Ukraine Seeks More Weapons As Russia 'Not Interested' In Peace, Zelenskyy Adviser Tells RFE/RL

Ukraine is seeking more weapons from the West amid concerns that, even after the two recent summits in the United States, Russia is “not interested” in peace, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has told RFE/RL's Current Time.

Speaking on August 25, Mykhaylo Podolyak said Kyiv has been in “active consultations” with US and European officials “about increasing the supply of various tools for conducting counter‑war operations.”

“We understand how much Russia is spending right now, and what they will do next -- what resources they're using along the front or deeper into Ukrainian territory,” Podolyak, a key figure in Zelenskyy’s administration since 2020, added.

“Accordingly, consultations and negotiations are under way to increase the inflow of certain types of weapons into Ukraine.... Long‑range missiles, long‑range drones -- this is one of today’s priority directions, which truly allows us to effectively influence the course of this war," he said.

At a briefing in Kyiv following talks with visiting Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store on August 25, Zelenskyy said Ukraine hopes to secure at least $1 billion a month from supportive countries to buy US weapons.

Russia has pressed ahead with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which it launched in February 2022, following US President Donald Trump’s meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15 and with Zelenskyy and European leaders at the White House three days later.

Russian attacks on Ukraine’s Sumy region killed one civilian and wounded nine others overnight, and dozens of battles were fought along the front lines in the previous 24 hours, many of them near them near the ruined Donetsk region city of Pokrovsk, Ukrainian officials said on August 25.

Buildings at Sumy State University after a Russian attack on August 18, 2025.

Moscow has also thrown cold water on the prospects for peace. Trump, who has been seeking to broker an end to the war since he took office in January, used the meetings – and particularly the summit with Putin, the first by a US president in more than four years – to press for a face-to-face meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy, who have not met in person since 2019.

Zelenskyy has agreed to a meeting with Putin and unsuccessfully sought one during lower-level peace talks in Istanbul in May. Speaking at celebrations on August 24 marking 34 years since Ukraine declared independence for the Soviet Union in 1991, Zelenskyy said a meeting with Putin would be "the most effective way forward."

At the briefing on August 25, he said he plans to discuss preparations for a possible meeting with Putin with Keith Kellogg, Trump's special envoy for Ukraine, and that senior Ukrainian and US officials would hold talks later this week.

But Russia has balked so far, signaling that it is not ready for a Putin-Zelenskyy meeting now and may not be any time soon. "Putin is ready to meet with Zelenskyy when the agenda would be ready for a summit. And this agenda is not ready at all," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told NBC News in an interview broadcast on August 22.

A meeting between the two presidents would “certainly” be possible “if Russia had the desire to genuinely engage in a realistic conversation about ending the war, or at least about possible scenarios for stopping the war,” Podolyak told Current Time. “But as far as I understand, and as is quite obvious, Russia is not interested in ending hostilities -- especially not in stopping the shelling of civilian infrastructure and the civilian population."

Russia’s “current war policy is based on three core elements,” Podolyak said. “First, buying time -- and for that, they deliberately mislead the United States with this supposed willingness to negotiate. Second, under no circumstances do they accept the idea of a cease-fire —any comprehensive cease-fire plan, including those discussed around Trump, and even by Trump himself. And third, avoiding the introduction of further sanctions.

“So, to put it bluntly, Russia will imitate any attempts to negotiate at the presidential level, at the level of Putin -- but in reality, it has no interest in that," he said.

In his remarks to NBC, Lavrov also claimed that comments from Europeans following the Alaska summit and at the gathering in Washington on August 18 indicated that "they don't want peace," and raised objections to plans that Ukraine's Western backers are trying to hammer out for security guarantees for Kyiv in the event of a peace deal.

He said the permanent UN Security Council members -- China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- should be the guarantors of Ukraine's security. Kyiv and other allies have so far rejected the idea of Moscow being among the security guarantors for a peace deal, and Zelenskyy has rejected the prospect of Beijing playing a role.