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15-02-2025
BRUSSELS/ KYIV: Kyiv and its European allies demanded on Thursday that they be included in any peace negotiations, after US President Donald Trump spoke by phone with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and said Ukraine could neither have all of its land back nor join NATO.
Russia’s financial markets soared and the price of Ukraine’s debt rose at the prospect of the first peace talks since the early months of Europe’s deadliest war since World War Two, soon to enter its fourth year but Trump’s unilateral overture to Putin, accompanied by apparent concessions on Ukraine’s principal demands, raised alarm for both Kyiv and the European allies in NATO who said they feared the White House might make a deal without them.
“We, as a sovereign country, simply will not be able to accept any agreements without us,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
He said Putin aimed to make his negotiations bilateral with the United States, and it was important not to allow that.
European officials took an exceptionally firm line in public towards Trump’s peace overture, saying any agreement would be impossible to implement unless they and the Ukrainians were included in negotiating it.
“Any quick fix is a dirty deal,” European foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said. She also strongly denounced the apparent concessions offered in advance.
“Why are we giving them (Russia) everything that they want even before the negotiations have been started?” said Kallas. “It’s appeasement. It has never worked.”
A European diplomatic source said ministers had agreed to engage in a “frank and demanding dialogue” with US officials, some of the strongest language in the diplomatic lexicon at the annual Munich Security Conference beginning on Friday.
Trump, who made the first publicly acknowledged White House call with Putin since the February 2022 full-scale invasion, and then followed it up with a call to Zelenskiy, said he believed both men wanted peace but the Trump administration also said openly for the first time that it was unrealistic for Ukraine to expect to return to its 2014 borders or join the NATO alliance as part of any agreement, and that no US troops would join any security force in Ukraine that might be set up to guarantee a ceasefire.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Thursday the world was fortunate to have Trump, the “best negotiator on the planet, bringing two sides together to find a negotiated peace”.
The Kremlin, for its part, said it was “impressed” by Trump’s position, which it contrasted with that of his predecessor Joe Biden.
“There is a political will, which was emphasized during yesterday’s conversation, to conduct a dialogue in search of a settlement,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and its proxies captured territory in the east in 2014, before its full-scale invasion in 2022 when it captured more land in the east and south.
Ukraine pushed Russian troops back from the outskirts of Kyiv and recaptured swathes of territory in 2022 but its outmanned and outgunned forces have slowly ceded more land since a failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in 2023.
Relentless fighting has killed or injured hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides there is no reliable death toll and pulverized Ukrainian cities. (Int’l News Desk)
