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The outcome of Russia’s war against Ukraine will ultimately be determined in the air, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with the Financial Times, arguing that Ukraine has already blunted Russia’s advantages at sea and stabilized the front line, UATV English reports.
Speaking about his recent conversation with U.S. President Donald Trump, Zelenskyy said Trump acknowledged Ukraine’s growing success in conducting long-range drone operations against military targets inside Russia.
According to Zelenskyy, Trump told him during a phone call on Saturday that Ukraine was “doing very well” in its long-range drone campaign.
The Ukrainian president suggested that the U.S. leader’s perception of the war has evolved.
“President Trump wants to be where success is. This is connected not only with his personality, but also with the upcoming elections, his political standing, and his belief in how this war can be brought to an end,” Zelenskyy said.
The president argued that Ukraine has fundamentally altered the military balance by neutralizing Russia’s naval advantage in the Black Sea and preventing major breakthroughs along the front.
“Ukraine has pushed Russia out of the sea and stopped it on the ground. Therefore, it is in the air that the outcome of this war will be decided,” he said.
At the same time, Zelenskyy acknowledged that Russia’s ballistic missile arsenal remains one of Ukraine’s greatest security challenges.
“Our major vulnerability is ballistic missiles. This remains the biggest weakness in the overall equation,” he said.
The president also suggested that expanding Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign could eventually influence the Kremlin’s strategic calculations.
According to Zelenskyy, increasingly large-scale drone strikes against military targets in Moscow, St. Petersburg, occupied Crimea, and other parts of Russia may gradually increase political pressure on the Russian leadership.
“When it is no longer one hundred drones but one thousand flying toward Moscow, he will begin to feel it personally. You will see how his advisers will start persuading him to move somewhere beyond the Urals,” Zelenskyy said.
He added that increasing the distance between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the political center of power in Moscow would symbolize growing pressure on the Kremlin.
“The farther Putin is from Moscow, the closer the end of the war will be,” Zelenskyy said.
The interview reflects Ukraine’s increasing emphasis on long-range precision strike capabilities, including drones and domestically developed missile systems, as part of its broader strategy to weaken Russia’s military logistics, air defenses, energy infrastructure, and defense-industrial capacity while sustaining pressure on the Kremlin to end the war.
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