A senior Russian official said talks about Ukraine’s security without Russia are a “road to nowhere,” raising a red flag on conversations happening among NATO allies on supporting Ukraine.
“We cannot agree with the fact that it is now proposed to resolve collective security issues without the Russian Federation. This will not work,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Wednesday during a press conference in Moscow.
“And I am sure that in the West and above all in the United States they understand perfectly well that seriously discussing security issues without the Russian Federation is a utopia, a road to nowhere,” he added.
World leaders are urgently working out the details of what a negotiated end of the Russia-Ukraine war could look like and how they can ensure Ukraine will never be invaded again. However, Russian officials have tamped down those expectations already. It is also not clear whether Russian President Vladimir Putin, who began the war and has had the ability to end it every day since then, is actually willing to do so.
President Donald Trump and Putin met Friday in Anchorage, Alaska, to discuss the state of the conflict, and on Monday, Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the heads of Italy, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Finland, as well as the secretary general of NATO.
Russia will “ensure its legitimate interests firmly and harshly,” Lavrov added.
The chiefs of defense of NATO countries met virtually on Wednesday. Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, the chairman of NATO’s Military Committee, hosted the meeting, while Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the new Supreme Allied Commander Europe, made his first appearance at one after recently assuming the position.
Dragone said it was a “great, candid discussion,” and he added, “I thanked everyone for their always proactive participation in these meetings: we are united, and that unity was truly tangible today, as always.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine was also in attendance for the meeting, according to a U.S. defense official, who also told the Washington Examiner that Caine met with European leaders on Tuesday evening “to discuss best options for political leaders with respect to Ukraine peace negotiations.”
Zelensky has maintained that any agreement to end the war has to include guarantees from the West to deter Russia in the future from additional aggression.
Trump ruled out putting U.S. troops on the ground in Ukraine as part of a larger peacekeeping force, though he left open the possibility of air support. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said 30 countries expressed an interest in helping with the security guarantees, including some outside of NATO, such as Australia and Japan.
The exact configuration of what such a peacekeeping force could look like remains unknown publicly.
“We reiterate our repeatedly expressed position that we deny any scenarios that envisage the deployment of a military contingent to Ukraine with the participation of NATO states, which could lead to an uncontrollable escalation of the conflict with unpredictable consequences,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Tuesday.
Russian officials have said repeatedly that they would not accept NATO troops in Ukraine.
Both Trump and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, have said Putin agreed to some security guarantees for Ukraine during the bilateral meeting in Alaska, though the messaging from the Kremlin appears to reject their comments.
Trump also said the next step in ending the war would be a bilateral meeting between Zelensky and Putin, while French President Emmanuel Macron suggested such a conversation could occur in Geneva, Switzerland. The Swiss have expressed an openness to hosting it and said they would ask the International Criminal Court to exempt it from sanctions to allow Putin to travel to the country.
The Kremlin has not commented publicly about a possible Putin-Zelensky meeting, though Lavrov said Russia was open to meeting with more senior delegates than those involved in a recent but fruitless meeting between the two countries in Istanbul.
Western leaders have repeatedly accused Putin of dragging out negotiating efforts to end the war intentionally while simultaneously continuing Russian efforts along the front lines in eastern Ukraine and targeting cities far from there.
