Left Out of Ukraine Talks, Europe Races to Organize a Response

The Trump administration’s push for direct negotiations with Russia without Ukraine’s involvement leaves the European allies with no clear role.

Andrew E. Kramer, Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, 02/16/25

While American officials prepared on Sunday for the start of talks with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine, European leaders were rushing to formulate a response to President Trump’s push for a settlement that appeared to leave them and Kyiv with no clear role in the process.

The Russian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, where the talks are set to take place this week, met Sunday with the kingdom’s foreign minister. Two senior Trump administration officials — the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and the Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff — will fly to Saudi Arabia to join Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the negotiations, Mr. Witkoff said Sunday in an interview on Sunday Morning Futures, on Fox News.

The final preparations follow a flurry of diplomatic discussions over the past several days that included a conversation between Mr. Rubio and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.

On Sunday, Mr. Rubio said in an interview from Jerusalem with CBS News that if an opportunity presented itself “for a broader conversation that would involve Ukraine, that would involve the end of the war, that would involve our allies all over the world, particularly in Europe, we’re going to explore it if that opportunity presents itself.”

The meeting with Russia, while preliminary, would signal the start of Mr. Trump’s accelerated timetable for a deal and his seeming determination to conduct negotiations with Russia alone, at least for now.

Ukraine will not take part, Andriy Yermak, the head of the President Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential office, confirmed Sunday in a post on the Telegram social networking site. He said that Ukraine would prefer to reach a common plan for negotiations with the Trump administration before meeting with a Russian delegation.

“There have been no meetings, nor are any planned,” Mr. Yermak wrote. “The president made it clear that any agreement reached without Ukraine’s involvement will not be accepted. Security guarantees must include the United States. We will never make decisions that go against Ukraine’s interests.”

In an initiative initially encouraged by Ukraine, the Trump administration is in talks to secure a portion of the profits from Ukraine’s natural resources in exchange for security aid. But when the administration proposal arrived, Mr. Zelensky declined the terms, under which the United States would receive half of the profits.

Mr. Zelensky said he declined, in part, because it offered no assurances of U.S. support in the war in exchange. It has not been clear whether the U.S. demand is tied to future aid or seen as compensation for assistance already provided.

Mr. Zelensky’s rejection of the proposal prompted a rebuke from Mr. Waltz, the national security adviser. Mr. Zelensky, he said in an interview on Fox News Sunday, would be “very wise” to accept the deal, adding, “The American people deserve to be recouped, deserve to have some kind of payback for the billions they have invested in this war.”

The leaders of France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, and the top officials of the European Union and NATO, will convene an emergency meeting in Paris on Monday to discuss the war in Ukraine and European security, French officials said Sunday. The aim is to coordinate a response to the Trump administration’s opening of talks with Russia without European participation.

That follows a meeting Sunday of foreign ministers from the European Union, which as a bloc has provided more military support for Ukraine than has the United States.

In the Fox News interview, Mr. Waltz denied that the Europeans were being excluded from the negotiations. “They may not like some of the sequencing that is going on in some of these negotiations,” he said. “I have to push back on any notion that they aren’t being consulted. They absolutely are.”

Mr. Waltz added that the U.S. negotiators “will bring everyone together when appropriate,” while specifying that the Europeans will be expected to “provide long-term military guarantees.”

Mr. Zelensky said he would be in Saudi Arabia this week but did not specify when. He has made clear he does not want to enter negotiations before determining what security guarantees Western nations are willing to offer to ensure any cease-fire is not violated. As of Saturday, he said he had no such assurances from the United States.

In an interview with NBC on Sunday he reiterated that he would “never” accept a peace negotiation settled between Russia and the United States without Ukraine.

Asked if he feels he has a seat at the table right now, Mr. Zelensky did not answer directly. He said he counted on one. He said he told Mr. Trump that Putin “is a liar” who “doesn’t want any peace.”

In Moscow, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. But Russian state television on Sunday released an interview with Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, who reasserted Russia’s newfound optimism about negotiating with the United States after years of diplomatic isolation by the Biden administration.

“We’re now going to be talking about peace, not about war,” Mr. Peskov said. “Based on President Trump’s statements, we’re solving problems through dialogue.”

Russia and Ukraine have not met for direct talks in nearly three years. Direct Russian and Ukrainian talks, mediated first by Belarus and then Turkey, began at the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 but unraveled six weeks later. They became untenable after Russia suffered battlefield defeats and after human rights abuses by the Russian Army came to light in the town of Bucha, where about 400 bodies were found on city streets, in mass graves and in backyards.

Russia subsequently lost about half of the territory gained in the invasion, but for a year it has been advancing in a bloody, slow-motion offensive in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine that has moved the front line about 30 miles. Ukraine has a pocket of Russian territory it captured six months ago in the Kursk region to use as leverage going into the talks.

For now, though, Ukrainians — who have endured hundreds of thousands of casualties in the fighting and missile attacks, electrical blackouts and displacement for civilians to fight Russia to a near stalemate — were left with the unwelcome prospect of negotiations on their future without their voice.

“I find this completely incomprehensible, and of course, it outrages me,” Vladyslava Bilova, 19, a student in Kyiv, said of Ukraine’s exclusion from the opening of talks. “It’s strange to decide the fate of a country when it is not even participating in the process.”

Viktor Reuta, 49, a soldier, said Ukrainians would not accept a settlement forced on them. “They can try to impose whatever they want,” he said. “We are already at war, and we have realized that we can speak for ourselves.”

The exclusion of Ukraine from the start of talks is “very unsettling and even terrifying,” said Vita Voinovska, 40, a pharmacist. She added, “It feels like three people are standing together, and two are talking to each other while the third — the one actually facing the problem — is standing there as if they don’t exist.”