U.S. Vice-President JD Vance, second right, and United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio, third right, meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, third left, during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 14.Matthias Schrader/The Associated Press
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday that his country wants “security guarantees” before any talks with Russia, as the Trump administration presses both countries to find a quick endgame to the three-year war.
Shortly before sitting down with U.S. Vice-President JD Vance for highly anticipated talks at the Munich Security Conference, Mr. Zelensky said he will only agree to meet in-person with Russian leader Vladimir Putin after a common plan is negotiated with U.S. President Donald Trump.
The roughly 40-minute meeting between Mr. Vance and Mr. Zelensky produced no major announcements detailing the way out of the deadliest war in Europe since the Second World War. Mr. Zelensky made a plaintive statement about the state of play.
“We want peace very much,” Mr. Zelensky said. “But we need real security guarantees.”
Mr. Vance, for his part, said the Trump administration is committed to finding a lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia.
“Fundamentally, the goal is, as President Trump outlined it, we want the war to come to a close,” Mr. Vance said. “We want the killings to stop. Not the kind of peace that’s going to have Eastern Europe in conflict just a couple of years down the road.”
Mr. Trump upended years of steadfast U.S. support for Ukraine this week after a phone call with Mr. Putin, when he said the two leaders would likely meet soon to negotiate a peace deal. Mr. Trump later assured Mr. Zelensky that he, too, would have a seat at the table.
NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct U.S. assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine.
The Associated Press
Before his meeting with Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Vance lectured European officials on free speech and illegal migration on the continent, warning that they risk losing public support if they don’t quickly change course.
“The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s not any other external actor,” Mr. Vance said in an address to the Munich Security Conference. “What I worry about is the threat from within – the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”
He warned European officials: “If you’re running in fear of your own voters there’s nothing America can do for you.”
The speech and Mr. Trump’s push for a quick way out of Ukraine have been met with intense concern and uncertainty at the annual gathering of world leaders and national-security officials.
The Vice-President also warned the European officials against illegal migration, saying Europeans didn’t vote to open “floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants” and referencing an attack Thursday in Munich where the suspect is a 24-year-old Afghan who arrived in Germany as an asylum-seeker in 2016.
The violence left more than 30 people injured and appears to have had an Islamic extremist motive.
U.S. Vice-President JD Vance, right, and Britain's Foreign Secretary David Lammy during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 14.Matthias Schrader/The Associated Press
Earlier Friday, Mr. Vance met separately with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy. He used the engagements to reiterate the Republican administration’s call for NATO members to spend more on defence.
Currently, 23 of NATO’s 32 member nations are hitting the Western military alliance’s target of spending 2 per cent of their GDP on defence.
But European leaders are pushing back that the White House’s characterizations of a dependent Europe doesn’t play out in the data. The continent has rallied to get behind Ukraine since Mr. Putin launched the February, 2022, invasion. The U.S. has poured more than US$66-billion in weapons and military assistance into Ukraine, while European and other allies have sent US$60-billion in weaponry to Kyiv.
“We have put in place hard-hitting sanctions, substantially weakening Russia’s economy,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in remarks to the conference. “We have broken one taboo after another and smashed our reliance on Russian gas, making us more resilient permanently. And we are about to do more.”
A searchlight illuminates a hole in the roof of a damaged sarcophagus that covers the destroyed fourth reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Chernobyl, Ukraine, on Feb. 14.The Associated Press
Hours before Mr. Vance and Mr. Zelensky were set to meet, a Russian drone with a high-explosive warhead hit the protective confinement shell of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Kyiv region, the Ukrainian President said. Radiation levels have not increased, Mr. Zelensky and the UN atomic agency said.
Mr. Zelensky told reporters that he thinks the Chornobyl drone strike is a “very clear greeting from Putin and Russian Federation to the security conference.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday denied Ukraine’s claims. And Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said the Munich organizers haven’t invited Russia for several years.
Mr. Trump has been vague about his specific intentions for Ukraine and Russia – other than suggesting that a deal will likely result in Ukraine being forced to cede territory that Russia has seized since it annexed Crimea in 2014.
Mr. Trump’s musings have left Europeans in a quandary, wondering how – or even if – they can maintain the post-Second World War security that NATO afforded them or fill the gap in the billions of dollars of security assistance that the Democratic Biden administration provided to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion.
Mr. Trump has been highly skeptical of that aid and is expected to cut or otherwise limit it as negotiations get under way.
Both Mr. Trump and U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth this week undercut Ukraine’s hopes of becoming part of NATO, which the alliance said less than a year ago was “irreversible,” or of getting back territory captured by Russia, which currently occupies close to 20 per cent including Crimea.
“I don’t see any way that a country in Russia’s position could allow ... them to join NATO,” Mr. Trump said Thursday. “I don’t see that happening.”
Mr. Zelensky, in his own remarks during the conference, said the United States, including the Biden administration, never saw Ukraine as a NATO member.
Mr. Vance, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, said the U.S. would hit Moscow with sanctions and potentially military action if Mr. Putin won’t agree to a peace deal with Ukraine that guarantees Kyiv’s long-term independence.
The warning that military options “remain on the table” was striking language from a Trump administration that’s repeatedly underscored a desire to quickly end the war.
Mr. Vance’s team later pushed back on the newspaper’s report, saying he “didn’t make any threats.”
“He simply stated the fact that no one is going to take options away from President Trump as these negotiations begin,” said Will Martin, Mr. Vance’s communications director.
The track Mr. Trump is taking also has rocked Europe.
Increasingly alarmed that U.S. security priorities lie elsewhere, a group of European countries has been quietly working on a plan to send troops into Ukraine to help enforce any future peace settlement with Russia. Britain and France are at the forefront of the effort, though details remain scarce.
French President Emmanuel Macron said he spoke with Mr. Zelensky on Friday evening.
“If President Donald Trump can truly convince President Putin to stop the aggression against Ukraine, that is great news,” he said in a message on X. “Then, it will be the Ukrainians alone who can drive the discussions for a solid and lasting peace. We will help them in this endeavour.”
Mr. Macron added: “We, Europeans, will need to strengthen our collective security and become more autonomous. ... A stronger and more sovereign Europe, let’s make it happen now.”
Donald Trump said both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed a desire for peace in separate phone calls with him on Wednesday, and Trump ordered top U.S. officials to begin talks on ending the war in Ukraine.
Reuters