June 3 (UPI) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview published Saturday his country is ready for its anticipated counteroffensive against Russian occupation forces.
“In my opinion, as of today, we are ready to do it,” Zelensky told the Wall Street Journal in a wide-ranging interview. “We would like to have certain things, but we can’t wait for months. We strongly believe we will succeed. I don’t know how long it will take.”
The Ukrainian leader also weighed on other subjects, including U.S. politics.
When discussing the next year’s presidential election, Zelensky said President Joe Biden “has been more helpful than President Trump,” though he emphasized that there was no full-scale invasion during Trump’s tenure.
“I didn’t understand when Donald Trump said that, ‘in 24 hours, I would bring Putin and Zelensky to the table and end the war.’ He could have done it. But that didn’t happen. Yes, the question was probably not as pressing at the time, because there was no full-scale invasion. But our territories were occupied,” Zelensky said.
The Ukrainian leader also talked about the success of U.S.-built Patriot missile batteries against Moscow’s hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, which Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously called “undefeatable.”
“There’s currently one weapon capable of stopping some types of missiles launched by the Russian Federation,” Zelensky said. “The reality is 50 Patriots will, for the most part, prevent people from dying.”
Ukrainian forces have been able to use a phased radar array system to help Patriots target the trajectories of incoming Kinzhal’s, effectively knocking them out.
Ivan Kirichevskiy, an analyst with the Ukrainian military publication Defense Express, told local media last month that Kyiv’s air defense forces had, with crash-course training, “literally squeezed out of the Patriot a capability that the Pentagon did not think was possible.”
A number of Russian scientists who worked on the Kinzhal have been arrested over the past year, prompting colleagues to write an open letter in protest last month.
The signatories said they “know each of them as a patriot and a decent person,” CNN reported.
“The materials of all three criminal cases are closed from the public, but we know from open sources that the acts for which our colleagues can spend the rest of their lives behind bars are something that is considered essential all over the world, including in Russia,” the scientists said.
Stressing the importance of further aircraft and air defense support, Zelensky said Saturday that “any counteroffensive without air superiority is very dangerous.”