Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his government was "working very hard" to secure crucial support from allies. He also raised the prospect of a potential large mobilization.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said during an end-of-year press conference he was certain that crucial US and European financial aid would continue.
"We are working very hard on this, and I am certain the United States will not betray us," Zelenskyy said during a televised press briefing in Kyiv.
He also said he expected the European Union to approve a €50 billion (roughly $55 billion) aid package soon. Funding for Ukraine has been held up recently in both the US and European Union amid political tussles as Ukraine fends off a full-scale Russian invasion.
According to Zelenskyy, no one knows when the war with Russia will end, with fatigue building in Kyiv and among its allies abroad. "I think that no one knows the answer. Even respected people, our commanders and our Western partners, who say that this is a war for many years, they do not know," Zelenskyy told reporters, adding that: "If we don't lose our resilience, we will end the war sooner."
However, if Donald Trump is elected US president in 2024, it could change significantly how the war in Ukraine plays out, Zelenskyy said.
"If the policy of the next [US] president, whoever it is, is different towards Ukraine, more cold or more economical, I think these signals will have a very strong impact on the course of the war," the Ukrainian president said, referring to Trump, who he said "will surely have a different policy."
Trump has already claimed several times that if elected next year he would end the war in Ukraine "in a day," but has gone into very little detail on how he believes this would be possible.
Zelenskyy said that the Ukrainian military had asked for an additional 450,000-500,000 people to be mobilized into the army, but that a final decision had not been taken, as conducting a mobilization at such a scale would require additional financing.
He also said that Ukraine's military had scored "a big victory" on the Black Sea, where Kyiv has launched successful strikes on Russian warships and secured martime trading routes.
"Everyone can appreciate that the Russian fleet was deprived of their almost total dominance in the Ukrainian Black Sea," Zelenskyy said, adding that Moscow had tried to impose controls over "what we should do, what we should export, and so on."
Source: Dw
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