Simon Shuster
President Volodymyr Zelensky has not talked much about his meeting at the White House since it ended in acrimony on Feb. 28. He never expected to find himself arguing with Donald Trump on television that day, and he knew the dangers of making the situation worse by discussing it openly afterward. But on March 21, about three weeks after the drama in the Oval Office, he agreed to talk about it in an interview with TIME.
At the front of his mind going into that meeting, he says, was the peace process President Trump had initiated. He wanted to ensure that Trump understood what terms Ukraine could accept and what it would find too humiliating after more than three years of all-out war with Russia. He also wanted to make Trump understand that Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith. “But, well, the conversation went in another direction,” he told TIME in his office in Kyiv.
The full story of the Oval Office meeting, what led up to it, and how Zelensky sees the endgame in this war, appears on the cover of the latest issue of the magazine.
What follows is a partial transcript of the conversation, in which Zelensky spoke his native Ukrainian. It has been translated, condensed and edited for clarity by TIME.
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