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KYIV: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday he was willing to give up his position if it meant peace in Ukraine, adding that he could exchange his departure for his country’s entry into the NATO military alliance.
“If (it means) peace for Ukraine, if you really need me to leave my post, I am ready,” an irritated-looking Zelensky said when asked during a press conference whether he was ready to leave his post if it meant securing peace.
“I can exchange this for NATO (membership), if that condition is there, immediately,” the president added.
US President Donald Trump has pushed for elections to take place in Ukraine, having branded Zelensky a “dictator,” an apparent reference to the Ukrainian leader’s official five-year term running out in 2024. Russia has cited this in the past to assert that he is an illegitimate leader.
Ukrainian legislation prohibits holding elections during a state of martial law, which Ukraine declared the day Russia invaded in February 2022. Trump also falsely claimed that Zelensky has an approval rating of four percent.
“I am not going to be in power for decades, but we will not allow Putin to be in power over the territories of Ukraine either,” Zelensky said on Sunday, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A poll released this week put Zelensky’s approval ratings at 63 percent, and he made reference to this when talking about Trump’s claims on Sunday, calling his false statements “dangerous.”
“I believe it’s not a mistake, it’s misinformation that has an impact,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky said earlier this week Trump was in a “disinformation bubble,” angering the US President and his team. On Sunday, he sought to justify the earlier comments.
“(The information) about four percent of Ukrainians supporting me is one of the signals spread by the Russians, that’s why I said it was a disinformation attack, I didn’t say it was President Trump,” Zelensky said on Sunday.
Trump’s criticism of Zelensky came as relations between the two leaders deteriorated sharply in recent weeks.
Zelensky opposes the idea of elections in a full-scale war, a position backed by his major domestic political opponents.
The Ukrainian president also said he wanted to see Trump as a partner for Ukraine and more than a simply a mediator between Kyiv and Moscow.
“I really want it to be more than just mediation... that’s not enough,” he told a press conference in Kyiv.
Minerals deal

Trump has said Ukraine should give the US $500 billion in critical raw materials as payback for aid which Kyiv has already received from the previous Joe Biden administration.
Zelensky declined to sign a detailed US proposal last week that would have seen Washington receiving 50 percent of Ukraine’s critical minerals, which include graphite, uranium, titanium and lithium, the latter a key component in electric car batteries.
He has said he wants to do a deal, but that it should offer security guarantees for Ukraine in return.
On Friday, he said US and Ukrainian teams were working on a deal and Trump said he expects a deal will be signed soon.
On Sunday, Zelensky said at the press conference that he rejected the idea that Ukraine owed the US $500 billion.
“There cannot be (any) format which makes us debtors for the old (aid given).”
Zelensky said earlier this week that Washington had supplied his country with $67 billion in weapons and $31.5 billion in direct budget support throughout the nearly three-year war with Russia.
“I will not sign what 10 generations of Ukrainians will be repaying,” Zelensky said of the minerals deal.
Ukraine’s economy minister Yuliia Svyrydenko said on Sunday the 18 percent of Ukraine under Russian occupation contained about $350 billion of critical raw materials, adding that Ukraine is conducting additional geological research to update decades-old information.
The president’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said on Sunday that he had held constructive new talks with senior US officials on a deal to develop Ukrainian minerals.
“We are moving forward with our work. This was a constructive discussion,” Yermak wrote on Telegram.

MOSCOW: Russian and US teams plan to meet this week to discuss improving relations after the war in Ukraine had pushed ties to the worst level since the depths of the Cold War, a senior Russian start diplomat said on Sunday.
With Russian forces having advanced last year at the fastest rate in Ukraine since the start of the 2022 invasion, US President Donald Trump has said he wants to deliver a peace deal to end the war which he says has killed vast numbers of people.
Trump and President Vladimir Putin spoke on February 12 about improving relations and ending the war, and US and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh, on February 18 to that end.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, Moscow’s point man for relations with the US, said that a meeting at the level of departmental heads would take place at the end of the week.
“We are open to contacts with the American side, in particular, on irritants in bilateral relations,” Ryabkov was quoted as saying by state news agency TASS.
“We are waiting for real progress when the meeting scheduled for the end of the coming week takes place.”
Trump has repeatedly said that he believes Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky want to do a deal.
Trump said on February 12 that it was not practical for Ukraine to get NATO alliance membership and that he had seen support for US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s statement that Ukraine will not realistically return to its 2014 borders.
As the war enters its fourth year, Russia controls nearly one fifth of Ukraine — or an area about the size of the US state of Ohio — including Crimea which Russia annexed in 2014, about 75 percent of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions and more than 99 percent of the Luhansk region.
Russia says the land it controls is now Russian land under Russian law and the Russian nuclear umbrella, a position Ukraine and its Western European backers have said they will never recognize or accept.
Last June, Putin set out his terms for an end to the war: Ukraine must officially drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw troops from the entirety of the territory of the four Ukrainian regions claimed and mostly controlled by Russia.