Former prime minister Naftali Bennett said in a video published Saturday that Russian President Vladimir Putin assured him, in the early days of the war, that he wouldn’t kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Bennett said he called the Ukrainian president immediately after the three-hour encounter with Putin, and told him, “I’ve just come out of a meeting — [Putin] is not going to kill you. “[Zelensky] asked me, ‘Are you sure?’ I said 100 percent. [Putin’s] not going to kill you.”
Bennett recalled: “Two hours later, Zelensky went to his office, and did a selfie in the office, [in which the Ukrainian president said,] ‘I’m not afraid.’”
According to Bennett, Putin also agreed not to demand the disarming of Ukraine and that same weekend, Zelensky dropped his push for Ukraine to join NATO. (In September, Zelensky
called for Kyiv to receive fast-tracked NATO membership after Russia formally annexed four Moscow-held regions of Ukraine.)
Bennett also said that “everything I did [in the mediation effort] was coordinated with the US.”
At the time, the meeting was Putin’s first sit-down with a foreign leader since Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Bennett was accompanied on the trip by then-housing minister Ze’ev Elkin, who acted as a translator and adviser.