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President Donald Trump has said the US will not give Ukraine security guarantees “beyond very much”, as Washington and Kyiv prepare to sign a critical minerals deal on Friday.
“I’m not going to make security guarantees beyond very much,” Trump said at his first cabinet meeting on Wednesday. “We’re going to have Europe do that” because “Europe is the next-door neighbour”.
The US president also confirmed his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, would come to Washington on Friday to sign the agreement. “We’ll be really partnering with Ukraine in terms of rare earth. We very much need rare earth, they have great rare earth.”
He added the deal would be worth “probably $350bn” to the US and $100bn to Europe.
Trump’s remarks come as Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine enters a fourth year and its forces continue their grinding advance on the country’s eastern battlefields.
Ukraine has managed to slow the speed at which its enemy is taking ground and has held on to a swath of territory inside Russia that it captured in August. But Kyiv faces shortages of manpower and weaponry as Trump threatens to withhold vital assistance.
Zelenskyy had demanded clear guarantees of US military backing and security be part of the deal with Washington, but a framework agreed this week by both sides did not include an explicit reference to such support.
Ukrainian negotiators were able to narrow down the deal’s scope, but some key details are yet to be ironed out.
“It does not contain all the security guarantees Ukraine wanted, but I wanted at least one sentence mentioning guarantees — and it is there,” Zelenskyy said on Wednesday.
He said the future of the agreement would hinge on his broader talks with Trump and his stance on supporting Ukraine.
“This agreement can have a major success or quietly pass by,” Zelenskyy said. “And I believe that a major success depends on our conversation with President Trump.”
On a broader peace agreement between Moscow and Ukraine, Trump said Russian President Vladimir Putin “is going to have to” make concessions. But he declined to specify what these would be. “I don’t want to tell right now,” he said.
But Trump reiterated the US position that Ukraine can “forget about” a path to Nato membership, a key sticking point for Putin.
The US is going to do “the best we can to make the best deal we can for both sides”, Trump said, adding that “we want to get as much [Russian-held Ukrainian territory] back as possible” to Kyiv.
When asked if allowing Russia to retain Ukrainian territory it had captured would send a dangerous message to other US adversaries such as China, Trump said: “Oh, oh, you try to take it away.”
Russia occupies about 20 per cent of Ukrainian land, including the Crimean peninsula, which it forcibly annexed in 2014. Zelenskyy has conceded it would be difficult to take these territories back by force and is willing to acknowledge them as “temporarily occupied” by Russia in any peace deal, but unwilling to give them away.
Trump said loosening sanctions on Russia is not an option in any peace deal. “No, I want to see we make a deal first, but I think we will,” he said.
When asked how Washington would support any European peacekeeping effort in a postwar scenario, Trump said “peacekeeping is very easy, it’s making the deal that’s very tough”.
“Let me make peace first. Once we make peace I’ll give you all the answers you want,” he added.