlin.
The issue of Ukrainian military aid itself is also likely to become a divisive campaign issue in the U.S. presidential election next year.
Former President Donald Trump has said he would end the war immediately but has not explained how, while complaining about the cost of the aid. His main rival for the GOP nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, walked back comments in which he downplayed the war as a “territorial dispute” that the U.S. did not need to get “further entangled in.”
Richard Engel and Gabe Joselow reported from Kyiv, and Alexander Smith reported from London.
Yuliya Talmazan contributed.
