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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country is “defending the ability of a person to live in the modern world” by fighting off Russian invaders.
Zelensky, 44, made the comments in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” scheduled to air on Sunday.
The embattled president said he had just visited Bucha, a northern suburb of Kyiv where Russian soldiers are said to have slaughtered civilians in a series of apparent war crimes earlier this week.
“Death. Just death,” Zelensky told reporter Scott Pelley of the atrocities he witnessed.
Investigators have collected bodies — many with close-range gunshot wounds or severe burns, several with their hands still bound — throughout Bucha, where the dead have been found in mass graves and strewn across the city streets.
Zelensky said Ukraine is fighting for basic human rights, not “Western values,” as Russia has alleged in a bid to justify its invasion of the country.
“We are defending the ability of a person to live in the modern world. They say we’re defending Western values. I always say, what are Western values? Someone who lives in the United States or Europe, do they also not like children? Do they not want their children to go to university, do they not want their grandfather to live for 100 years? We have the same values,” Zelensky said from a government building in Kyiv.
“We are defending the right to live. I never thought this right was so costly. These are human values. So that Russia doesn’t choose what we should do and how I’m using my rights. That right was given to me by God and my parents.”
A preview of the interview was released by the network Friday as at least 52 Ukrainian civilians were killed in a missile strike at a train station in Kramatorsk, where thousands, including women and children, had gathered to flee eastern Ukraine.
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