President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking in New York at the high-level week of the 80th UN General Assembly, urged the international community to stop Vladimir Putin now, before the arms race leads to catastrophe. He stressed the need for immediate weapons and pressure on Russia and called on the EU to support Moldova to avoid a repeat of the Georgian or Belarusian scenarios.
From the General Assembly rostrum, Zelensky said that “stopping this war now — and with it the global arms race — is cheaper than later building underground kindergartens or huge bunkers for critical infrastructure.” According to him, “stopping Putin now is cheaper than trying to protect every port and every ship from terrorists with naval drones,” and “cheaper than wondering who will be the first to create a simple drone with a nuclear warhead.” The president underlined that if this requires weapons and additional pressure on Russia, “it must be done now,” otherwise the war “will move wider and deeper,” and “Ukraine is only the first — Russian drones are already flying over Europe and Russian operations are already spreading across countries.”
Addressing the escalation of unmanned threats, Zelensky noted that “tens of thousands of people know how to kill professionally with drones,” and stopping such an attack is harder than stopping “a rifle or even a bomb.” Drones were once available only to the most powerful states; now “even simple drones can fly thousands of kilometers,” and military technologies “no longer respect geography — they are reshaping it.” He recalled that European airports were recently forced to shut down due to drones, cited last week’s announcement by North Korea of tests of a tactical strike drone, and pointed to the danger of Iranian attack drones well known to Ukraine and Saudi Arabia. He warned that as all types of drones become more accessible, even “small terrorist groups or cartels” could obtain them, while “the world is moving too slowly to defend itself, and the weapons are moving fast.”
Zelensky added that companies are already working on drones that can shoot down other drones, and that it is “only a matter of time” before drones “start fighting drones, attacking critical infrastructure and targeting people — fully autonomously, without human involvement, apart from a few people overseeing AI systems.” Ten years ago, he said, few imagined cheap drones could create “dead zones” stretching for dozens of kilometers — a phenomenon once associated only with the aftermath of a nuclear strike.
In this context, the president recalled Ukraine’s successes in the Black Sea, where naval drones forced the remnants of Russia’s fleet into remote bays, protecting Ukrainian ports and sea trade routes, as well as Operation “Pavutyna,” in which “cheap Ukrainian drones destroyed or damaged dozens of expensive Russian strategic bombers.”
Separately, Zelensky appealed to the European Union to support Moldova. “It is important to remember how the world once ignored the need to help Georgia after Russia’s attack and how the moment was lost with Belarus. We cannot lose Moldova,” he said, arguing that for Europe, supporting Moldova’s stability “is inexpensive,” while the price of inaction would be much higher. He stressed that the current global response to Russia’s attempts to regain influence in Moldova is “insufficient,” and called for real financial and energy assistance, not just “words or political gestures.”