Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says his country won’t stop fighting Russia until Crimea is back in Kyiv’s control.

In an interview recorded Sunday with CNN, Zelenskyy also said the Wagner Group’s short-lived rebellion is proof that Russian President Vladimir Putin is weakened and losing control.

The Ukrainian leader told the network, “We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea. And while Crimea is under the Russian occupation, it means only one thing: the war is not over yet.” 

Asked if there was any scenario in which he would agree to peace without control of Crimea, Zelenskyy said, “It will not be victory then.”

Russia has controlled the peninsula along the Black Sea since 2014. Ukraine, meanwhile, is currently focusing on recapturing territory in southern and eastern Ukraine.

The full CNN interview is scheduled to run Wednesday night, but the network has released excerpts.

The Wagner Group, the paramilitary group led by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been fighting alongside Russian soldiers in Ukraine. But shortly after voicing his frustration with the Russian Defense Ministry, his mercenaries left Ukraine to seize a military headquarters in a southern Russian city and then moved hundreds of miles toward Moscow before turning around.

The Kremlin has said it won’t press charges against Prigozhin, who has since taken up in exile in Belarus.

Zelenskyy said Putin’s response to the rebellion was “weak.”

“Firstly, we see he doesn’t control everything,” Zelenskyy said. “Wagner’s moving deep into Russia and taking certain regions shows how easy it is to do. Putin doesn’t control the situation in the regions.

“All that vertical of power he used to have is just crumbling down.”

Zelenskyy claimed Ukrainian intelligence reports showed that half of Russia supported Prigozhin and the Wagner Group’s mutiny. 

Meanwhile Sunday, the Ukrainian president wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal wishing the United States a “Happy Birthday” on Independence Week this week and comparing his own country’s struggles for freedom and democracy to America’s origin story.

“Today, as Americans celebrate their freedom and independence, we celebrate with you and envision the day when every inch of Ukraine is free of the cruel tyranny that seeks to extinguish us,” Zelenskyy wrote.

He said today’s “Russian tyrants, like all tyrants, are fundamentally weak” and predicted “their regime will crumble over time.”

Zelenskyy said Russia’s invasion of his country was an attempt not only to bring Ukrainian people under Putin’s dictatorial rule but also to “extinguish the ideals that inspire people to be free.”

He added that Moscow “is desperately trying to attract other enemies of freedom, in particular the Iranian regime.”

“If — God forbid — Russia were to succeed in Ukraine, it would further embolden countries like Iran to take up arms against free peoples elsewhere in the world,” Zelenskyy wrote. “It would encourage Russia to invade deeper into Europe, bringing it into direct confrontation with NATO.”