German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said that his country can play an important role in providing security guarantees for Ukraine, but that Berlin likely doesn’t have the capacity to send troops to the embattled country.
“We are the only European troop contributor to station a combat-ready brigade in Lithuania. Doing that and also stationing troops in Ukraine would probably be too much for us,” Wadephul told the Table Today Podcast on Monday, adding that Defense Minister Boris Pistorius will look into the matter.
European leaders see durable security guarantees for Ukraine as key to any potential peace deal that may emerge between Kyiv and Moscow and the issue will be a top item on the agenda when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his European counterparts meet with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington on Monday.
“We are now hearing signals from Washington that they are prepared to do so [provide security guarantees], and this must then be worked out together with the Europeans, with Germany naturally having to play an important role,” Wadephul said in the interview, adding Berlin could provide military and technical help, among other things.
In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said there was support for “much more robust security guarantees [and] EU admission” and suggested “Article 5-like” protection was on the table for Ukraine, a reference to NATO’s mutual defense provisions.
It’s unclear, however, whether Zelenskyy will view an “Article-5 like” promise without troops on the ground as a sufficient deterrent, especially as Trump has previously cast doubt on the U.S. commitment to NATO’s common defense clause.
Conservative German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who is also traveling to Washington on Monday, has so far been vague on the issue of a potential German troop deployment to Ukraine. In an interview immediately after his election in February, he suggested that Germany could participate if the U.S. does so.
But despite a huge expansion of military spending, Germany has struggled to recruit and train battle-ready soldiers, with troop levels flatlining at around 182,000 despite significant efforts to grow the force. In April, Germany officially launched its first permanent foreign troop deployment since World War II — a 5,000-strong armored brigade in Lithuania intended to bolster NATO’s eastern flank in response to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
“The issue of security guarantees is a highly complex one that will require a great deal of coordination,” a German government spokesperson said Monday in the run-up to the meetings in Washington. “We see the specific details and concrete implementation as part of a truly lengthy and complex process.”
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