The U.S. has agreed to provide unspecified security guarantees to Ukraine as part of a peace deal to end Russia’s nearly four-year war, and more talks are likely this weekend, U.S. officials said Monday following the latest discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Berlin.
The officials said talks with U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, led to narrowing differences on security guarantees that Kyiv said must be provided, as well as on Moscow’s demand that Ukraine concede land in the Donbas region in the country’s east.
Trump dialled into a dinner Monday evening with negotiators and European leaders, and more talks are expected this weekend in Miami or elsewhere in the United States, according to the U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly by the White House.
“I think we’re closer now than we have been, ever,” Trump told reporters at an unrelated White House event. He added, “We’re having tremendous support from European leaders. They want to get it ended, also.”
The U.S. officials said the offer of security guarantees won’t be on the table “forever.” They said the Trump administration plans to put forward the agreement on guarantees for Senate approval, although they didn’t specify whether it would be ratified like a treaty, which needs the chamber’s two-thirds approval.
In a statement, European leaders in Berlin said they and the U.S. committed to work together to provide “robust security guarantees” including a European-led “multinational force Ukraine” supported by the U.S.
They said the force’s work would include “operating inside Ukraine” as well as assisting in rebuilding Ukraine’s forces, securing its skies and supporting safer seas. They said Ukrainian forces should remain at a peacetime level of 800,000.
Witkoff and Kushner were accompanied by U.S. air force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, who heads NATO’s military operations and the U.S. European Command, as talks homed in on the particulars of what the U.S. officials described as an “Article 5-like” security agreement. Article Five in the NATO treaty is the collective defence clause stating that an attack on one member is an attack on all.
The U.S. side presented the Ukrainians a document that spelled out in greater specificity aspects of the proposed U.S. security guarantees — something that Ukrainian officials said was missing from earlier iterations of the U.S. peace proposal, according to U.S. officials.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called it a “truly far-reaching, substantial agreement that we did not have before, namely that both Europe and the U.S. are jointly prepared to do this.”
Questions remain
Questions over Ukraine’s postwar security and the fate of occupied territories have been the main obstacles in talks. Zelenskyy has emphasized that any Western security assurances would need to be legally binding and supported by the U.S. Congress.
Meanwhile, Russia has said it will not accept any troops from NATO countries being based on Ukrainian soil.
Zelenskyy on Monday called talks “substantial” and noted that differences remain on the issue of territories.
Zelenskyy has expressed readiness to drop Ukraine’s bid to join the NATO military alliance if the U.S. and other Western nations give Kyiv security guarantees similar to those offered to NATO members. But Ukraine’s preference remains NATO membership as the best security guarantee to prevent further Russian aggression.
Ukraine has continued to reject the U.S. push for ceding territory to Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine to withdraw its forces from the part of Donetsk region still under its control as a key condition for peace.
The U.S. officials on Monday said there is consensus on about 90 per cent of the U.S.-authored peace plan, and that Russia has indicated it is open to Ukraine joining the European Union, something it previously said it did not object to.
Putin has cast Ukraine’s bid to join NATO, however, as a major threat to Moscow’s security and a reason for launching the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Kremlin has demanded that Ukraine renounce the bid for alliance membership as part of any prospective peace settlement.
Asked whether the negotiations could be over by Christmas, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said trying to predict a potential time frame for a peace deal was a “thankless task.”
The Canadian government is pledging another $200 million in military assistance for Ukraine through NATO, as well as $35 million in non-lethal aid, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand announced at a meeting in Brussels.
“I can only speak for the Russian side, for President Putin,” Peskov said. “He is open to peace, to a serious peace and serious decisions. He is absolutely not open to any tricks aimed at stalling for time.”
Putin has denied plans to attack any European allies.
Putin ‘dragging out’ talks: MI6 chief
Elsewhere in Europe, the head of Britain’s MI6 spy agency said Monday that Putin is stalling efforts to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, and is testing the West with tactics that fall “just below the threshold of war.”
Blaise Metreweli said Putin is “dragging out negotiations” on stopping the conflict, and remains determined to “subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO members.”
“We are now operating in a space between peace and war,” Metreweli said of the wider global threat landscape in her first public speech since becoming chief of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency two months ago.
Metreweli accused Moscow of sponsoring cyberattacks on other countries’ critical infrastructure, drone incursions around European airports, campaigns of arson, sabotage and disinformation, and “aggressive activities in our seas, above and below the waves.”
“The export of chaos is a feature, not a bug, in this Russian approach to international engagement, and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus,” she said.
Russia regularly denies accusations that it is behind drone incidents or cyberattacks affecting Western countries. It also denies any plans to attack NATO, which has been providing weapons, intelligence and other assistance to Ukraine since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion.
In a warning to Britain’s adversaries, Metreweli said MI6 will “sharpen our edge” and “take calculated risks.” She said the agency should tap into “our historical, SOE instincts,” referring to the clandestine special operations executive that sent agents on daring sabotage missions in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War.
“We will never stoop to the tactics of our opponents. But we must seek to outplay them,” she said.
In a separate speech, the head of the British military, Air Chief Marshal Richard Knighton, said that Putin’s aim is “to challenge, limit, divide and ultimately destroy NATO.”
Knighton said at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank that the war in Ukraine shows that Putin “threatens the whole of NATO, including the U.K.”
He argued Britain needs both a stronger military and more resilient infrastructure to meet the evolving threat.
“Our objective must be to avoid war, but the price of maintaining peace is rising.”
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