Zelenskyy: 'Free, democratic world' is 'waiting' for Trump to bring peace in Ukraine

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told ABC News' Martha Raddatz his country is ready for a ceasefire brokered by the United States, accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of aiming for the "total defeat" of Ukraine.

In the exclusive sit-down interview in Kyiv with Raddatz, co-anchor of ABC News' "This Week," Zelenskyy said Putin is uninterested in peace and that only "hard pressure" led by the U.S. and joined by European allies would render Putin to be "pragmatic" in his thinking.

"Then they will stop the war," Zelenskyy said.

"I am convinced that the president of the United States has all the powers and enough leverage to step up," Zelenskyy told Raddatz.

Zelenskyy’s pleas for the end of fighting in Ukraine -- a consistent message since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022 -- came as Russia bombarded Ukraine, launching 472 drones last week.

The Ukrainian air force said it was the largest drone assault of the war.

"Probably people don't realize that," Zelenskyy said. "They have to understand that we are under strikes, under attack every day. And you might remember that when they were talking about ceasefires, temporary ceasefire[s], they still continued attacking and launching strikes."

Raddatz's reporting in Ukraine comes a week after the country took perhaps its most significant offensive action in the war when it struck Russian airfields as far as Siberia in a coordinated, surprise drone attack that Ukraine said wiped out a third of Russia's strategic bombers, or some 40 aircraft.

The U.S. assesses Ukraine damaged far fewer aircraft, estimating 10 Russian planes were destroyed in the attack, a U.S. official told ABC News.

Zelenskyy told Raddatz he saw the videos "that the whole world was watching" after the attacks -- footage showing Ukrainian drones emerging from containers, including mobile cottages transported by Russian vehicles.

The Russian drivers "didn't know anything," and the operation used only Ukrainian weapons, the Ukrainian president said.

Zelenskyy noted the secret operation, planned over 18 months and dubbed "Operation Spiderweb," struck only military targets and was intended to improve Ukraine's position at the negotiating table.

"We can only counter" Russia's aggression "with force," Zelenskyy said, "and we understood if [Ukraine's special services could] take some steps, we can stop [Russia] in their tracks, and probably then they will be ready for some kind of diplomacy and talks."

The U.S. has held bilateral talks with each Ukraine and Russia since President Donald Trump took office, and delegations of the two warring countries have gathered together in Istanbul as recently as Monday, a day after Operation Spiderweb.

The Kremlin called the wide-ranging assault an act of terrorism, a charge Zelenskyy rejected.

"It's [a] clean and clear military operation. It's a step that showed everyone that we do not want this war. We do not want to fight," he said.

"We have to prepare such plans, and we are not stopping," he added. "Because … we have no estimation what [tomorrow will bring]. We don't really know if they will stop this war."

Zelenskyy called for a ceasefire throughout the discussion, telling Raddatz that Ukraine is ready to lay down its arms without conditions -- if Russia will, too.

The Ukrainians would forgo a security guarantee from the U.S., which they've called essential if they aren't invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and accept a 30-day cessation of hostility, Zelenskyy said.

Zelenskyy consistently suggested diplomacy, and the power to end the war, will run through the White House, where in February Trump scolded Zelenskyy as having "no cards" in discussions of a peace settlement.

Such apparent tension was not apparent in an Oval Office meeting between Trump and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Thursday, where Trump said the war in Ukraine is like "two young children fighting like crazy" and "sometimes you're better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart."

Merz pushed back on the president's assertion, and Zelenskyy said he took issue with it, too.

"President Zelenskyy, you speak so powerfully about the loss in your country and what your people have suffered," Raddatz said to Zelenskyy in Kyiv only two days later. "Do you think the president is getting that message when he says things like 'it's two children fighting'?"

Zelenskyy described the "limitless" pain of a Ukrainian man who had lost his children and wife in a missile strike.

Zelenskyy said the man told him he was "looking for them just beside me" in his flat still after they died. "And they are not there. … I still feel that it was a nightmare. It wasn't real. It was a dream, a bad dream."

"Do people who haven't lost the kids feel something like that? Probably not," Zelenskyy said. "Can president who is in America feel exactly like this father? No."

He closed the anecdote with a forceful rejection of Trump's analogy for the war.

"We are not kids with Putin at the playground in the park. This is why I am saying he is a murderer who came to this park to kill the kids," he said.

Zelenskyy suggested his relationship with Trump has improved since the two presidents met a month into Trump's presidency in the Oval Office, where Zelenskyy told Raddatz "cameras don't lie."

The Ukrainian leader acknowledged the meeting was not helpful, saying he was "emotional" as he went to Washington "defending the truth."

Yet their April meeting at the Vatican, where both leaders attended the funeral of Pope Francis, was "productive," Zelenskyy said.

"Fifteen minutes in Vatican, tet-a-tet, one-to-one … did more to establish trust than the meeting with many people present in the Oval Office," he added.

He said he now "want[s] to believe that we have normal, equal professional relationship."

Still, Zelenskyy said he disagreed with Trump's view of Putin's intentions in Ukraine.

"President Trump told our Terry Moran in an interview that he does believe Putin wants peace," Raddatz said. "You think he's wrong."

"With all due respect to President Trump, of course -- I think it's just his personal opinion," Zelenskyy said. "I feel strongly that Putin does not want to finish this war. Inside his mind, it's impossible to end this war without total defeat of Ukraine.

"Trust me, we understand the Russians much better, the mentality of the Russians, than the Americans understand the mentality of Russians. We are neighbors for ages," the wartime president, elected in 2019, told Raddatz.

Asked to characterize Trump's relationship with Putin, Zelenskyy said it was "longer" than his own with the 45th and 47th American president, suggesting their engagements preceded Trump's election as president.

"I think for Trump, business is important," he said, hinting at the force in what he called the president's "economic" relationship with Putin and even the diplomacy of the moment.

"For Trump, it's important to sort of extend the geopolitical line of relationship between America and the Soviet Union back then," Zelenskyy said.

The Ukrainian president pitched a course of action for his allies in the war, endorsing a crippling sanctions package led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Trump ally, that would slap 500% tariffs on any country that buys Russian energy products.

"It doesn't matter who wants, apart from the United States, to apply sanctions against Russia," Zelenskyy said. "If it's not the United States, there will be no real impact."

Zelenskyy said Kyiv had accepted ceasefire proposals under the Trump and Biden administrations and noted that Moscow has turned each offer down. While he argued that peace can only be "sustainable and long" through a "strong security guarantee," he said Ukraine would be willing to cease fighting without a U.S. vow to defend it in the future from Russia.

"Do we like the ceasefire without security guarantees?" Zelenskyy said. "Not very much, but still, we support it."

Ukraine has been invited to the upcoming NATO summit at the Hague in the Netherlands, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said this week. Trump will be in attendance for the high-stakes meeting, the White House said.

Zelenskyy framed his case for U.S. pressure on Russia in history, telling Raddatz that "the majority of wars were ended even at the stage when both sides, both parties, did not trust each other."

"There were intermediaries, there was a strong position of third countries … if it's not a complete capitulation [as with] Germany at the end of Second World War," he said. "The majority of wars were finished with some kinds of agreements … [with] strong third parties involved who can put pressure on the aggressor."

He described war's "long aftertaste" between its battered parties, and he appealed for "pressure" on Moscow numerous times throughout his interview with Raddatz.

"Are there enough levers and powers to stop this in the United States? Yes, I am convinced that the president of the United States has all the powers and enough leverage to step up," Zelenskyy said.

"He can unite around him other partners like European leaders," he concluded. "They [are] all looking at the President Trump as a leader of the free world, a free, democratic world, and they are waiting for him."