NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Thursday said Ukraine should be involved in discussions about its own future — but downplayed concerns that Europeans and Kyiv were being sidelined by Donald Trump.
The U.S. president stunned European allies on Wednesday evening by effectively starting peace talks about the long-running Ukraine conflict with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
“Of course, it’s crucial that Ukraine is closely involved in everything happening about Ukraine,” Rutte told reporters, ahead of a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels.
“You also forget to mention that [Trump] also had a long phone call with [Ukraine] President Zelenskyy,” he said. “There’s a clear convergence emerging: We all want peace in Ukraine, rather sooner than later. We all want Ukraine to be in the best possible position.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s debut in Europe created quite a stir. On his first trip to Brussels since he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Hegseth told his counterparts Wednesday at the NATO headquarters that Zelenskyy had no chance of returning Ukraine to its pre-2014 borders.
He also shut down hopes that Kyiv would join NATO, to which Zelenskyy replied: “I don’t think that these doors were really open,” in a pointed comment at past and current U.S. administrations.
On Thursday, Hegseth gushed over Trump’s efforts to deal with Putin.
“You saw from President Trump yesterday, who himself is the best negotiator on the planet, bringing two sides together to find a negotiated peace, which is ultimately what everyone wants,” Hegseth told reporters.
However, several NATO defense ministers — including from Sweden, Estonia and Canada — also stressed that Ukraine should be involved in any peace talks.
“There can be no negotiation about Ukraine without Ukraine,” said British Defence Secretary John Healey.
According to Dutch Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans, Europeans too should have a seat at the table. “The most important [thing] is that there is no negotiation of Europe’s security architecture without Europeans involved,” he told reporters.
Rutte said the essential element was for peace talks to be “durable,” unlike the 2014 Minsk agreements that failed to stop Russia’s decade-long aggression in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and didn’t prevent Putin from launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine eight years later.
The former Dutch prime minister also downplayed Hegseth’s comments Wednesday about the U.S. choosing to prioritize deterrence against China over Europe’s security.
“There is a clear expectation from the side of the U.S., but also clear commitments yesterday that this alliance is here to stay for the generations to come,” he said, calling again for NATO allies to spend more and produce more weapons.
Paul McLeary, Veronika Melkozerova and Matt Honeycombe-Foster contributed to this report.
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