The U.S. has agreed to offer unspecified security guarantees to Ukraine as a part of a peace deal to finish Russia’s nearly four-year war, and more talks are likely this weekend, U.S. officials said Monday following the newest discussions with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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 should be provided, in addition to on Moscow’s demand that Ukraine concede land within the Donbas region within the country’s east.
Trump dialed right into a dinner Monday evening with negotiators and European leaders, and more talks are expected this weekend in Miami or elsewhere in america, in response to the U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to comment publicly by the White House.
“I feel we’re closer now than we now have been, ever,” Trump told reporters at an unrelated White House event. He added, “We’re having tremendous support from European leaders. They wish to get it ended, also.”
The U.S. officials said the offer of security guarantees won’t be on the table “eternally.” They said the Trump administration plans to recommend the agreement on guarantees for Senate approval, although they didn’t specify whether it could be ratified like a treaty, which needs the chamber’s two-thirds approval.
In a press release, European leaders in Berlin said they and the U.S. committed to work together to offer “robust security guarantees,” including a European-led ”multinational force Ukraine” supported by the U.S.
They said the force’s work would come with “operating inside Ukraine” in addition to 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 within 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 points of the proposed U.S. security guarantees — something that Ukrainian officials said was missing from earlier iterations of the U.S. peace proposal, in response to U.S. officials.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called it a “truly far-reaching, substantial agreement that we didn’t have before, namely that each Europe and the U.S. are jointly prepared to do that.”
Questions over Ukraine’s postwar security and the fate of occupied territories have been the fundamental obstacles in talks. Zelenskyy has emphasized that any Western security assurances would have to be legally binding and supported by the U.S. Congress. Meanwhile, Russia has said it should not accept any troops from NATO countries being based on Ukrainian soil.
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Zelenskyy on Monday called the talks “substantial” and noted that differences remain on the difficulty of territory.
Zelenskyy has expressed readiness to drop Ukraine’s bid to affix NATO if the U.S. and other Western nations give Kyiv security guarantees much like those offered to NATO members. But Ukraine’s preference stays NATO membership as the most effective security guarantee to forestall further Russian aggression.
Ukraine has continued to reject the U.S. push for ceding territory to Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine to withdraw its forces from the a part of the Donetsk region still under its control as a key condition for peace.
The U.S. officials on Monday said there may be consensus on about 90% of the U.S.-authored peace plan, and that Russia has indicated it’s open to Ukraine joining the European Union, something it previously said it didn’t object to.
The Russian president has forged Ukraine’s bid to affix NATO, nevertheless, as a serious threat to Moscow’s security and a reason for launching the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The Kremlin has demanded that Ukraine resign the bid for alliance membership as a part of any prospective peace settlement.
Asked whether the negotiations could possibly be over by Christmas, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said attempting to predict a possible timeframe for a peace deal was a “thankless task.”
“I can only speak for the Russian side, for President Putin,” Peskov said. “He’s open to peace, to a serious peace and serious decisions. He is completely not open to any tricks geared toward stalling for time.”
Putin has denied plans to attack any European allies.
Britain’s MI6 chief warns Putin stalling peace, exporting ‘chaos’
Meanwhile, the brand new head of Britain’s MI6 spy agency, Blaise Metreweli, said Monday that Putin is “dragging out negotiations” on stopping the conflict, and stays determined to “subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO members.”
“We are actually operating in an area between peace and war,” Metreweli said of the broader global threat landscape in her first public speech since becoming chief of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency two months ago.
Metreweli accused Moscow of sponsoring cyberattacks on other countries’ critical infrastructure, drone incursions around European airports, campaigns of arson, sabotage and disinformation, and “aggressive activities in our seas, above and below the waves.”
“The export of chaos is a feature, not a bug, on this Russian approach to international engagement, and we needs to be ready for this to proceed until Putin is forced to alter his calculus,” she said.
The speech made a temporary reference to China’s “implications for national security,” but Metreweli focused on the threat from an “aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia.”
“Russia is testing us within the gray zone with tactics which are slightly below the edge of war,” she said.
Russia fired 153 drones of assorted types at Ukraine overnight Sunday into Monday, in response to Ukraine’s Air Force, which said 133 drones were neutralized, while 17 more hit their targets.
In Russia, the Defense Ministry on Monday said forces destroyed 130 Ukrainian drones overnight. An extra 16 drones were destroyed between 7 a.m. and eight a.m. local time.
Eighteen drones were shot down over Moscow itself, the defense ministry said. Flights were temporarily halted at the town’s Domodedovo and Zhukovsky airports as a part of safety measures, officials said.
Damage details and casualty figures weren’t immediately available.
Jill Lawless in London, Seung Min Kim in Washington; Pietro De Cristofaro in Berlin; Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine; and Katie Marie Davies in Manchester, England, contributed to this report.