On Wednesday, September 23, 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. He spoke in English for roughly 25 minutes. Below, Meduza reproduces key excerpts from Zelensky’s remarks.
‘Patient Zero’ Putin, Russia-Ukraine war & Trump: Zelensky addresses UN
CNN
This year alone, from January through August, in just eight months, the Russian army lost 248,964 people on the battlefield in Ukraine, killed and badly wounded. […] Russia managed to capture just over 1,000 square kilometers of our territory, and we have already liberated a significant part of it. Russia is a country that already has 17 million square kilometers of territory, without any Ukrainian territory, by the way. And to add another 1,000 square kilometers, Putin is paying with 248 lives for every square kilometer.
[…]
You know, Putin recently promised representatives of the U.S. president once again that he would take the rest of our Donetsk region, saying that he needs only a few more months. This is probably the 17th or 18th time in five years that he has made this promise. It is always the same: just a few more months. And then the deadline moves again. And moves again.
Even our Donetsk region is not enough for him. He wants more of our cities: Odesa and Kharkiv, Dnipro and others. Someone in the Kremlin even posted a picture with the words “to be conquered.”
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Something always seems to stop Putin from simply saying, “That’s it. Enough. Peace.” Something always prevents him from accepting that 17 million square kilometers of his own territory, internationally recognized by all of you, should be enough for this man.
Putin is always looking for someone who can help him kill more, kill more people for every kilometer of land, take more territory, and take another country instead of simply stopping and running his own country. After all of this, can you even imagine him without war?
He is Patient Zero, the one from whom this idea of war keeps spreading further. And wherever it spreads, it brings only pain, instability, new risks and, of course, new crises. The more freedom Putin has to act, the more dangerous the world becomes for everyone else. That is why Patient Zero must be stopped. He must be denied the space to act and the space to spread this evil further.
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But oil itself is not Ukraine’s target. It is not our target. Not gasoline or diesel themselves. Not factories or ports themselves.
Our target is Russia’s ability to finance this war, to prolong it and to make it more brutal and more destructive. Russia’s finances and its production must be stopped if we want to stop Putin. […] So Russia’s revenues must remain a target.
[…]
No Russian official ever imagined that “General Winter,” which for centuries fought on Russia’s side, would one day switch sides and support those defending themselves from Russia.
We will make that happen this winter if Russia continues to target our energy system and our heating. Ukrainians understand that this winter could be very harsh for us. But in response, we will have no choice but to make it painful for Russia too. That is exactly why we say that de-escalation steps are important and are needed before winter.
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Cover photo: Charly Triballeau / AFP / Scanpix / LETA