But the Ukrainian president’s biggest gripe is about something that seems literally lost in translation.

Per multiple people in the U.S. and Ukraine familiar with their Thursday call, Biden said Russia “could attack” at any time, citing the position of Russia’s 120,000 troops on the border. That echoes White House press secretary JEN PSAKI’s statement this week that an invasion “remains imminent.”

There’s no direct translation in Ukrainian for “imminent” — that word is Неминуче, which most closely corresponds to “no matter what” or “inevitable,” which are close synonyms. But it’s not quite the same, and we’re told there isn’t a single Ukrainian word that conveys the meaning as it does in English. (Seriously, we checked with native Ukrainian speakers.) So when Biden’s team might genuinely mean “soon,” Zelenskyy hears U.S. officials effectively say “there will be an invasion regardless of what we do.”

For Zelenskyy, then, it’s important to project confidence that Ukraine, the U.S. and Europe can deter Putin from launching a renewed incursion. “Given that we are still in the diplomatic phase, Ukraine is trying to prevent this from boiling over into the military phase, both for Russia and for NATO,” EUGENE CHAUSOVSKY, a fellow at the New Lines Institute in Washington, D.C., told NatSec Daily. It’s “politically useful for Zelenskyy to say when there is not a real threat of invasion, but it becomes more dangerous when that threat is now more acute.”