Zelensky: Kremlin officials 'have to know where the bomb shelters are'

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a recent interview suggested Kremlin officials will need to locate bomb shelters if Russia does not end its military operation in Ukraine.

“First of all, they have to know where their bomb shelters are,” Zelensky told Axios’s Barak Ravid in a clip released early Thursday. “They need it. If they will not stop the war, they will need it in any case.”

The full interview with Ravid will be released Friday.

The Ukrainian leader added that his war-torn country will not attack Russian civilians because “we are not terrorists.” Though, he added that Kyiv will retaliate in kind to continued Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure.

Former Russian President and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev reacted to the comments in a post on social platform X.

"Russia can use weapons a bomb shelter won't protect against," he wrote Thursday. "Americans should also keep this in mind."

Zelensky’s comments come days after he met with President Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday. After the meeting, Trump seemingly shifted his position, posting to Truth Social that the nation “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”

Russia occupies all of Luhansk and Crimea — the latter of which it seized in 2014 — and parts of Ukraine's Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.

Trump added that Russia is in “big economic trouble” and likened the country to a “paper tiger.” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov pushed back against Trump’s claims on Wednesday, saying Russia is a “bear.”

Zelensky told Fox News’s Bret Baier on Wednesday he was “a little bit” surprised at Trump’s pivot on the conflict.

“He [Trump] showed that he wants to support Ukraine to the weary end. So, we understand now, that we are ready to finish this war as quick as possible,” Zelensky noted.

In June, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said more than 250,000 Russian troops and between 60,000 and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died since the war began. The U.N. said Sept. 10 that more than 14,100 Ukrainian civilians have died in the conflict. In May, the independent Moscow Times, based out of Amsterdam, reported more than 620 Russian civilians have died since the war began.

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