Russian President Vladimir Putin does not love his country and people as he is sending Russia's youth to die in his wars of aggression, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with U.S. podcaster Lex Fridman released on Jan. 5.
"He does not love his people. He loves only his inner circle," Zelensky said in response to Fridman's suggestion that Putin is a "serious person who loves his country."
"What is his country? He happened to consider Ukraine his country," the president responded in the three-hour-long interview, pointing out that Putin had previously also launched a destructive war against Chechnya, now a constituent republic of the Russian Federation.
Putin rose to power during the Second Chechen War in 1999-2000, in which Russia forcibly subjugated the region and seized its capital, Grozny, after a devastating siege.
"Who are the Chechens? A different people: Another faith… Another language. One million people eliminated…. How did he kill them – with love?" Zelensky asked rhetorically.
Ukraine's head of state also stressed that Russia's all-out war against Ukraine resulted in 780,000 of its soldiers killed or wounded, adding that Putin "calls them all Russians, even those who don't know how to speak Russian, on his territory of Russia, everything they've enslaved."
"He's (Putin) sending 18-year-boys (to die in war)... It's not that the fascists came to his country, and he needs to defend it. He came to ours, and he sends them," Zelensky continued, providing other examples of Moscow's wars and military interventions in Syria, Chechnya, Georgia, and Africa.
Though the exact Russian losses in the full-scale invasion are difficult to establish with certainty, The Economist wrote that they already outpace Moscow's battlefield losses in all of its post-1945 wars combined.
Kateryna Denisova
(Updated: )
