U.S. and Ukrainian officials said Monday that Washington had pledged to protect Ukraine against further Russian attack, potentially easing the path to Kyiv’s signing on to a truce even as major questions about territory and Russia’s willingness to agree to a deal remained unresolved.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday that he had made progress over two days of conversations in Berlin with top White House envoys trying to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, saying that Washington had offered security guarantees akin to those of the NATO defense alliance as Kyiv entered a crucial week of high-stakes talks with its backers.
“Things are seemingly going well, but we’ve been saying that for a long time, and it’s a difficult one,” President Donald Trump said Monday in the Oval Office after a conversation with Zelensky and other European leaders. “We have to get them on the same page. But I think that’s working.”
Ukrainian, U.S. and top European officials met in Berlin on Sunday and Monday to try to advance a peace deal as Russia continues to bombard Ukrainian cities. Trump has urged Ukraine to hand over territory that Russia has not yet conquered as the price for peace, even while Putin has demanded additional concessions to weaken Kyiv’s sovereignty. Ukrainian leaders said Monday they appreciated White House efforts to reach a deal even as significant gaps appeared to remain between the sides. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said in the past that he is likely to oppose a deal that would grant major U.S. security guarantees to Kyiv.
“We have now heard from the American side that they are prepared to give security guarantees that are equivalent to Article 5 of the NATO partners,” Zelensky said at a Monday news conference, referring to the element of NATO treaties that commits members to treat an attack on one country as an attack on them all. Zelensky spoke after hours of meetings with White House envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
The U.S. guarantees are “just a first step,” Zelensky said.
U.S. officials said Monday they had offered “platinum” security guarantees to Ukraine that would require a vote by Congress. They said that they believed they had solved “90 percent” of the issues between Ukraine and Russia.
But the U.S. officials offered no details about what form the security guarantees would take, other than that there would be no U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine. Seeing as the United States is unwilling to shoulder the risk of taking Ukraine into NATO because of concerns about being pulled into a direct war with Russia, it is unclear why it would be willing to offer separate security guarantees as robust as those of NATO.
U.S. officials also said that Ukraine and Russia would talk directly with each other about the fate of contested territory in eastern Ukraine — a sign that they did not see an immediate path to a negotiated compromise.
Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials praised the U.S. involvement in the negotiations, and U.S. and European officials said they would do what they could to reassure Ukrainians they would not be left alone should Russia attack again after a peace deal.
“Ukraine will be able to defend itself in the long term, not only on its own, but also with the support of the states allied with Ukraine, and that is good news,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told reporters alongside Zelensky.
European Union leaders will gather in Brussels on Thursday to discuss a plan to issue loans against $220 billion in Russian assets that were frozen after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine that could help finance Kyiv’s weapons purchases and the reconstruction of the devastated country. But Belgium, whose financial institutions hold much of the money, has been staunchly opposed to the plan. And a U.S. vision for a peace deal envisions a different use for the funds by using them for joint U.S. investments in Ukraine, pitting Washington against many European leaders.
Trump and his top officials have said they hope to achieve a peace deal by the end of the year, a timeline that Ukrainian and European officials have suggested is ambitious.
Zelensky has been facing a major corruption scandal at home and was forced to dismiss his powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, after Yermak’s home was raided as part of the investigation.
That domestic vulnerability, along with painful Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure that have left Kyiv and other cities in increasingly long stretches of darkness and cold, may make Zelensky more ready to strike a deal, one senior European diplomat said.
“I do believe they have never been as serious as we are right now. And somehow the feeling is that this has to do with the whole scandal on corruption and the whole domestic mess as well,” the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about the situation.
But the diplomat expressed skepticism about whether Russia was willing to agree to peace.
“People in this country are quite realistic about the ways to bring this war to its end,” the diplomat said. “They believe that as long as Russia feels it has an upper hand in this whole process, there is no chance to move to a really sustainable peace.”
Trump last week spoke by phone to Zelensky and other European leaders about the peace deal in a conversation that both sides said was difficult. But he dispatched Witkoff and Kushner to Berlin to meet with Zelensky and others to try to keep negotiations going. The president once said that he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine in less than 24 hours and has since confessed his frustration that resolving the conflict has proved more complicated.
Trump on Monday spoke again to Zelensky and Merz, calling into the dinner that included the two leaders in Berlin.
Washington is offering “really, really strong guarantees, Article Five-like,” said one U.S. official familiar with the discussions, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity under White House ground rules.
Washington wants Russia to get “back into the global economy so that they have incentive not to go back to war in the future,” the official said. Russia was integrated into the global economy before its invasion of Ukraine.
“There’s no such thing as permanent allies or permanent enemies,” the official said.
Siobhán O’Grady contributed to this report.
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