Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has urged Donald Trump to provide security guarantees against future Russian attacks as part of any peace deal with Vladimir Putin, admitting that European assurances alone are not enough.
The Ukrainian leader is preparing to meet members of Mr Trump’s administration for the first time following his inauguration last month. Chief among those meetings will be a sit-down with Ukraine-sceptic vice president JD Vance. He will meet the former Ohio senator, who has previously said he does not “really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other”, at the Munich Security Conference this weekend.
Mr Trump announced on Tuesday evening that he would send his treasury secretary Scott Bessent to Kyiv to discuss accessing Ukraine’s natural resources, worth upwards of £10 trillion. Mr Trump views access to these resources, including massive quantities of untapped titanium and lithium, as a means for Kyiv to pay for US protection.
Mr Trump has also said he will “probably” meet Mr Zelensky, though he did not elaborate on where that would occur. Mr Trump has already spoken to Mr Putin.
Speaking to The Guardian, Mr Zelensky said he hoped to impress upon Mr Trump and his administration that “security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees”. He later said he was “already prepared for meetings with representatives of the United States”.
He first expressed concern that European security guarantees alone were insufficient in December after meeting EU and Nato leaders in Brussels.
“It is impossible to discuss only with the Europeans, because the only guarantee, currently or in the future, is Nato [membership],” he said, at the time.
Mr Trump remains tight-lipped about how he plans to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine but his officials have suggested Kyiv will not be permitted to join Nato. Mr Trump has also said any peacekeeping force in Ukraine would not be manned by US personnel.
In response, French president Emmanuel Macron has floated the idea of a European peacekeeping force that could be deployed to Ukraine at some point after a ceasefire deal.
But Mr Zelensky has been clear that without US guarantees, Russia will not be sufficiently deterred from future attacks.
“I don’t think that United Nations troops or anything similar has ever really helped anyone in history,” Mr Zelensky said of a peacekeeping force without the US.
“Today we can’t really support this idea. We are for a [peacekeeping] contingent if it is part of a security guarantee, and I would underline again that without America this is impossible.”
Former senior British and US officials during Mr Trump’s first term previously told The Independent that Europe is currently incapable of guaranteeing Ukraine’s security without US assistance. They also expressed concern that the US leader could do a deal without consulting Europe, a move that could undermine the possibility of more permanent peace.
Should Mr Trump manage to get Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table, Mr Zelensky says he plans to offer a straight territory swap. Kyiv would hand over the sliver of the Russian Kursk region it currently controls back to Moscow in exchange for some – or all – of the nearly 20 per cent of Ukraine occupied by Mr Putin’s forces.
“We will swap one territory for another,” he said. The latest from Moscow suggests they will not be willing to do this, however.
Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said last week that Mr Trump would not be able to force Mr Putin into territorial concessions. The only path to peace, he said, was if Ukraine abandoned the four regions illegally annexed by Mr Putin in September 2022, as well as the Crimean peninsula. Those regions are only partly controlled by Russia.
