Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russian leader Vladimir Putin of seeking to expand the Kremlin’s war beyond Ukraine and called on the international community to stop the conflict to avoid a destructive arms race.
Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, Zelenskyy, whose country has been fighting to repel a full-scale Russian invasion since February 2022, warned that the use of drones and technology has brought a new dimension to the battlefield.
“The facts are simple: stopping this war now and with it the global arms race is cheaper than building underground kindergartens or massive bunkers for critical infrastructure later,” he told the 193-member assembly at its annual meeting.
“Stopping Putin now is cheaper than trying to protect every port and every ship from terrorists with sea drones. Stopping Russia now is cheaper than wondering who will be the first to build a simple drone carrying a nuclear warhead. So we must use everything we have to force the aggressor to stop.”
The rise in the use of drones in the war has given the fighting in Ukraine a complexion like no other.
Both sides have come to depend on launching sometimes hundreds of drones in waves that experts say now account for about two-thirds of battlefield deaths.
In recent weeks, fears of a potential widening of the conflict have risen with a series of recent incursions by Russian fighter jets and drones into NATO airspace in countries including Poland and Estonia. The Kremlin has denied the accusations.
Zelenskyy warned that “weapons are evolving faster than our ability to defend ourselves,” adding to the immediacy for halting the war.
“Now Russian drones are already flying across Europe, and Russian operations are already spreading across countries…Putin wants to continue this war by expanding it, and no one can feel safe right now.”
Zelenskyy’s speech came a day after US President Donald Trump said Ukraine could win back all of its territory from Russia with the help of its European allies.
Trump was sharply critical of Russia’s army, saying it had been fighting “aimlessly for three and and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win.”
