President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine warned in an interview that Russian influence had pierced the American political system and rejected the idea, backed by allies of Donald Trump, that Ukraine could swiftly end the war just by making massive territorial concessions.

Zelenskyy said Tuesday that he had privately urged Trump through intermediaries to travel to Ukraine and that Trump had expressed interest but had not yet committed to making a trip.

Zelenskyy said he was open to hearing Trump’s proposals for the war, while making clear he was highly skeptical. “If the deal is that we just give up our territories, and that’s the idea behind it, then it’s a very primitive idea,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with Axel Springer media outlets.

“I need very strong arguments. I don’t need a fantastic idea, I need a real idea, because people’s lives are at stake,” he said.

According to Zelenskyy, any deal that merely gave up land to Russian President Vladimir Putin in exchange for an end to hostilities, Zelenskyy said, would just open the way for more Russian wars of conquest in the future. A negotiated peace, he said, had to leave the Russian despot “no room to carry out his plans.”

The ezine notes that in the interview, Zelenskyy swerved at times between expressing impatience with Western allies that have not delivered military aid readily enough — he faulted Germany most explicitly — and admitting that Ukraine is under considerable pressure to show new progress in the war.

Russia, he said, had succeeded in warping “the information field of the world.” Without naming names, Zelenskyy claimed that American citizens were effectively doing Russia’s work within the U.S. media.

In recent weeks, two Republican lawmakers who support aiding Ukraine — Reps. Mike Turner of Ohio and Mike McCaul of Texas — have declared that pro-Russian propaganda has filtered into the thinking of some members of Congress.

Asked about that claim, Zelenskyy said it understated the problem of Russian influence in democracies like the United States. “They have their lobbies everywhere: in the United States, in the EU countries, in Britain, in Latin America, in Africa,” Zelenskyy said of Russia.

Still, Zelenskyy said he expects that a new tranche of American aid will ultimately arrive for his country. Asked if he was optimistic about that prospect, the Ukrainian President replied: “Yes, of course. I have to be.”

In the interview, Zelenskyy acknowledged that Ukraine’s attempted counteroffensive against Russia last year was “not so successful,” and vowed that the next attempt to strike back against Russia would show more progress. Without elaborating, Zelenskyy implied that Ukraine had been sabotaged from within in its last offensive, noting that “the Russians knew where we were going to attack” and promising “history will tell” how they knew.

Scholz, he said, had declined to provide TAURUS missiles to Ukraine for reasons that did not make strategic sense. The German chancellor, Zelenskyy said, “shared messages with me saying that he cannot leave his country without such a powerful weapon.”

That thinking, Zelenskyy said, seemed to stem from fear of Russia’s firepower as a nuclear-armed state: Germany, he said, was clinging to the idea that having a special missile would help it in the event of a full-scale war with Russia. “But I don’t think it will save the world from the nuclear threat from Russia either,” Zelenskyy countered. “Any missiles, TAURUS, ATACMS, F-16s will not protect a single person from nuclear strikes, if a nuclear war breaks out, God forbid. It won’t.”