European leaders laid out their conditions for any progress on peace in Ukraine in bilateral talks between Russia and the U.S. due this Friday after a call with President Donald Trump.
President Trump hosted an hour-long strategy call with European leaders including Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Friedrich Merz, NATO’s Mark Rutte, the European Union’s Ursula Von Der Leyen, and others. The call comes ahead of Friday’s bilateral talks between President Trump and the Russian Federation’s President Vladimir Putin at which it is hoped progress towards an end of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might be made.
Before the call began on Wednesday President Trump paid a compliment to his transatlantic colleagues, writing in a statement: “Will be speaking to European Leaders in a short while. They are great people who want to see a deal done”. These remarks follow others made by Trump of late, where he has commented on having a new perspective on Europe and its leadership after seeing how dedicated, he said, they are to protecting Ukraine.
President Trump expressed his anger, however, at what he called a bid by the legacy media to declare his talks with Putin this week as a failure before they even begin. Countering a talking point that simply by inviting President Putin to Alaska to speak was handing him a victory, President Trump said the coverage was so biased that even if he managed to negotiate to get “Moscow and Leningrad free”, the “fake news would say I made a bad deal”.
While European figures were complimentary in their remarks following the Trump call, with Von der Leyen calling it “very good” and Germany’s Merz saying he wished success on Trump for Friday, nevertheless demands followed very quickly. French President Emmanuel Macron demanded that the next round of talks, said to be under planning presently and to include Trump, Putin, and Ukraine’s Zelensky, take place in Europe and not in a neutral third country, such has been the case in talks to now.
Macron said of the possibly coming trilateral talks, reports Le Figaro “We would like this to take place in Europe, in a neutral country that is acceptable to all sides” and further stated it would only be acceptable for talks on the future of Ukraine to take place when Zelensky is in the room. He said: “territorial questions concerning Ukraine can be, and will be, negotiated only by the Ukrainian president.”
Germany’s Merz was more explicit. Speaking besides President Zelensky, who is in Berlin for talks, the German Chancellor laid out a five-point list of demands from Europe to Presidents Trump and Putin. He said that he’d told Trump “fundamental European and Ukrainian security interests must be safeguarded in Alaska” and said of the five points that Ukraine must be at the negotiating table, and that if territorial swaps are considered Ukraine must not be asked to surrender any further territory, saying the present front lines are as far as it can go.
On the other point, Merz said Ukraine needs “robust security guarantees” and no limits on its future armed forces, that negotiations must be conducted in line with agreed “transatlantic security” — in other words demanding Trump must not deviate or improvise from what Europe agreed with him already — and that there will be consequences for Putin if he fails to strike a deal.
Trump is aware and agrees to the final point of being ready to hammer Russia with more sanctions as a punishment “to a large extent”, Merz said.
Zelensky, for his part, again threw doubt on whether he was going to drag his heels on territory changes in order to get peace. Referring to the fact the Ukrainian constitution would prevent him from giving away territory, Zelensky said: “My position has not changed because it is based on the Constitution of Ukraine… I want to emphasize right away: any issues related to the territorial integrity of our state cannot be discussed without regard for our state, our people, the will of the state, the will of our people, and the Constitution of Ukraine”.
President Trump has already expressed his frustration at Zelensky shielding himself with the Ukrainian constitution on this point, this week. On Monday he said: “Of course, we will not give Russia any awards for what it has done. The Ukrainian people deserve peace… I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelensky was saying, ‘Well, I have to get constitutional approval.’ I mean, he’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap — because there’ll be some land swapping going on… for the good of Ukraine”.
Recent polling suggests there is an appetite in Ukraine to end the fighting, even at a cost. As reported last week, a poll found a clear majority of Ukrainians say their country “should seek to negotiate an ending to the war as soon as possible”, a total reversal of the situation in 2022 when the war was fresh when the majority said to keep fighting until victory.
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