The United States has proposed to Ukraine, for the first time, that it relinquish territory in exchange for joining NATO, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in comments released Saturday following trilateral talks held in recent days. This comes as Russia confirmed that President Vladimir Putin will participate in an unprecedented summit with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, and U.S. President Donald Trump in Shenzhen, China, next week.
Zelensky said, “The Americans raised a question: ‘What if Ukraine joins NATO? Would Ukraine withdraw from Donbas?’ This was the first time this had been raised.”
The first trilateral talks since February did not yield decisive progress toward resolving the most violent conflict in Europe since World War II, but they did allow all parties to agree on involving Europeans in future negotiations. U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff met separately with both Putin and Zelensky on Thursday. Kushner, son-in-law of US president, later wrote on X, “The press has reported some of the maximalist positions proposed by both sides, along with strong political rhetoric.”
In Dublin on Friday, Europe chose five countries — France, Germany, Italy, the UK and Poland — to send representatives to the talks, the date of which has not yet been announced. Zelensky revealed that Russia rejected a proposed energy truce in Abu Dhabi. The bombing of Ukraine’s power grid by Moscow in October was the most intense since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, according to the CEO of Ukraine’s largest energy company.
On the other hand, Russian airstrikes carried out on Saturday resulted in one death and ten injuries in Pavlohrad, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, and one death in a village near Zaporizhzhia, a city in southeastern Ukraine located just tens of kilometers from the front line. Around twenty people were also injured in strikes targeting the city of Zaporizhzhia, according to regional authorities.
With Moscow steadfastly refusing Ukraine’s accession to NATO, the American proposals appear to be facing a complex equation: ceding Ukrainian territory in exchange for Western security guarantees. While Washington seeks to push negotiations toward a settlement, Kyiv rejects any formula that infringes upon its territorial integrity or diminishes its right to security.
These developments reveal a continuing gap between the American vision for a settlement and the Ukrainian position on the terms of peace, at a time when Moscow remains steadfast in its demands. This makes reaching an agreement contingent on finding a balance between Russian territorial demands and the security guarantees sought by Kyiv, without the settlement becoming a prelude to a new round of conflict. (AFP+EIR)
