Ukraine in ‘perilous’ fight

Battle for Bakhmut is critical, Zelenskyy says

ON A TRAIN FROM SUMY TO KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Tuesday that unless his nation wins a drawn-out battle in a key eastern city, Russia could begin building international support for a deal that could require Ukraine to make unacceptable compromises. He also invited the leader of China, long aligned with Russia, to visit.

If Bakhmut fell to Russian forces, their president, Vladimir Putin, would “sell this victory to the West, to his society, to China, to Iran,” Zelenskyy said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press.

“If he will feel some blood — smell that we are weak — he will push, push, push,” Zelenskyy said in English, which he used for virtually all of the interview.

The leader spoke to the AP aboard a train shuttling him across Ukraine, to cities near some of the fiercest fighting and others where his country’s forces have successfully repelled Russia’s invasion. Zelenskyy rarely travels with journalists, and the president’s office said AP’s two-night train trip with him was the most extensive since the war began.

Since then, Ukraine — backed by much of the West — has surprised the world with the strength of its resistance against the larger, betterequipped Russian military. Ukrainian forces have held their capital, Kyiv, and pushed Russia back from other strategically important areas.

But as the war enters its second year, Zelenskyy finds himself focused on keeping motivation high in both his military and the general Ukrainian population — particularly the millions who have fled abroad and those living in relative comfort and security far from the front lines.

Zelenskyy is also well aware his country’s success has been in great part due to waves of international military support, particularly from the United States and Western Europe. But some in the United States have questioned whether Washington should continue to supply Ukraine with billions of dollars in military aid.

“The United States really understands that if they stop helping us, we will not win,” he said in the interview. He sipped tea as he sat on a narrow bed in the cramped, unadorned sleeper cabin on a state railway train.

The president’s carefully calibrated railroad trip was a remarkable journey across land through a country at war. Zelenskyy, who has become a recognizable face across the world as he doggedly tells his side of the story to nation after nation, used the morale-building journey to carry his considerable clout to regions close to the front lines.

He traveled with a small cadre of advisers and a large group of heavily armed security officials dressed in battlefield fatigues. His destinations included ceremonies marking the one-year anniversary of the liberation of towns in the Sumy region and visits with troops stationed at front-line positions near Zaporizhzhia. Each visit was kept under wraps until after he departed.

Zelenskyy recently made a similar visit near Bakhmut, where Ukrainian and Russian forces have been locked for months in a grinding and bloody battle. While some Western military analysts have suggested the city is not of significant strategic importance, Zelenskyy warned that a loss anywhere at this stage in the war could put Ukraine’s hard-fought momentum at risk.

“We can’t lose the steps because the war is a pie — pieces of victories. Small victories, small steps,” he said.

Zelensky’s comments were an acknowledgment that losing the seven-month-long battle for Bakhmut — the longest of the war thus far — would be more of a costly political defeat than a tactical one.

He predicted that the pressure from a defeat in Bakhmut would come quickly — both from the international community and within his own country. “Our society will feel tired,” he said. “Our society will push me to have compromise with them.”