Por falar em corpos...
Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський
Speaking to journalists, I said: during the repatriation of bodies, 20 of those returned to us as Ukrainian fallen soldiers turned out to be Russians, one was a foreign mercenary. This lie is documented, some of the bodies even had Russian passports.
We want to bring home all our defenders, living and fallen. But we won’t take Russians just to even out numbers. When we tell them they’ve handed us Russian citizens, they deny it. This isn’t a one-off. We believe they do it deliberately, to make it look like they have more of our dead.
Body exchanges took place earlier too, quietly, right on the battlefield. Now Russia is making them public to mask the true scale of their own losses. They fear the public acknowledging how many Russians have died.
Because if the moment comes when Putin wants to mobilize more people, his society will be afraid. But if they show that for every Russian soldier there are supposedly a hundred dead Ukrainians, it doesn’t look so terrifying. They’re trying to distort the reality we live in, where their losses are actually much greater.
Russia needed to break U.S. support for Ukraine. To look “diplomatic,” they needed talks with Ukraine, ideally without the U.S. involved. How can a meeting be wrapped up on a positive note? With exchanges.
The more exchanges, the more they can show the U.S. that diplomatic process is underway, and sanctions will be delayed. As long as exchanges continue, meetings at the level of leaders will be postponed, because that’s clearly not in Russia’s interest.
There are currently around 700,000 Russian troops on Ukrainian territory. And about 52,000 are concentrated near the border of Sumy region. They desperately need success at the front, because without it, we believe President Trump would be more likely to pressure them with sanctions.Up to 200 assaults per day across the front line. Our soldiers have pushed back their assaults in the Sumy region. In the Dnipro region, Russian sabotage groups keep trying to break through in small teams of 2-4 men. But so far, without success.
Regarding air defense: not a single Patriot system was destroyed or damaged in recent mass strikes, contrary to what some media claimed.
bout a third of “shaheds” are downed by our mobile fire teams. We’ve started using interceptors, four companies in Ukraine are already producing them. Dozens of “shaheds” are being taken down. We just need a bit more time to scale up mass production. Ukraine has already contracted more artillery and both long- and short-range drones this year than in any previous year of the war.
We’ve launched the Build with Ukraine program. This summer, we’ll sign agreements to begin exporting our defense technologies, opening production lines in partner countries. These weapons will be made for both them and us. We’re talking drones, missiles, and potentially artillery.
This year alone, $43 billion has been allocated to support Ukraine’s defense industry. Next year, we call on each ally to allocate 0.25% of their GDP for this. Because supporting Ukraine’s defense means supporting Europe’s security.
