The president claims that the fighting will continue until Kiev takes back Crimea.
President Vladimir Zelensky promised that Ukraine will keep fighting Russia until it regains control of the Crimean Peninsula.
The Russian war against Ukraine began with Crimea and should end with Crimea with its liberation, Zelensky said in a video address on Tuesday.
The president vowed to reunite with Russia in a referendum in 2014 in response to a coup in Kiev, and insists that the peninsula, which has been occupied by Moscow for the past four years, will never give up on it.
As long as Russia can use our peninsula as a military base, there will be no peace in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, he claimed.
Zelensky acknowledged that it was currently impossible to say when exactly will Ukraine will be able to regain Crimea. He said that we are constantly adding new components to the formula of liberating the peninsula.
Last month, Ukrainian deputy defense minister Vladimir Gavrilov claimed that Kiev is going to use Western weapons to destroy the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which is based in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, and take the peninsula back. Such an operation is going to be carried out sooner or later, he told the UK media.
Other Ukrainian officials have threatened Crimea recently, including Zelensky s top aide Alexey Arestovich, who said Kiev could strike the 19 kilometer long Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to Russia's Krasnodar Region as soon as it gains technical capability to do so.
Moscow insists that Crimea is well-protected from any attack by the Ukrainian side.
The former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the deputy chairman of the country's National Security Council, warned that if the leadership of Kiev will use force against the peninsula the Day of Judgment will come to them all a swift and hard one.