Zelensky to Vance: Ukraine wants ‘security guarantees’ as Trump seeks deal with Russia
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MUNICH, Germany — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday that his country wants “security guarantees” before any talks with Russia, as the Trump administration presses both countries to find a quick endgame to the three-year war.
Shortly before sitting down with Vice President JD Vance for highly anticipated talks at the Munich Security Conference, Zelensky said he will agree to meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin only after a common plan is negotiated with President Trump.
The roughly 40-minute meeting between Vance and Zelensky produced no major announcements detailing the way out of the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. Zelensky made a plaintive statement about the state of play.
“We want peace very much,” Zelensky said. “But we need real security guarantees.”
Vance, for his part, said the Trump administration is committed to finding a lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia.
“Fundamentally, the goal is, as President Trump outlined it, we want the war to come to a close,” Vance said. “We want the killings to stop. Not the kind of peace that’s going to have Eastern Europe in conflict just a couple of years down the road.”
As Trump grants Putin his main wish to end war in Ukraine, Kyiv and Europe voice anger at not being included in proposed talks.
Trump upended years of steadfast U.S. support for Ukraine this week after a phone call with Putin, when he said the two leaders would probably meet soon to negotiate a peace deal. Trump later assured Zelensky that he too would have a seat at the table.
Trump has been vague about his intentions — other than suggesting that a deal will likely result in Ukraine being forced to cede territory that Russia has seized since it invaded and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014.
‘New sheriff in town’
Before his meeting with Zelensky, Vance lectured European officials on free speech and illegal migration on the continent, warning that they risk losing public support if they don’t quickly change course.
“What I worry about is the threat from within — the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America,” he said in an address to the Munich Security Conference.
He warned European officials: “If you’re running in fear of your own voters there’s nothing America can do for you.”
President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin share some traits and want some of the same things. But a chasm divides them.
The speech and Trump’s push for a quick way out of Ukraine have been met with intense concern and uncertainty at the annual gathering of world leaders and national security officials.
“In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town,” Vance said to tepid applause. “And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square.”
Russia takes a triumphant tone after Trump jettisoned U.S. policy and said he would likely meet soon with Putin to negotiate a Ukraine peace deal.
The vice president also warned the European officials against illegal migration, saying that the electorate didn’t vote to open “floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants” and referencing an attack Thursday in Munich where the suspect is a 24-year-old Afghan who arrived in Germany as an asylum-seeker in 2016.
The violence left more than 30 people injured and officials say it appears to have had an Islamic extremist motive.
NATO defense spending
Earlier Friday, Vance met separately with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy. He used the meetings to reiterate the Trump administration’s call for NATO members to spend more on defense.
Currently, 23 of NATO’s 32 member nations are hitting the Western military alliance’s target of spending 2% of the nation’s GDP on defense.
But European leaders are pushing back that the White House’s characterizations of a dependent Europe don’t play out in the data. The continent has rallied to get behind Ukraine since Putin launched the February 2022 invasion. The U.S. has poured more than $66 billion in weapons and military assistance into Ukraine, while European and other allies have sent $60 billion in weaponry to Kyiv.
“We have put in place hard-hitting sanctions, substantially weakening Russia’s economy,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in remarks to the conference. “We have broken one taboo after another and smashed our reliance on Russian gas, making us more resilient permanently. And we are about to do more.”
Chernobyl drone strike
Hours before Vance and Zelensky met, a Russian drone with a high-explosive warhead hit the protective confinement shell of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Kyiv region, the Ukrainian president said.
Radiation levels at the closed plant in the Kyiv region — site of the world’s worst nuclear accident — have not increased, according to the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, which said the strike did not breach the plant’s inner containment shell.
Fighting around nuclear power plants has repeatedly raised fears of a nuclear catastrophe, particularly in a country where many vividly remember living through the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which killed at least 30 people and spewed radioactive fallout over much of the Northern Hemisphere.
During the war, Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s biggest, has occasionally been hit by drones without causing significant damage.
Zelensky told reporters he thinks the Chernobyl drone strike is a “very clear greeting from Putin and Russian Federation to the security conference.”
A drone armed with a warhead hit the outer shell of Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear plant, briefly starting a fire, in an attack Kyiv blamed on Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday denied Ukraine’s allegations. And Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said the Munich organizers haven’t invited Russia for several years.
Ukraine’s bid to join NATO
Trump’s musings have left Europeans in a quandary, wondering how — or even if — they can maintain the post-WWII security that NATO afforded them or fill the gap in the billions of dollars of security assistance that the Democratic Biden administration provided to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion.
Trump has been highly skeptical of that aid and is expected to cut or otherwise limit it as negotiations get underway in the coming days.
Both Trump and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week undercut Ukraine’s hopes of becoming part of NATO, which the alliance said less than a year ago was “irreversible,” or of getting back its territory captured by Russia, which occupies close to 20% of Ukraine, including Crimea.
“I don’t see any way that a country in Russia’s position could allow ... them to join NATO,” Trump said Thursday. “I don’t see that happening.”
But British Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Zelensky on Friday that Ukraine must be allowed to join NATO.
Possible sanctions against Russia
Vance, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, said that the U.S. would hit Moscow with sanctions and potentially military action if Putin won’t agree to a peace deal with Ukraine that guarantees Kyiv’s long-term independence.
The warning that military options “remain on the table” was striking language from a Trump administration that’s repeatedly underscored a desire to quickly end the war.
Vance’s team later pushed back on the newspaper’s report, saying he “didn’t make any threats.”.
European turning point
The track Trump is taking also has rocked Europe.
French Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Haddad described Europe as being at a turning point, with the ground shifting rapidly under its feet, and said Europe must wean itself off its reliance on the United States for its security. He warned that handing a victory to Russia in Ukraine could have repercussions in Asia, too.
“I think we’re not sufficiently grasping the extent to which our world is changing,” Haddad told broadcaster France Info on Thursday. “Both our competitors and our allies are busy accelerating.”
Madhani, Lee and Dazio write for the Associated Press. Madhani reported from Munich, Lee from Washington and Dazio from Berlin. AP reporters Lolita C. Baldor and Zeke Miller in Washington, John Leicester in Paris, Jill Lawless in London and Illia Novikov in Kyiv contributed to this report.
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