Four years this week after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has sent a message of defiance, telling the BBC that Ukraine will end the war victorious.

In a special interview to mark the anniversary, President Zelensky said he was against paying the price for a ceasefire deal demanded by President Vladimir Putin, by withdrawing from strategic ground that Russia has failed to capture despite sacrificing tens of thousands of soldiers.

The US President Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested that Ukraine has no choice but to give up control of some land in exchange for peace. However Zelensky said that the Russian President Vladimir Putin had started World War Three with his invasion of Ukraine, and the only answer was intense military and economic pressure to force him to step back.

“I believe that Putin has already started it. The question is how much territory he will be able to seize and how to stop him… Russia wants to impose on the world a different way of life and change the lives people have chosen for themselves”, he said.

Asked about Russia’s demand for Ukraine to hand over the 20% of the eastern region of Donetsk that it still holds – a line of towns Ukraine calls “fortress cities” – as well as more land in the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Zelensky said:

“I don’t look at it simply as land. I see it as abandonment – weakening our positions, abandoning hundreds of thousands of our people who live there. That is how I see it. And I am sure that this ‘withdrawal’ would divide our society.”

Ukraine’s president rejected the suggestion that it might be a good price to pay, if it satisfied Russia’s leader and finally ended the war. “It would probably satisfy him for a while… he needs a pause… but once he recovers, our European partners say it could take three to five years. In my opinion, he could recover in no more than a couple of years. Where would he go next? We do not know, but that he would want to continue is a fact.”

Reeta Chakrabarti presents BBC News at Ten reporting by Jeremy Bowen, in Kyiv.

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