US officials say Washington has agreed to give Ukraine security guarantees in peace talks

BERLIN, December 17 ------ The U.S. has agreed to provide unspecified security guarantees to Ukraine as part of a peace deal to end Russia's nearly four-year war, and more talks are likely this weekend, U.S. officials said following the latest discussions with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Berlin.

The officials said talks with President Donald Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, led to narrowing differences on security guarantees that Kyiv said must be provided, as well as on Moscow’s demand that Ukraine concede land in the Donbas region in the country’s east.

Trump dialed into a dinner Monday evening with negotiators and European leaders, and more talks are expected this weekend in Miami or elsewhere in the United States, according to the U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly by the White House. “I think we’re closer now than we have been, ever,” Trump told reporters at an unrelated White House event. He added, “We’re having tremendous support from European leaders. They want to get it ended, also."

The U.S. officials said the offer of security guarantees won’t be on the table “forever.” They said the Trump administration plans to put forward the agreement on guarantees for Senate approval, although they didn’t specify whether it would be ratified like a treaty, which needs the chamber's two-thirds approval.

In a statement, European leaders in Berlin said they and the U.S. were committed to work together to provide “robust security guarantees,” including a European-led “multinational force Ukraine" supported by the U.S. They said the force's work would include "operating inside Ukraine" as well as assisting in rebuilding Ukraine's forces, securing its skies, and supporting safer seas. They said Ukrainian forces should remain at a peacetime level of 800,000.

Witkoff and Kushner were accompanied by U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, who heads NATO's military operations and the U.S. European Command, as talks honed in on the particulars of what the U.S. officials described as an “Article 5-like” security agreement. Article Five in the NATO treaty is the collective defense clause, stating that an attack on one member is an attack on all. The U.S. side presented the Ukrainians a document that spelled out in greater specificity aspects of the proposed U.S. security guarantees — something that Ukrainian officials said was missing from earlier iterations of the U.S. peace proposal, according to U.S. officials.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called it a “truly far-reaching, substantial agreement that we did not have before, namely that both Europe and the U.S. are jointly prepared to do this.” Questions over Ukraine's postwar security and the fate of occupied territories have been the main obstacles in talks. Zelensky has emphasized that any Western security assurances would need to be legally binding and supported by the U.S. Congress. Meanwhile, Russia has said it will not accept any troops from NATO countries being based on Ukrainian soil.

Source: mb.com.ph