MUNICH — Europe may not be “at the table” if the United States brokers negotiations to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy for Ukraine and Russia said.
Speaking at a lunch panel at the Munich Security Conference on February 15, Keith Kellogg suggested Washington is aiming to make substantial progress within weeks, saying he is operating “on Trump time.”
“He’ll ask you to do this job today, and he’ll want to know tomorrow why isn’t it solved,” Kellogg said. “You got to give us a bit of breathing space and time, but when I say that, I’m not talking six months, I’m talking days and weeks.”
Amid concerns in Kyiv and the European Union that they could be sidelined after Trump spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin this week and said Russia and the United States would start negotiations immediately, Kellogg said Ukraine and Europe would not be left out.
“You’ve got to bring the allies with you. Are they going to play a part? Of course they are. You can’t do it at the exclusion of anyone,” he said at the lunch hosted by the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation. “We want to make sure it’s lasting and it’s sustainable peace,” he added.
Asked whether he could assure the audience that “the Ukrainians will be at the table and the Europeans will be at the table,” however, Kellogg replied, “Oh, well you just changed the whole dynamic.”
“The answer to that last question…is no,” he said, apparently referring to Europe. “The answer to the earlier part of that question is yes, of course the Ukrainians are going to be there.”
“When you sit at the table…there’s two protagonists” and an intermediary,” Kellogg said, adding that “the fact is we’re looking at – you can have the Ukrainians and the Russians and obviously the Americans at the table.”
In an interview with RFE/RL on the sidelines of the conference, Kurt Volker, Trump’s envoy for Ukraine negotiations in 2017-19, said Kellogg’s remarks indicated “that Ukraine will be at the table and [there is] a little bit of uncertainty about how President Trump is going to handle Europe.”
Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, also said the United States is going go find that “we have to put more pressure on Putin so that he concludes he has to do a cease-fire.”
“Putin has shown no desire to negotiate other than to see a capitulation” from Ukraine, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said at an evening panel at the conference.
Asked at the same panel what concessions the United States might seek from Russia, Kellogg said, “To me, there’s going to have to be territorial concessions,” and that Moscow could have to renounce the use of force.
No specific plans for negotiations have been announced, but Bloomberg News and Politico cited sources as saying senior U.S. and Russian officials would meet in Saudi Arabia next week.
Both reports said Ukrainian officials were also expected, but Bloomberg said Zelenskyy told reporters in Munich that he was unaware of an invitation.
U.S. State Department on February 15 said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken by phone with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier in the day.
Rubio spoke with Lavrov “as a follow up to President Donald Trump’s conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this week,” a short statement said.
“The secretary reaffirmed President Trump’s commitment to finding an end to the conflict in Ukraine. In addition, they discussed the opportunity to potentially work together on a number of other bilateral issues,” the statement said of Rubio, who arrived on February 15 in Israel for the first Middle East trip since taking office.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the two “agreed to maintain an open channel of communication to address long-standing issues in Russian-American relations.”
“Both sides expressed a shared commitment to engaging on key international issues, including the situation in Ukraine, developments in Palestine, and the broader Middle East, as well as other regional matters,” it said.
Addressing the conference earlier in the day, Zelenskyy called on European countries to create a common army in the face of possible U.S. disengagement and a continued threat from Russia.
“The time has come, the armed forces of Europe must be created,” he said.
“If the Americans decided to go that way, decreasing their presence, it’s not good, of course, it’s very dangerous,” he said, speaking in English.
Zelenskyy’s call came at an annual conference that, this year, has been dominated by the question of Ukraine and the position of the new U.S. administration on ending the war, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives since Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.
Delegates in Munich have voiced concern over statements by senior U.S. officials this week, suggesting Washington is ready to make major concessions to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
U.S. officials have also reiterated calls for European countries to spend more on defense and take on a bigger share of the security burden. And Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb confirmed media reports saying the United Sates had sent European countries a questionnare asking what they could contribute to security guarantees for Ukraine.
Zelenskyy suggested the new U.S. administration had a new approach not only to Ukraine, but to Europe as a whole. “The old days are over,” he said, saying Washington needed Europe as a market but not necessarily as an ally.
The answer, he said, was collective strength.
“America needs to see where Europe is heading, and this direction of European policy shouldn’t just be promising. It should make America want to stand with a strong Europe.”
Speaking before Zelenskyy, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he was glad the United States had reaffirmed its commitments to Ukraine, adding that nothing should be agreed without Kyiv’s involvement.
There could be, he said, no “dictated” solution and “no decoupling” of European and U.S. security.
Scholz added that Germany had provided four times more support than the United States for Ukraine, when measured as a percentage of GDP.
The chancellor, who faces federal elections on February 23 that opinion polls predict he will lose, also responded to comments made by U.S. Vice President JD Vance yesterday criticizing standards of democracy in Europe and the levels of migration there.
“We will not accept that people who look at Germany from the outside intervene in our democracy, in our elections,” Scholz said.
Vance’s speech stunned delegates at the conference, who had been expecting him to lay out details of Washington’s plans for peace in Ukraine. Vance also raised eyebrows here by meeting later with Alice Weidel, the leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
A meeting between Vance and Zelenskyy on February 14 ended without a deal that would give the United States access to Ukrainian critical minerals, including rare-earth elements, which Trump has indicated he is seeking in exchange for aid to Ukraine.
The following day, Zelenskyy told journalists he had rejected the version of the agreement offered by the United States, saying it lacked “security guarantees” for Kyiv and “does not protect us.”
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