Ukraine’s Zelenskyy ‘didn’t want to hear’ US warnings of impending Russian invasion

President Joe Biden, speaking to donors at a Democratic fundraiser in Los Angeles, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not want to listen to US intelligence that warned of the possibility of an invasion by Russia.

“Nothing like this has happened since World War II. I know a lot of people thought I was maybe exaggerating. But I knew we had data to sustain he was going to go in, off the border. There was no doubt,” Biden said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “And Zelenskyy didn’t want to hear it.”

Mykhailo Podoliak, an adviser to the head of Ukraine’s President’s Office, responded to Biden’s comments Saturday in Interfax Ukraine, saying that while the level of aggression from Russia was a shock, the country quickly rallied its military presence to fight back.

“Ukraine understood the intentions of the Russians, expected one or another aggressive scenario, prepared for it, which sharply broke the original Russian plans,” Podoliak wrote to Interfax. “I think it is pointless to blame the country, which is more than 100 days (into) a full-fledged war against a much more resourceful opponent, if key countries have failed to prevent the militaristic appetites of the Russian Federation, knowing them well.”

According to Podolyak, up to 200 Ukrainian soldiers are being killed every day in the Russia-Ukraine war. Podolyak told the BBC in an interview that the daily loss of between 100 and 200 Ukrainian soldiers is the result of a complete lack of parity “between Ukraine and Russia, which has thrown pretty much everything non-nuclear at the front” in its bid to advance in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and beyond.

Ukrainian officials have pointed to this mounting loss in their pleas for the United States to supply them with more weapons and financial aid.