New Delhi: Ukraine will not compromise on its territorial integrity, will not allow third countries to dictate its right to join alliances, and accept no limits to its military capacity, the nation’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said in an exclusive interview to ThePrint Tuesday.
“Our position is very clear—no compromise at the cost of Ukrainian territory. We will never recognise any part occupied by Russia and no third country has the right of veto, or has the right to block our choice, I mean a Ukrainian choice, the choice of our people to choose any alliances,” he asserted.
The Ukrainian foreign minister made it clear that any limits to the nation’s military, in terms of soldiers or armaments, is unacceptable, saying that “the best guarantee of our security is a strong army, and to increase our defence industry capacity, that is the best way to guarantee our security”.
Sybiha was in New Delhi as part of a three-day visit to India, during which he held a bilateral meeting with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar as well as addressed a session at the Raisina Dialogue. The two ministers jointly inaugurated the new Ukrainian Consulate General in Mumbai during their bilateral meeting Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed to a partial ceasefire, halting attacks on Russian energy infrastructure following a call with US President Donald Trump. A day earlier, Trump had an over two-hour call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who also agreed to refrain from striking at Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
Zelenskyy’s team is drawing up a list of facilities that could potentially come under the partial ceasefire and is likely to hand them over to the US negotiating team during upcoming talks on ending the war.
The Ukrainian foreign minister explained to ThePrint that Kyiv hopes to end its war with Russia by the end of this year. Sybiha had earlier this month met his counterpart from the US, Marco Rubio, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where the two sides agreed to continue working together towards a 30-day ceasefire with Russia, as well as forming a negotiation team to work on bringing the war to a close.
“Ukraine is not an obstacle to achieving a just and comprehensive peace. We agreed to the American proposal to establish a full 30-day ceasefire, unconditionally. We expect Russia to also accept the proposal unconditionally. I can assure you that Russians have not changed their language–that of blackmail, ultimatums and continual demand of our capitulation,” said Sybiha.
The war, which was started by Russia in 2022, has continued for over three years. Trump has made ending the war a key foreign policy goal in his second term as US president. To this end, he has had two telephonic conversations with Putin, while Rubio met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Riyadh.
Also Read: Trump dials Putin, discusses ending war in Ukraine, agrees to work together ‘very closely’
‘Need US security guarantees’
The Ukrainian foreign minister made it clear that there has been no change in Kyiv’s needs for security guarantees as part of any deal to end the war with Russia.
Early last month, US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, during a visit to the NATO headquarters in Brussels, had indicated that Washington will not support Ukraine’s membership to the military alliance, and said that any return to pre-2014 borders—before the occupation of the Crimean peninsula by Russia—was an “illusionary objective”.
Speaking on the subject, Sybiha said: “For Ukraine, NATO is a strategic goal, it is fixed in our constitution, and by the way, this choice is supported by Ukrainian people, approximately 90 percent support this choice. But we are talking about strategic goals, because we still consider that NATO is the best guarantee of transatlantic security, not only of Ukrainian security, but of transatlantic security.”
He added that any future peace deal, which could involve the deployment of foreign contingents in Ukraine, would require a US “backstop” to deter Russia from future attacks.
In 1991, as the Soviet Union (USSR) dissolved, Ukraine held the world’s third largest strategic nuclear arms stockpile. Through a number of negotiations, Kyiv agreed to abandon its nuclear arms in exchange for security guarantees, including Moscow’s recognition of Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and integrity, which was outlined in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
Two decades later, Moscow occupied and annexed the Crimean peninsula and in 2022, open warfare broke out between Russia and Ukraine. A number of agreements between Ukraine and Russia signed in the past have not prevented the current situation and this is one of the reasons why Kyiv has been pushing for a US-backed security guarantee for any future deal with Moscow.
Ukraine’s growing defence capacity
The war has seen Kyiv mobilise close to one million Ukrainians, and it has been fighting across a frontline which stretches roughly 1,300 km across eastern Ukraine and parts of Kursk, in Russia, following the Ukrainian summer offensive last year.
As a result of the conflict, Ukraine has ramped up its domestic defence production, a point, which Sybiha emphasises is important for transatlantic security, along with its recent combat experience, all of which he says is an incentive for deeper US and European cooperation with Kyiv.
“We scaled up our defence industry production six times since the beginning of the war. We can produce up to six million drones (loitering munitions and unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles) per year. We started to use this tactic of using drones against our enemy, because our main goal is to save the lives of our soldiers and of our civilians,” Sybiha told ThePrint.
“Our production of 155 calibre artillery shells before the war was zero. Now we can cover around a third of our need for 155 calibre artillery shells. We want to become more and more self-sufficient. It is also mutually beneficial for our partners, because in the future, we could expect mutually beneficial cooperation in this direction,” he added.
For Ukraine, self-reliance in defence production is important. It has relied heavily on US-made weaponry for the last three years. Earlier this month, the US temporarily suspended the transfer of arms to Ukraine, along with the sharing of intelligence, all of which had consequences for the Ukrainian military on the frontlines.
But Ukraine’s quest for a defence industry could also potentially aid the EU’s larger goal of increasing spending on defence. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has just announced an 800-billion-euro plan to “ReArm Europe” and protect itself against future threats.
“Of course, Ukraine will contribute with strong capacity, with combat experience, with strong military units. We have more than 110 brigades and approximately one million soldiers now. Our frontline of over 1,300 km has daily clashes and fighting, so we have experience, and this experience will definitely contribute to European security,” Sybiha asserted.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)