kyiv and his European allies demanded Thursday that they were included in any peace negotiation, after the president of the United States, Donald Trump, spoke on the phone with Vladimir Putin of Russia and said that Ukraine could not recover all their lands or join To NATO.
Russia's financial markets shot and the price of Ukraine's debt increased in the face of the perspective of the first peace conversations from the first months of the most fatal war in Europe since World War, which soon entered its fourth year.
But Trump's unilateral overture to Putin, accompanied by apparent concessions on the main demands of Ukraine, gave alarm for both kyiv and European allies in NATO, who said they feared that the White House could reach an agreement without them.
“We, as a sovereign country, simply cannot accept any agreements without us,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
He said Putin was aimed at making his bilateral negotiations with the United States, and it was important not to allow that.
European officials took an exceptionally firm line in public towards Trump's overture of peace, saying that any agreement would be impossible to implement unless they and the Ukrainians were included in the negotiation.
“Any quick solution is a dirty agreement,” said European Foreign Policy Kaja Kallas. He also strongly denounced the apparent concessions offered beforehand.
“Why are we giving them (Russia) everything they want even before negotiations have begun?” Kallas said. “It is the appeasement. It has never worked. “
A European diplomatic source said the ministers had agreed to participate in a “frank and demanding dialogue” with American officials, some of the strongest languages in the diplomatic lexicon, at the Annual Security Conference of Munich that begins on Friday.
Trump, who made the first call from the White House recognized publicly with Putin from the large -scale invasion of February 2022, and then followed him with a call to Zelenskiy, said he believed that both men wanted peace.
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But the Trump administration also said openly for the first time that it was not realistic for Ukraine Ukraine that may be configured to guarantee a high fire.
The Secretary of Defense of the United States, Pete Hegseth, said Thursday that the world was fortunate to have Trump, the “best negotiator on the planet, who joined two parts to find a negotiated peace.”
The Kremlin, meanwhile, said he was “impressed” by Trump's position, which contrasted with that of his predecessor Joe Biden.
“There is a political will, which emphasized during yesterday's conversation, to carry out a dialogue in search of an agreement,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Russia confiscated the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine and its representatives captured territory in the East in 2014, before their large -scale invasion in 2022 when it captured more lands in the east and south.
Ukraine pushed the Russian troops on the outskirts of kyiv and recaptured stripes of territory in 2022, but their forces overcome and surpassed have slowly yielded more land from a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023.
The relentless struggle has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides, there are not a reliable number of deaths, and sprayed Ukrainian cities.
Through years of struggle there has been no narrowing of positions on both sides. Moscow demands that kyiv yield more land and becomes permanently neutral in any peace agreement; kyiv says that Russian troops must be withdrawn and must gain security guarantees equivalent to NATO membership to avoid future attacks.
Ukrainian officials have recognized in the past that the full membership of NATO can be out of the short term and that a hypothetical peace agreement could leave some lands occupied in Russian hands.
But kyiv and his European allies made it clear that Trump had opened negotiations with apparent concessions to Moscow, without first agreeing a common position.
Ukraine Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said that kyiv was still committed to running to join NATO, which according to him was the simplest and least expensive way that the West could provide the necessary security guarantees to guarantee peace.
“All our allies have said that the Ukraine path to NATO is irreversible. This perspective is in our Constitution. It is of our strategic interest. “
The mood in the capital of Ukraine on Thursday was descending.
Myroslava Lesko, a resident of kyiv, 23, standing near a sea of flags in the city center in honor of fallen troops, said: “It really seems that they want to deliver Ukraine, because I do not see any benefit to our country of these negotiations or Trump's rhetoric. ” “
However, the Ukrainians have been exhausted by three years of war, and many say they are prepared to sacrifice some goals to achieve peace.
Many were frustrated by American politics under former President Biden, who had promised to help Ukraine recover all their lands and provided tens of billions of dollars in military hardware, but with restrictions and delays that Ukrainian commanders say that forces Russians regrouped.
Trump, at least, is being more direct about the limits of the support of the United States, said Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the kyiv Economy School.
“The difference between Biden and Trump is that Trump says aloud what Biden was thinking and doing about Ukraine,” he said.
–Additional reports from Yurii Kovalenko and Dan Pereschuk; Write by Peter Graff; Jon Boyle and Gareth Jones edition