The United States had estimated at the beginning of the war that Ukraine would resist Russia for only a week. international

Volodymyr Zelensky is credited with a famous phrase he said privately to the US government when the Russian invasion began in February 2022: “I don’t need a taxi, I need weapons.” Books, media, and statements by Ukrainian politicians have reported on Ukraine’s president under pressure from his Western allies to abandon the country in the early stages of the war. Few people had confidence in the country’s ability to defend itself. His former foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, put the idea in black on white in a television program documentary on Thursday tsn, In the first hours of the Russian invasion, the White House assumed Ukraine would hold out for a maximum of seven days.

tsn He assures on his website that Kuleba also points out in the program that during the Munich Security Conference on February 19, 2022, US Vice President Kamala Harris privately recommended that Zelensky organize a government in exile and end the Russian occupation. Prepare a guerrilla war against. However, these statements do not appear in the more than two-hour documentary.

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion five days later, on 19 February. Book showmanIn which journalist Simon Shuster lives with Zelensky’s team during 2022 and 2023, reports that the Ukrainian leader at the Munich meeting received requests from several participants not to return to their country: “Many Western leaders urged Zelensky to return home that day. urged not to return, and to begin forming a government in exile. The President responded to these proposals with a smile: ‘I had breakfast in Kiev and I will have dinner there too.’ American journalist Bob Woodward in his recent book warAssured that at the Munich conference, Harris also suggested that Zelensky draw up a plan for his succession in the event of his assassination.

The US vice president has highlighted his staunch defense of military support for Ukraine as the Democratic candidate in the US elections, in contrast to his Republican rival, Donald Trump. But in preparation for the war, almost no one would have bet that Kiev would be able to resist Russian aggression. The start of the invasion surprised Kuleba in Washington and the former minister confirmed that at that time, President Joe Biden had received information from his military advisers that Ukraine would not hold out for more than a week: “Very prepared people met with Biden And he asked what was going to happen, and they told him that (the war) would last for a maximum of seven days. “But this was not a situation specific to the United States, it was generalized,” says Kuleba.

a small part of ukraine

Ukraine’s foreign minister from 2020 to last September explains that a senior White House representative in Washington urged him not to return to Kyiv because “in the most optimistic scenario, the government will be able to retain power only in a small part.” Of Ukraine.” This senior officer told Kuleba, “Think three times, you will be needed to achieve Ukraine’s independence.” The Ukrainian politician does not want to identify his interlocutor, but assures that he was not Biden.

On the return journey, during his stop in Warsaw, Kuleba again received the same message from this man, stressing that he was headed towards certain death. Another senior Allied representative asked Zelensky to record a posthumous farewell message, in case of death, to strengthen Ukrainian resistance during the Russian occupation.

Kuleba remembers that the US government had warned for weeks before the invasion that Russia would attack, but when Kiev asked for proof, Washington did not want to provide it, arguing that they were secret documents. “On the other hand, when we called Berlin or Paris they assured us that everything would be fine, that the Russians would not attack us,” says the former minister. Zelensky has been criticized in Ukraine because up to the day the invasion began he told citizens that a Russian invasion would not occur.

Kuleba, today an experienced diplomat without political office, highlights in the documentary that since the beginning of relations between Biden and Zelensky in 2021, the US president used paternalistic forms, which the Ukrainian leader clearly Wanted to know that they were wrong. Kuleba also believes that, at the beginning of the invasion, the Americans were reluctant to provide weapons because they were convinced they would soon fall into Russian hands.