European leaders have said they are ready to give Ukraine security guarantees and warned that it would be dangerous for Kyiv to agree to a ceasefire without a negotiated peace agreement in place with Moscow, officials said.
The offer of a European security commitment to Ukraine was made at a meeting in Paris on Monday, called by French President Emmanuel Macron after United States President Donald Trump excluded European allies and Kyiv’s leadership from negotiations, due to take place in Saudi Arabia, with Russia on a deal to end the war in Ukraine.
“Ready and willing. That’s my take from today’s meeting in Paris. Europe is ready and willing to step up. To lead in providing security guarantees for Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said in a post on social media after the emergency meeting.
“The details will need to be decided but the commitment is clear,” Rutte said.
A European Union official said after the meeting that the leaders were “ready to provide security guarantees, with modalities to be examined with each party, depending on the level of American support”.
“We agree with President Trump on a ‘peace through strength’ approach,” the official said, summarising the result of the meeting.
“We believe it is dangerous to conclude a ceasefire without a peace agreement at the same time,” the official also said.
The three hours of emergency talks at the Elysee Palace in Paris followed US statements on Ukraine last week that threw a once-solid transatlantic alliance into turmoil. They also followed a call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin amid fears that Washington is ready to abandon Ukraine and embrace the Kremlin, while also giving the cold shoulder to the US’s traditional European allies.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late on Monday that he had spoken with Macron about security guarantees for his country, adding that a weak ceasefire with Russia would only serve as a ”prelude” to more Russian aggression against his or other countries in Europe.
“We share a common vision: security guarantees must be robust and reliable,” Zelenskyy said on social media.
“Any other decision without such guarantees – such as a fragile ceasefire – would only serve as another deception by Russia and a prelude to a new Russian war against Ukraine or other European nations,” he said.
Melinda Haring, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, told Al Jazeera that Europe was “caught off guard” by Washington’s overtures towards Russia.
“It is very strange that the aggressor is meeting with the United States without Ukraine. The longstanding policy of the United States has been, ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’,” Haring said.
“So it’s definitely a change in policy. But it could also be – the most charitable interpretation is – that the United States is trying to see if Russia is finally serious [about peace],” she said.
‘We came to negotiate with American colleagues’
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in Saudi Arabia with the US National Security adviser, Mike Waltz, and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff for talks on Tuesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov, according to reports.
Ushakov said on Monday, upon arrival in Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, that talks on Ukraine would be strictly bilateral, Russia’s RIA state news agency reported.
“We came to negotiate with American colleagues,” RIA cited Ushakov as saying. “These are bilateral talks, purely bilateral. There can be no trilateral talks in Riyadh.”
Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou-Castro, reporting from Washington, DC said the Trump administration’s communication with Moscow and talks on a peace agreement mark a reversal of the previous US President Joe Biden’s administration’s approach to Ukraine.
“With Biden, we heard so much affirmation about Ukraine’s standpoint in the war, and it’s only been the opposite since Trump took office,” Zhou-Castro said.
“Coming from [Trump’s] administration, from his secretary of defence, we’ve heard the US side really on Russia’s negotiating positions, saying that the US finds it now to be unrealistic for Ukraine to reclaim all of its lost territory to Russia, and no longer endorsing a NATO membership for Ukraine,” she said.
“Both very bitter pills to swallow for Ukraine, which is saying that it won’t swallow them at all,” she added.
“The US side has not telegraphed any expectations for tomorrow but the Russian Foreign Ministry has said that this would pave the way towards a meeting in person between Trump and Putin somewhere down the road.”
United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez attended the meeting alongside Macron in Paris. Also at the meeting were Dutch Premier Dick Schoof, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, NATO’s Rutte, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa.
