Zelenskyy: Europe cannot guarantee Ukraine's security without America
If Donald Trump withdraws US support for Ukraine, Europe alone will be unable to fill the gap, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned, on the eve of what could be his most consequential diplomatic trip since Russia's full-scale invasion three years ago.
'There are voices which say that Europe could offer security guarantees without the Americans, and I always say no,' said the Ukrainian president during an hour-long interview with the Guardian at the presidential administration in Kyiv. 'Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees,' he added.
Trump has said he wants to end the war in Ukraine, but sceptics fear that a US-brokered deal could involve forcing Ukraine to capitulate to Vladimir Putin's maximalist demands. Zelenskyy said he was ready to negotiate, but wanted Ukraine to do so from a 'position of strength', and said he would offer American companies lucrative reconstruction contracts and investment concessions to try to get Trump onside.
'Those who are helping us to save Ukraine will [have the chance to] renovate it, with their businesses together with Ukrainian businesses. All these things we are ready to speak about in detail,' he said.
Zelenskyy will travel to the Munich Security Conference later this week, where he expects to meet the US vice-president, JD Vance, one of the most hostile towards Ukraine among Trump's inner circle. At last year's conference, Vance, then a senator, refused to meet Zelenskyy, and he has previously said he does not 'really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other'.
Zelenskyy also plans to meet other members of Trump's team as well as influential senators in Munich, but there is 'not yet a date' to meet Trump himself, he said, although his team is working to fix one. Trump said over the weekend that he would 'probably' meet Zelenskyy this week, and it is possible that the Ukrainian president could fly to Washington from Munich.
'We are hoping that our teams will fix a date and a plan of meetings in the US; as soon as it is agreed, we are ready, I am ready,' he said.
Zelenskyy switched between Ukrainian and English to make his points during the interview, conducted on Monday afternoon in a lavishly decorated room inside the heavily fortified administration building in central Kyiv.
During the first phase of the full-scale invasion, his communication skills and passionate pleas were credited with forcing reluctant western leaders to back Ukraine with weapons and financial support. Now, in Trump, Zelenskyy faces a new challenge, with a major sceptic on continuing support for Kyiv becoming the leader of the country's biggest ally.
In a Fox News interview aired late on Monday, Trump said the US had spent hundreds of billions of dollars on Ukraine in recent years. 'They may make a deal, they may not make a deal, they may be Russian some day, they may not be Russian some day, but we're gonna have all this money in there and I said I want it back,' said Trump.
It means that along with Zelenskyy's oft-heard messages about the geopolitical and moral risks of allowing Russia to prevail in Ukraine, he has added some new ones, tailor-made for the US president. Most notable is the idea that the US will get priority access to Ukraine's 'rare earths', a prospect that has piqued Trump's interest enough for him to mention it several times in recent media appearances.
Zelenskyy said he pitched this idea to Trump back in September, when the pair met in New York, and he intends to return with 'a more detailed plan' about opportunities for US companies both in the reconstruction of postwar Ukraine and in the extraction of Ukrainian natural resources.
Ukraine has the biggest uranium and titanium reserves in Europe, said Zelenskyy, and it was 'not in the interests of the United States' for these reserves to be in Russian hands and potentially shared with North Korea, China or Iran.
But there was a financial incentive, too, he said: 'We are talking not only about security, but also about money … Valuable natural resources where we can offer our partners possibilities that didn't exist before to invest in them … For us it will create jobs, for American companies it will create profits.'
Zelenskyy said it was crucial for Ukraine's security that US military support continued, giving the example of US-made Patriot air defence systems. 'Only Patriot can defend us against all kinds of missiles, only Patriots. There are other [European] systems … but they cannot provide full protection … So even from this small example you can see that without America, security guarantees cannot be complete,' he said.
The first weeks of Trump's presidency have given Ukrainians plenty to worry about. There was the global freeze on USAid projects, which in Ukraine torpedoed hundreds of organisations working on everything from army veterans to schools and bomb shelters. Then, there was Trump's admission in an interview with the New York Post over the weekend that he had already spoken to Putin by telephone in an attempt to begin negotiations. When asked how many times, he said only: 'I'd better not say.'
Zelenskyy said it was 'very important' that the US president met a Ukrainian delegation before meeting Putin, but stopped short of criticising Trump for his opaque statements. 'Clearly he doesn't really want everyone to know the details, and that's his personal decision,' he said.
Zelenskyy is used to treading carefully when it comes to Trump; soon after he was elected in 2019 he was reluctantly sucked into a US impeachment drama over a phone call between the two presidents. Now, he again finds himself walking a diplomatic tightrope, with Ukraine's survival potentially dependent on the US president's decision to continue support.
On the USAid freeze, Zelenskyy said: 'We aren't going to complain that some programmes have been frozen, because the most important thing for us is the military aid and that has been preserved, for which I'm grateful … If the American side has the possibility and desire to continue its humanitarian mission, we are fully for it, and if it doesn't, then we will find our own way out of this situation.'
Trump's public pronouncements on Ukraine so far have been fragmented and often contradictory, but one theme that has prevailed is that while he wants to make a deal to end the war, Europe should be responsible for maintaining the peace afterwards. In response, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has floated the idea of a European peacekeeping force that could be deployed to Ukraine at some point after a ceasefire deal. Zelenskyy said such a mission would only work if it was deployed at scale.
'When it comes to Emmanuel's idea, if it's part [of a security guarantee] then yes, if there will be 100-150,000 European troops, then yes. But even then we wouldn't be at the same level of troops as the Russian army that is opposing us,' he said.
Europe is still a long way from agreeing to deploy combat-ready troops to Ukraine, a move that Putin would be unlikely to agree to in negotiations, and Zelenskyy said a softer peacekeeping mission would be unlikely to work unless it came with guarantees that it would stand against Russia if Moscow resumed hostilities.
'I will be open with you, I don't think that UN troops or anything similar has ever really helped anyone in history. Today we can't really support this idea. We are for a [peacekeeping] contingent if it is part of a security guarantee, and I would underline again that without America this is impossible,' he added.
If Trump does manage to get Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table, Zelenskyy said he planned to offer Russia a straight territory exchange, giving up land Kyiv has held in Russia's Kursk region since the launch of a surprise offensive there six months ago.
'We will swap one territory for another,' he said, but added that he did not know which part of Russian-occupied land Ukraine would ask for in return. 'I don't know, we will see. But all our territories are important, there is no priority,' he said.
As Zelenskyy turns his attention to Trump-whispering, he said it was still too early to pass judgment on the previous administration. Relations between Kyiv and Washington were said to be increasingly frosty as Zelenskyy's team grew frustrated with Joe Biden's focus on managing the risks of escalation.
Asked whether he thought Biden would go down in history as the man who helped save Ukraine, or the man who responded too slowly to meet the challenge from Putin, Zelenskyy laughed and said it was 'very difficult' to say at this stage.
He criticised Biden's initial unwillingness to provide Ukraine with weapons – 'this lack of confidence gave confidence to Russia' – but said Ukraine was grateful for all the help that followed.
The full evaluation, he said, would only emerge with time: 'History shows that there are many things that you just don't know, what happened behind the scenes, what negotiations there were … it's hard to characterise it all today because we don't know everything. Later we will know, we will know everything.'
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