Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the decisive phase of Russia’s war against Ukraine has shifted from land and sea to the air, arguing that the “battle in the sky” would determine the conflict’s outcome.
In an interview with the FT on Monday, hours after a massive Russian attack on Kyiv, the Ukrainian president said his country had already succeeded in denying Russia victory on the battlefield and had pushed its fleet from much of the western Black Sea, leaving airspace as the defining theatre.
“Today I believe victory in this war belongs to whoever is smarter,” Zelenskyy said. “If you stop the enemy on the battlefield, if you stop the war on land, and if you deny him dominance at sea — as we did with our naval drones, driving the Russian fleet away — then the next battlefield becomes the sky.”
“And frankly, in that contest it matters far less whose territory is larger,” he said, noting Russia’s advantages in geography and manpower. “We have moved into the air domain. And in the air, we are already competitive.”
Zelenskyy said US President Donald Trump had told him in a phone call on Saturday that Ukraine “is doing very well” with its long-range drone campaign. Asked whether that was enough to bring Trump firmly on to Ukraine’s side, Zelenskyy said he felt the American leader was viewing the war in a new light.
“President Trump wants to be where there’s success,” Zelenskyy said. “That’s tied to many things — not only to his personality, but to the approaching elections, to his status, to his belief in how this war can be ended.”
Trump told reporters in Washington on Monday that “we’re getting much closer than people realise” to the end of the war. “President [Vladimir] Putin wants it to end. I will tell you that, very strongly,” he said. “And President Zelenskyy actually wants it to end now.”
As Zelenskyy spoke, his army’s drones struck the Omsk refinery in western Siberia, roughly 2,500km from the Ukrainian border, in what appeared to be Kyiv’s deepest strike yet against a Russian refining facility.
Zelenskyy met the FT in his central Kyiv office before the Nato summit in Turkey, where he will urge partners to step up support to help end Russia’s war.
He argued that Ukraine’s ability to produce and deploy long-range drones had transformed the conflict by allowing Kyiv to strike military and energy facilities deeper and deeper inside Russia, blunting Moscow’s war machine.
But Zelenskyy identified one critical vulnerability that could yet determine the war’s outcome: air defences.
“There remains only one unknown,” he said. “Unfortunately, it is anti-ballistic defence. That is the major weakness [for Ukraine] in this equation.”
At least 15 people were killed and 43 injured in Monday’s attack, which Ukrainian authorities said involved hundreds of drones and dozens of ballistic and cruise missiles. Last Thursday, Kyiv suffered its deadliest Russian attack of the year, killing 31.
Ukraine has US-made Patriot and French SAMP/T systems capable of shooting down Russian ballistic missiles, but they are in extremely short supply. During Monday’s attack, Ukraine failed to intercept any of the 29 ballistic missiles launched.
Zelenskyy said Pac-3 interceptors for Patriots sometimes arrived “literally the day before a massive attack”.
Russia’s defence ministry said Monday’s strikes targeted Ukraine’s military-industrial complex and energy infrastructure in and around Kyiv.
Zelenskyy said air strikes on both sides were proof the “war is changing” and had entered a “new phase” after more than four years of grinding attrition, with the front line moving only slightly despite continued heavy fighting.
“Our soldiers, through their sacrifice, stopped Russia on the ground,” Zelenskyy said. “When the front is largely static, and the enemy cannot operate freely at sea, what remains is the air.”
When Putin launched his full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine could not intercept large numbers of ballistic missiles because Soviet-era anti-ballistic missile programmes had remained under Moscow’s control, Zelenskyy said. “We were not prepared.”
He linked that strategic vulnerability to Ukraine’s decision in the 1990s to give up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for western and Russian security guarantees.
“Without nuclear weapons, you are no longer part of the club that others fear attacking,” Zelenskyy said. “Instead, you become part of the club that can be attacked.”
Despite repeated Russian missile and drone barrages, Zelenskyy expressed confidence that Ukraine could prevail.
“If our partners do not abandon Ukraine financially, if our soldiers continue holding the front, if every kilometre of Russian advance continues to cost them tens of thousands — and sometimes hundreds of thousands — of personnel, then the decisive struggle will take place in the skies,” he said.
“Because the skies will determine the outcome of this war.”
Zelenskyy said he would meet Trump and other Nato leaders in Ankara, where he would seek to convince them to send more air-defence systems — even those unlikely to hand them over.
“We understand that every Nato country has established limits regarding the number of missiles and air-defence systems it must retain in service,” he conceded.
Zelenskyy said he would push for Nato countries to help Ukraine produce its own anti-ballistic air-defence systems.
“Europe should stop being negligent in this regard. It should share technologies and industrial capabilities with other countries, because there will never be enough Patriots for everyone,” he said.
One solution would be licensed production, Zelenskyy said, adding that at the G7 summit in France he had “again raised the issue” of obtaining a Patriot production licence.
“I have been raising this issue for years. We are waiting for a positive signal from the United States.”
In the meantime, Ukraine would do what it can, he said, while intensifying strikes on targets inside Russia and on the territories it controls, particularly Crimea.
The objective in targeting the Black Sea peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, Zelenskyy said, was to do “everything to hit military bases, depots, air defence — all the sites from which aircraft take off, from which we receive missile strikes — and, of course, the logistics that supply and sustain everything”.
In striking Crimea and cutting off its access points, the Ukrainian leader said, “we showed what it means to operationally control the sky at a specific point, at a specific time”.
Zelenskyy argued that the psychological impact of Ukraine’s sustained large-scale drone attacks on Moscow and St Petersburg — along with the deepening economic effects — would eventually alter Putin’s calculations.
“When it is no longer one hundred drones but one thousand flying towards Moscow . . . he will understand.
“Once he begins to feel it personally, once he begins to see it with his own eyes, you will see advisers urging him to relocate somewhere beyond the Urals.
“The farther Putin is from Moscow, the closer the end of the war will be,” Zelenskyy said.
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