Ukraine’s security chief believes that World War III has already begun with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.
During the Kyiv Security Forum on Tuesday, Oleksiy Danilov, who serves as secretary of the country’s National Security and Defense Council, said that the Russia-Ukraine war was not an isolated incident.
“People who think that the Third World War has not yet started – they make a big mistake,” he warned attendees. “This is not just about relations between Ukraine and Russia … It’s a much more complicated geopolitical situation and some sober-minded people say that this will not be the last war in this century.”
Danilov also blasted some of the West’s political leaders for their lack of “balls of steel” to stand up against Russia.
“They are just scared stiff of Russia,” he said, “I cannot imagine that Roosevelt would call Churchill and say, ‘You know, don’t bother Hitler. He has a strong army. Don’t bother him … You have to put up with this.’”
“Our people will fight for our independence as long as it takes,” he continued, adding there would be no negotiations with “the killer of [Ukrainian] children,” Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy echoed the security chief’s sentiment at the height of the war last year, warning that Russia may have put the “whole civilization at stake.”
“Nobody knows whether it may have already started. And what is the possibility of this war if Ukraine will fall, in case Ukraine will? It’s very hard to say,” Zelenskyy said. “And we’ve seen this 80 years ago, when the Second World War had started … nobody would be able to predict when the full-scale war would start.”
Elsewhere, Zelenskyy recently said during an interview with Brazilian TV channel GloboNews that Putin will die within ten years before winning the war.
“Putin will not live for so many years,” the Ukrainian leader said when asked about whether his country could repeat the fate of Syria, where the Kremlin has been fighting alongside the government since 2015. “At the pace at which he is fighting with us, he didn’t fight [like that] in Syria.
“He won’t withstand it. He won’t live for 30 more years. He will die – this is completely clear,” he continued. “But he won’t survive ten years either. He’s not the same figure anymore.”
