A journalist reported that Zelensky instructed his advisers to prepare for another three years of war

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy instructed his closest advisers to prepare to keep fighting for another three years.

This was said by The Wall Street Journal journalist Bojan Pancevski in a podcast on Spotify.

According to Pancevski, the conversation—which shocked people around the president—took place last Thursday.

“He said it plainly. Everyone was shocked. Of course, nobody wants three more years of war. Up to that point they had essentially been working on a plan to announce elections and a referendum in late spring or early summer, to put a possible agreement—whatever it might be—to a vote and see whether voters would accept it. And then suddenly Zelenskyy makes a 180-degree internal turn and says: all of that is nonsense; we have to prepare for a long war. That makes me even more skeptical, because it feels like, for some reason, he is no longer genuinely inclined toward negotiations. I don’t know why. I know three of his closest advisers—they themselves didn’t know, or if they did know, they didn’t tell me why he changed his position,” Pancevski said.

In his view, Zelenskyy considered the current proposal from U.S. President Donald Trump for ending the war unsatisfactory, and therefore decided to keep fighting.

In three years, Trump’s term will be coming to an end.

Zelenskyy’s office on Bankova Street has already responded to Pancevski’s remarks. Presidential adviser Dmytro Lytvyn called the information he revealed fake. Lytvyn says there were neither any such conversations with advisers, as the WSJjournalist described, nor any negative assessment of the negotiations.

It was recently reported in an article by The Atlantic that some of the president’s advisers are inclined toward a territorial compromise—meaning a withdrawal of troops from the Donbas to end the war. But Zelenskyy is against that.