There’re no Russian children in Ukraine - Zelenskyy on Russia's demands after talks in Istanbul

11:09, 25.07.2025 1 min read

There are no Russian children in Ukraine, this is a new track, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy responded to the Russian Federation's demands for the return of 20 Russian children and 30 residents of Kursk region.

"I think we need to sort this out. We don't have their children. This is some new track. In principle, I'm not surprised. Why? Because when we talked about Putin's illegitimacy, how we can deal with him, they took up the story of my illegitimacy and so on," Zelenskyy said during a meeting with journalists on July 24.

The President noted that as soon as the Ukrainian side said that the Russians do not take back their dead, “they began to offer us an exchange of bodies.”

"Although before this, on the battlefield, this happened without the media, calmly, quietly, no one made the kind of media pressure that they did. And now, you see, they realized that they handed over the ‘Russians’ to us, and then they realized that this pressure is already working against them," Zelenskyy added.