Ukraine will not accept limits on the size of its military or neutral status as part of a peace agreement, and Russia cannot dictate its security guarantees, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with TSN published on the evening of Oct. 25.
“I probably won’t go into detail about this because we have certain agreements with the Americans. But nevertheless, our position is clear. Our security guarantees are our security guarantees. They cannot be dictated by the Russian side. So the conclusions are clear: limits on the size of our army and Ukraine’s neutrality are not up for discussion,” Zelenskyy said.
The Ukrainian president stressed that the size of Ukraine’s military is strictly a domestic matter.
“If I have enough funding, I want to maintain an army of 800,000 people. If we’re in NATO, that number could be 800,000 or fewer,” he said.
The question, Zelenskyy said, is who is prepared to fund Ukraine’s Armed Forces and who will actually do so.
“And that’s my question for NATO,” he added.
On Oct. 2, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin said Russia wanted to “end all this as quickly as possible — through peaceful negotiations, at that,” referring to its war against Ukraine, but only if a series of ultimatums were met. He again raised the prospect of occupying all of Donbas and securing neutral status for Ukraine.
On Oct. 23, The Economist reported that the United States had proposed a peace plan to Russia that would reduce Ukraine’s military to 600,000 troops, rule out the deployment of NATO forces in Ukraine and restrict Kyiv’s ability to strike Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The Economist noted that the plan imposed no equivalent restrictions on Russia, while the proposed security guarantees for Ukraine remained insufficiently reliable.
