Volodymyr Zelensky and his European partners are counting on the United States to help protect Ukraine from a future Russian attack. The Ukrainian president wants the allies to offer him the same security guarantees as if he belonged to NATO, in exchange for abandoning his country’s application for membership in this organization.
After two days of negotiations in Berlin, Zelensky and the host, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, seemed convinced on Monday that the United States would offer robust protection, an essential condition, according to kyiv, for agreeing to a cease-fire. Moscow in turn demands that Ukraine definitively renounce its membership in the Atlantic Alliance.
The new details on Ukraine’s defense after a hypothetical peace constitute the biggest breakthrough in the marathon of meetings between the Ukrainian president and the emissaries of his American counterpart, Donald Trump. The Berlin meetings come after three weeks of struggle over a plan proposed by the United States and negotiated by its main envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Kirill Dmitriev, a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The plan proposed drastic conditions for Ukraine, with territorial cessions, limits on its armed forces and an amnesty for war crimes.
“The United States told us that it is ready to give us security guarantees that correspond to Article 5,” Zelensky said at a press conference with the German chancellor. The Ukrainian president is referring to the article in the NATO treaty that establishes that an attack on one member is an attack on all, and obliges them to provide assistance in this case. Merz added: “Both the Europeans and the Americans are ready to give Ukraine guarantees similar to those in Article 5. This is a substantial and ambitious agreement that we did not have until now. »
Washington has not officially confirmed this offer, but American sources cited by the Associated Press agency and the German newspaper Picture They speak of “really strong” guarantees and “very strong deterrence” against Russia thanks to American weapons. It remains to be seen how these promises will come to fruition, whether Trump actually approves them and whether Putin accepts them.
A joint statement from Merz and the leaders of several European countries, including France, Poland, Italy and the United Kingdom, cites some of these guarantees, such as the presence of a European multinational force to protect air and maritime space in Ukraine. This protection, outside of NATO, should be formalized in a “legally binding commitment” which would require “taking measures to restore peace and security in the event of a future armed attack”.
The other obstacle to the negotiation lies in the territories that Ukraine might be willing to cede to Russia to reach the agreement. kyiv will only make territorial concessions if it benefits from security guarantees from Europe and the United States.
The US idea of a demilitarized zone in Ukraine’s Donbass region, largely under Russian control, is at the center of discussions. This demilitarized zone would force Ukraine to withdraw from the territories it still controls. At the press conference with Merz, Zelensky admitted little progress on this issue, but added: “The important thing is that he listened to us.”
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