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Washington — Back in February, just after American forces captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and days before the United States would kick off its war with Iran, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed for the first time that he had uttered perhaps the best-known line attributed to him about the war against Russia: “I need ammunition — not a ride.”
In a speech marking four years since the full-scale Russian invasion had begun, the embattled president recounted that as Russian forces were closing in, the U.S. offered to evacuate him. That line was his response. Zelenskyy told Ukrainians he had said it “not because we are all fearless or made of steel…but [that] on some invisible level, all of us know that we have no other Ukraine, that this is our home.”
Today, the war has settled into a grinding conflict of attrition defined by drone warfare, long-range missile strikes, World War I-esque entrenched fighting positions, high casualty counts and mounting economic pressure on both sides. No long-term peace settlement appears close. But the war has also defied some early predictions that an outmanned Ukrainian military would suffer a swift defeat.
In late February 2022, Zelenskyy’s historic line became one of the most frequently quoted remarks about the invasion — despite the fact that after I reported it, the Biden administration firmly denied Zelenskyy had ever made the comment.
Still, the quote, which showed Zelenskyy’s resolve and dashed any hope Vladimir Putin may have harbored for a quick takeover of Ukraine, became a war cry, appearing on t-shirts and posters and in countless social media posts.
Zelenskyy’s defiance starkly differed from what had occurred months earlier, when a different president — Ashraf Ghani — fled Afghanistan as the Taliban rapidly swept up swaths of territory in the summer of 2021. And only six years earlier, Ukraine had seen another president, Viktor Yanukovych, flee Ukraine for Russia, amid massive protests about government corruption.
Despite the virality of the quote, what I remember most is an angry Biden administration and even a call from National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, pushing back on the reporting.
Vadim Ghirda / AP
At the time, I was working at the Associated Press, covering national security issues on the investigations team. After learning of the evacuation offer and quote, I notified my editor, Ron Nixon, who, like me, is a Marine veteran. The AP’s top editors met to discuss whether the story could be published on the single source that I had.
Among them was Julie Pace, the AP’s former Washington bureau chief who had been appointed executive editor five months earlier. She made the call to publish, since the source was a senior U.S. intelligence official with direct knowledge of the conversation.
The story went live late that night, a Friday, at 11:04 p.m. The world now knew that the Biden administration had offered to evacuate Zelenskyy from Kyiv as invading Russian forces closed in on Ukraine’s capital following a savage fusillade of airstrikes on cities and military bases around Ukraine.
Zelenskyy’s reply: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride,” according to a senior American intelligence official with direct knowledge of the conversation.
The story and the quote instantly went viral. President Joe Biden instructed the U.S. State Department to release up to an additional $350 million worth of weapons from U.S. stocks to Ukraine, according to Reuters.
In Franklin Foer’s 2023 book, “The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future,” Foer wrote about the Associated Press report quoting Zelenskyy’s refusal to evacuate Kyiv. He compared it to “a line that screenwriters might conjure as they imagine their next blockbuster, and according to the administration it was apocryphia.”
He added, “Jake Sullivan’s advisors considered asking for a correction, but never bothered. A good story that came at their expense was understandable in the circumstances. If anybody deserved a little slack, it was Volodymyr Zelensky.”
He was wrong about that. Biden administration officials did want a correction — and a retraction, if they could get it.
As Friday night rolled into early Saturday, Anna Johnson, the AP’s new Washington bureau chief, received an angry call from a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. As is the case whenever a news outlet receives pushback, I begin re-checking my facts as I knew them. The story and the quote were verbatim accurate in the English translation — in Ukrainian, it’s “I need a weapon, not a taxi.”
I stayed up all night. The Washington Post fact-checked the quote in March 2022 and reported that Biden administration officials expressed confusion about the claim and denied Zelenskyy was asked to leave Kyiv by the U.S. government.
The Post quoted me: “I can understand why they have been denying it. It makes them look bad.”
The Post noted that many news outlets typically would not cite a single-source secondhand quote by another news organization. But at 4:37 a.m. Saturday, hours after the AP’s story was posted, the Ukrainian Embassy in Britain tweeted the quote, giving a source to other news publications.
Multiple news outlets started to report the quote by morning on the East Coast. I remember what The New York Times wrote: “Mr. Zelensky’s response…will most likely go down in Ukrainian history whether he survives this onslaught or not.”
By 9 a.m., we were on another call with a spokesperson from the National Security Council. Angry about Zelenskyy’s quote and another story Nomaan Merchant, our intelligence reporter, was working on — a report about a delay in the intelligence the United States was sharing with Ukraine.
I soon received a call to ask if Sullivan could call me. I was stunned to hear that a top Biden adviser would want to talk to me, but agreed. When Sullivan called, I was at home unclogging my toilet with a plunger. He pushed back on the reporting and urged that I recheck my facts.
I did. The facts did not change. After the call, I spoke to my editor who wanted me to let my source know how much pushback the Associated Press was receiving from the White House. I went back and checked my reporting again. No change.
Sullivan told CBS News earlier this year he had nothing further to add.
I sent an email to the National Security Council spokesperson at 1:50 p.m.
“I spoke to Jake and he wanted me to give him a call back after I had gone back to double check my facts. I called but there was no answer,” I wrote. “The facts as we understand them have not changed but the one thing I don’t quite understand is why the NSC is so upset over this quote when it seems like the NSC has bigger issues to worry about? Thank you for your help and any clarification you can provide for the record.”
In March 2022, The Washington Post’s fact checker published an analysis on whether the quote was real and concluded that it was not easy to confirm. The AP neither corrected nor retracted the story.
Contacted for this story, the AP said they stand by it — me too. A spokesperson for Zelenskyy did as well.
U.S. intelligence agencies were reviewing what they got wrong on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by June 2022. While the U.S. intelligence community accurately predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin would order an invasion, it underestimated Zelenskyy’s resolve.
In December 2022, the AP reported that Zelenskyy’s quip denying to be evacuated from Kyiv was the top notable quote for 2022, according to a Yale Law School librarian’s list of the most notable quotations.
