Zelensky says Putin ‘won’t be around’ long enough to wage drawn-out war against Ukraine

Vladimir Putin won’t be around long enough to wage a drawn-out war against Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday in an interview with the Brazilian TV channel GloboNews.

Responding to a question about whether Ukraine might suffer the same fate as Syria, where Russia has been engaged in a “proxy war” for “nearly 30 years,” Zelensky said the following:

Putin won’t survive that long. He didn’t fight in Syria at the pace he’s fighting against us. […] He won’t be able to sustain it. He won’t be around for 30 years, he’ll die — that much is totally clear. But he won’t last 10 years, either. He’s not the same figure he was.

The Ukrainian leader also said that the entire Russian army is currently deployed against the Ukrainian military right now, but that its backbone has already been destroyed. The Kremlin, he said, needs a “pause” so that it can gather resources and political support from “anywhere in the world” — something Zelensky said Kyiv will not allow. “Ukraine will act. […] We won’t let them become as strong as they were at the start of the full-scale war,” he said.