Russia has said it won’t accept NATO troops in Ukraine as part of any peace deal, its Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said after talks with the US in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday.
Speaking after the meeting, Lavrov called the talks “useful” and stressed that any type of peacekeeping forces in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable.”
This was after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Monday he was “ready and willing” to put UK troops into Ukraine after a ceasefire.
Lavrov said: “The deployment of troops from the same NATO countries, but under a different flag – EU or their national flags – changes nothing. Of course, this is unacceptable for us.”
In practical terms, this translates into Russian opposition to any meaningful security guarantees for Ukraine against future attacks.
Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, told reporters he’s “convinced” that Russia is willing to engage in a serious process of ending the war. Referencing criticisms from Ukraine’s European allies, who also missed an invite, he said nobody was “sidelined” from the meeting.
Rubio explained some of the initial steps agreed on in Tuesday’s talks between the US and Russia to open dialogue and bring an end to the Ukraine war. Among them, he said, the goal is to re-establish diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C., and Moscow and appoint negotiation teams to discuss ending the conflict.
The two countries agreed to appoint teams to negotiate ending the Ukraine war, but they are no closer to arranging a meeting between Trump and Putin, Rubio said Tuesday’s talks with Russia are the “first step of a long and difficult journey” to ending the war in Ukraine
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking in Turkey on Tuesday, insists Ukraine will not cede territory, saying, “The east is ours, Crimea is ours and all the other towns and villages that are important for us.”
Uninvited to those talks, Zelensky made it known he wouldn’t accept a deal made about Ukraine without Ukraine’s involvement, adding that he wouldn’t recognise parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia. Zelensky told reporters in Turkey that he had postponed his visit to Saudi Arabia until mid-March after the results from Tuesday’s talks came to light.
With the Trump administration threatening to redirect America’s foreign defence spending from Ukraine and Europe to other parts of the world, European leaders are grappling with the future of their security without US support.
As European nations scramble for ideas on bolstering Ukraine’s security, one idea – suggested by the UK and Sweden, for example – is the deployment of foreign troops to guarantee that a possible peace deal holds.
Polish President Andrzej Duda said the US does not plan to reduce American troops on NATO’s eastern flank.
“There is no American intention whatsoever to reduce activity here in our part of Europe, especially in terms of security, to reduce the number of American troops,” Duda said after meeting with Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, in Warsaw.
Duda said he hoped earlier plans to create a permanent US military base in Poland, which he had dubbed ‘Fort Trump’ during Trump’s first term in office, could still be realised.
“Here we even talked about the fact that I hope that Fort Trump, which we talked about during President Donald Trump’s first term, will come into being and that there will be such a very strongly entrenched American military presence in our country,” he said.
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