MUNICH (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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, Zelenskyy said he will only agree to meet in-person with Russian leader Vladimir Putin after a common plan is negotiated with U.S. President Donald Trump.
The roughly 40-minute meeting between Vance and Zelenskyy produced no major announcements detailing the way out of the deadliest war in Europe since World War II. Zelenskyy made a plaintive statement about the state of play.
“We want peace very much,” Zelenskyy 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.”
Trump upended years of steadfast U.S. support for Ukraine this week following a phone call with Putin, when he said the two leaders would likely meet soon to negotiate a peace deal. Trump later assured Zelenskyy that he, too, would have a seat at the table.
‘New sheriff in town’
Before his meeting with Zelenskyy, 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.
“The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s not any other external actor,” Vance said in an address to the Munich Security Conference. “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 warned European officials: “If you’re running in fear of your own voters there’s nothing America can do for you.”
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.
The vice president also warned the European officials against illegal migration, saying Europeans 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 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 engagements to reiterate the Republican 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 their GDP on defense.
But European leaders are pushing back that the White House’s characterizations of a dependent Europe doesn’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.
