Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy strongly disputed Donald Trump’s recent characterization of the war between Russia and Ukraine as “two kids fighting in a park.”

Zelenskyy emphasized that Putin is “a murderer who came to this park to kill the kids.” According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Russia killed 631 Ukrainian children since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.

“We are not kids with Putin at the playground in the park. He [Putin] is a murderer who came to this park to kill the kids,” Zelenskyy said in an exclusive interview with ABC News.

The Ukrainian president argued that Trump cannot fully comprehend the suffering experienced by Ukrainians.

Zelenskyy illustrated this point by describing a conversation with a Ukrainian father who lost his wife and three children in a missile strike. The man told Zelenskyy that every morning upon waking, he searches for his family throughout his apartment, still believing their deaths were a nightmare.

“He wasn’t mentioning any statistics or figures and numbers of strikes,” Zelenskyy said, describing how the father’s words differed from official discussions of casualties.

“He just said, ‘Every morning when I wake up, I’m just looking for my family — I’m looking everywhere in the flat … I still feel that it was a nightmare … a bad dream,'” Zelenskyy shared.

While the president did not specify the family name or what city they were from, he might be referring to the Bazylevych family tragedy which occurred on 4 September 2024, when a Russian hypersonic missile struck their home in Lviv.

Yevheniia Bazylevych and her three daughters—Yaryna (21), a program manager for Lviv’s European Youth Capital 2025 office; Daryna (18), a university student active in cultural studies and volunteering; and Emilia (7), the youngest—were killed in the attack. Their father, Yaroslav Bazylevych, was injured but survived the strike.

Trump “could not feel fully and understand this pain,” Zelenskyy stated, while clarifying that this limitation applies to anyone located thousands of miles away from the conflict.