Read TIME’s Latest Interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

President Volodymyr Zelensky has not talked much about his meeting at the White House since it ended in acrimony on Feb. 28. He never expected to find himself arguing with Donald Trump on television that day, and he knew the dangers of making the situation worse by discussing it openly afterward. But on March 21, about three weeks after the drama in the Oval Office, he agreed to talk about it in an interview with TIME.

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At the front of his mind going into that meeting, he says, was the peace process President Trump had initiated. He wanted to ensure that Trump understood what terms Ukraine could accept and what it would find too humiliating after more than three years of all-out war with Russia. He also wanted to make Trump understand that Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith. “But, well, the conversation went in another direction,” he told TIME in his office in Kyiv.

The full story of the Oval Office meeting, what led up to it, and how Zelensky sees the endgame in this war, appears on the cover of the latest issue of the magazine.

What follows is a partial transcript of the conversation, in which Zelensky spoke his native Ukrainian. It has been translated, condensed and edited for clarity by TIME. 

Thank you, Mr. President, for making time to speak with me today. It was a rough night in Kyiv. The Russian drone strikes kept me up half the night, along with all the air-raid alerts and anti-aircraft fire. Do these things still keep you from sleeping? Or are you already accustomed to them? 

It’s hard to get used to war. Safety, comfort, freedom in life—war takes all of that away. We were riding in the train when we heard these alerts. So yes, the war doesn’t let anyone sleep.

The main target yesterday was Odesa, where the drone strikes were particularly intense. What does it say about the peace process that such attacks have continued practically every night? 

[The Russians] don’t want to end the war in its current state. For [Vladimir Putin], in my view, the point is to put pressure on us, on everyone. He needs to raise the temperature, to raise the stakes, to raise the pressure before talks begin in any form. 

Recently the U.S. decided to suspend military aid to Ukraine, including the sharing of intelligence. How did that affect the armed forces, especially those in the region of Kursk? 

Any suspension or pause in support certainly does not do anything good for us on the battlefield, and for our defense. Don’t get me wrong. The state of morale always depends on whether your partners are standing beside you. But I wouldn’t say that the freeze influenced the operation in Kursk. 

Thank God the pause was not long enough to have a fundamental impact. Online someone wrote that they might turn off Starlink. I don’t know whether that’s true. But that would be very sensitive, in my view. And of course that pushed us to seek alternatives. We are working on that. I don’t want to talk about it openly, but we are doing it. 

What do you think was the reason for the halt in U.S. support? 

I think Russia managed to influence some members of the White House team through information. Their signal to the Americans was that the Ukrainians do not want to end the war, and something should be done to force them. Of course, that was disinformation. It’s not true. The Russians don’t want [to end the war], and we see that now, as we’ve always seen it. But this situation arose, most likely, due to a lack of dialogue [between the U.S. and Ukraine.] 

Second, I think the Americans wanted to demonstrate to the Russians that they are in the middle. They are not with us. In general, I don’t think the American team was hiding the fact that they want to be mediators rather than standing with one of the sides. We told them, Well, okay, if you’re not on our side, then at least stay in the middle. So if the Russians don’t accept the full ceasefire that you proposed, we want to see additional sanctions. They don’t need to be in place for long, just like the pause in our case wasn’t. But you need to demonstrate that. We are really expecting the American side to take these steps.

So far the opposite seems to be happening. The U.S. has pulled out of the international organization that was investigating Russian war crimes. It also stopped the project with Yale University to track Ukrainian children that were abducted into Russia. How do you interpret these steps?

Again, I think they want to show that they are in the middle, and that means they can get behind Ukraine’s suggestions, or they can get behind those of Russia. They are demonstrating that. As for what consequences or results will come out of this, unfortunately we can’t foresee that today. 

During the Oval Office meeting on Feb. 28, you tried to make the case that the U.S. is your ally, not just a mediator. You even presented a set of photos of Ukrainian prisoners of war that you showed to President Trump. Why did you decide to do that? 

First of all I wanted to show not only the consequences of war, but also the most important things, with which I would begin the plan to end the war. It’s not about some political steps, no. It’s about people. [For the Russians] people are like garbage. That’s a fact. And that’s what I wanted to demonstrate. Apart from that, I know that in any negotiations there will always be questions of NATO, territory, and things like that. But we never get around to the question of people… I always say, just give me a few minutes to tell you about my priority: the people, the prisoners. But it’s always very hard to get around to that. So that’s why I started with it. 

It seems you were also trying to reach Trump on the level of human values, empathy. Do you find that works with him? 

I think he’s a human being. He has family, loved ones, children. He has to feel the things that every person feels. We talked to him about the [abducted] children that we want to bring home. And we’re having a lot of trouble doing that. 

In my view it’s only a question of certain leaders who can simply pressure Putin to return the children. Trump is one of them. There’s no other way. Not as a trade, because we don’t live in some other century. It’s not like buying them out of slavery. It’s difficult even to raise this question: how do you make trades with children? For whom? For what? Slowly we are getting them back, but overall it’s difficult. What I wanted to show were my values. But, well, then the conversation went in another direction. 

When did you start to feel that the conversation in the Oval Office had gone wrong? What went through your mind? 

Before the journalists arrived, we had a normal conversation. I told him I wanted to talk about this, that and the third — about prisoners of war, about the first steps to ending the war. We have a plan, and we talk about this plan with the Europeans. But it’s a first draft: Without [Trump] we don’t see a plan to end the war. It would be a guarantee of security, but without America. I wanted to have a serious, specific conversation with him. With the journalists we were meant to have only some of the main topics, say, and a couple of questions, if someone wanted that. And then we were meant to keep going. We had a lot of things to talk about. It was supposed to be one on one. But we didn’t quite get to the end. 

Do you have any regrets from that meeting? 

I think this situation is not in the service of our alliance. 

I was in Kyiv when this meeting happened, and the people I spoke to had a lot of respect for the way you acted. Your approval ratings also spiked afterward. Why is that? What did Ukrainians see in that meeting that others may not have? 

Why did the Ukrainians defend themselves at the start of this war? It was because of dignity. We have the right to that. We are normal people. We do not consider ourselves some kind of superpower. But we don’t want to be treated in an undignified way. I think such things always united Ukrainians. There are small things, unfortunately, that divide us. I think that’s our negative side. But there are positive things about this nation. Our people are very emotional, and when it comes to our sense of dignity, freedom, democracy, our people rise up and unite.

It’s not a question of how things may have sounded. It’s a question of the Ukrainians wanting to see the United States as an ally, which, in my view, the United States always was for us and continues to be. But in that moment there was the sense of not being allies, or not taking the position of an ally. And that’s a question of Ukrainian dignity. In that conversation, I was defending the dignity of Ukraine.

Outside Ukraine, people often fail to understand how sensitive you are to the views of Ukrainians. Can you explain what role that factor plays for you in the peace process? For example, does it limit what you could agree to in a peace agreement, if the Ukrainian people do not support it? 

First of all, I don’t think that I would agree to something like that. I don’t have an approach different to that of my people. I represent the people. I feel that and I understand that. I am a citizen of Ukraine. In this situation, I think what has already been done is already a big historical compromise. Lifting Putin’s political isolation—that’s a big compromise. Imagine releasing Hitler from his political isolation. It would probably be impossible.

We are talking about a ceasefire, and we understand who we’re dealing with. It’s like the story when a terrorist takes over a bank, and people understand that they can’t tell him straight away: ‘Come out of there! Release all the people, leave the money behind.’ Professionals understand how you have to start a conversation like that. It’s about compromising for the sake of people. And here it’s the same. It’s for the sake of people, the people who are at the front. And for the sake of all people when all is said and done. 

Everyone says, OK, we’re going to talk about a ceasefire with no preconditions. That’s a big compromise, but [Putin] does not go for that. That’s the problem. We want to use the language of diplomacy with him, but he never learned this language. He speaks a different language. Not because he is unfamiliar with diplomacy. He understands it as an instrument. But he is against dialogue. He is not a man of dialogue. He is a man of ultimatums.

It strikes me that, in the peace process so far, as the U.S. has pursued it under Trump, the carrots are reserved for Russia, while the Ukrainians get the stick. Is that how you have felt? 

[Laughs] Well, look, if the carrot is poisoned, then thank God. Maybe that’s the sneakiness of this diplomacy… I think that if the American administration would take stronger steps, then Putin would have a better reaction. The Russians would respond more quickly. I think that, as soon as Trump returned to the presidency, the pace of his reactions was very quick and unexpected. His rhetoric, his statements. I think at that moment the Russians got really scared. When he started talking about sanctions, about his other steps. His moves are very unexpected for them. And for them anything unexpected is worrying. 

In the long game, the Russians are fairly strong. They have an authoritarian system. Under authoritarianism everything is bureaucratic. It might move slowly, but it moves. But swift actions are another story. That’s why I feel we do not have enough strong, swift actions. 

As part of the peace process Trump initiated, it seems all we see from the Russians right now are demands from Putin and members of this team, the same we heard at the start of the war: de-militarization of Ukraine, “de-Nazification,” for NATO to retreat from Europe. Why is that?

The Russians are negotiating, setting the bar at the maximum level, so that they have some room later to retreat. As we know from history, from books, [Putin] has no interest in ending the war at all. The war will become a liability to him when his economy faces the maximum losses. Right now he still has time. But it probably depends on the strength of sanctions. I think the Americans can cut the time he has using strong sanctions. From the analysis I’ve seen, Putin’s economy will be in trouble in 2026 or ’27. We don’t know what reserves he has. But the dates are pretty clear. So I would really count on strong steps, sanctions and various military steps. 

So far we have seen other steps from the Trump administration. For example, on the third anniversary of the Russian invasion, the U.S. voted with Russia and North Korea in the United Nations. What did you think when you saw that? 

They are showing that they are in the middle. But I think that plays to the benefit of the Russians. 

Have you tried expressing that to Trump? How does he react to such arguments? 

Thanks to the media, to journalists, I present these arguments. When we talk with President Trump, it looks a little different, because we talk about the realities that we can create right now. For example, we talk about ways to reach a ceasefire. And there I explained to him that the Russians [have not surrounded Ukrainian troops] in Kursk. I’m very glad that the institutions worked, and that the CIA showed there is no encirclement in the Kursk region. They officially showed that information. [The encirclement] could have happened if we had told the troops to go deeper, beyond the limits that had been prepared. We would never have said that. So that was unverified information. But the Russians said, ‘Look, tomorrow we’re going to destroy them!’ For what? So that Trump would tell Putin to stop. So the Russians understand what to say to the Americans.

And the reaction was clear. Trump published a statement on social media, saying that he is trying to save thousands of surrounded Ukrainian soldiers. 

Yes, because he was told a falsehood. 

Let’s talk about possible scenarios for how the war will end. In a recent interview I had with Petr Pavel, the president of the Czech Republic, who visited you here in Kyiv yesterday, he told me to consider several scenarios as precedents. For example, the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, which went on for decades. Or the 38th parallel on the Korean Peninsula. When you imagine the conflict line after a future peace agreement, does it look like any of these historical examples? How do you see it? 

You can see for yourself that all of these dividing lines are different in every case. In Berlin, for example, there was a line in the form of a wall, and you know how that ended. The reasons are always different. What seems important to me in these lines is that they are not permanent. In cases where they last a long time, there is conflict everywhere. There is war or frozen conflict that leads to military actions of various kinds. It’s always been that way. 

So I told President Trump: Do we want many Berlins? I said that, when we divide people, there will be no peace in those cities, and sooner or later they will all return to the side that was right all along. From the point of view of international law, we are in the right, and everything will return to Ukraine. It’s a matter of time, and a question of how many people will need to go through hell. That’s the price. 

You said recently that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are your country’s best security guarantee. What is your assessment of how long they can hold out without the help of your partners, the Americans, the Europeans? 

It depends on our ability to rotate the troops. If there is a ceasefire, some kind of pause, how long can the army hold out? As long as necessary. But they need rest, rotation, reserves, salaries. That’s a real problem, I think, because the army was always smaller than it is now. And when the army is three times bigger than it was, then it needs to be financed. The budget of Ukraine will not be enough. There need to be separate programs. Europe needs to finance it. Ideally Europe and America. But in the present circumstances I would rely more on Europe. They truly believe, and it’s true, that our army is part of the security of all of Europe. That’s a fact. Our people will not run away if another war kicks off. Whereas Europe, in general, is not ready to act like that. 

What do you expect to happen if Russia violates the ceasefire again and again? 

We don’t even have one yet. But ever since 2014, they constantly broke the peace. Here’s the way I see it. They are going to violate it all the time. That is why the window of opportunity is very short between the point when we have a ceasefire, and the point at which we reach a deal to end the war. It has to be a very short period. One month, two, three, and that’s it. After that it will be a question of morale within the military. We have 800,000 at arms.

It’s not just about the finances. If we don’t have an agreement to end the war, it becomes a frozen conflict. And we can’t just keep living in a state of war. We need to open the borders. We need to liberalize many things. And we can do that if we sign an agreement. If the period between the ceasefire and the agreement is not long, then we may only see a few violations here and there. That would not be a total collapse. But if the process drags on, it will all fall apart many times over. And we don’t know how that will end. 

If we do see an agreement, the post-war period will be extremely hard. There will be a demographic crisis, the problem of reconstruction, infrastructure, the needs of veterans, and many other problems besides. How do you see yourself in this period? In what role? And have you been tempted to reach this point, to sign the agreement, and then walk away from your position as president? 

The most important thing for me is to find an agreement that will unify the nation rather than dividing it. That has to be an agreement on a just peace. Most likely we will have the kinds of challenges you just mentioned. But it’s very important for this agreement to unify the nation. Then the nation will be able to solve the next question, which is the question of how to rebuild in a fair way. I think we will see a surge in morale. The need to rebuild will not be a problem, but the opposite. We will know that we have saved the country, saved our independence, and now we can build it all back. And that will be a really big source of positivity. We will have found the social contract on where things stand and how the war ended. Then, when it comes to the demographic question, if we have this positive moment to motivate us, then people will return. 

If the days after the war will not be grey but bright, then we will see ourselves rising. There will be investment, among other things. Then it will not matter where I will be. Honestly. I think that when the people feel that updraft, then the people are more important than any role that politicians play. Because the people are the ones who can bring us back to life. In those circumstances, leadership is more like management, rather than in the difficult times, when the nation needs a leader. But if the next phase will be a forced peace, a humiliating one, if Ukraine, God forbid, will be left on her own, and if our partners, for whatever reason, will not be partners to us, then Ukraine will fall into a depression. She will have fought for everyone and ended up alone.

But again, how do you see yourself in that dark scenario? When you imagine that, how do you see your role? 

I don’t believe it will be like that. It would be a betrayal on the part of our partners. And I think the chances of that happening are practically zero. Because then we would need to admit the loss of NATO, the EU, Europe, above all America and all of its current leaders. All leaders are different, but they have their own ambitions. They see their role in history. Many of them are no longer young. They want to enter history as leaders who had success. That’s why I don’t believe in these apocalyptic scenarios. Honestly I don’t.