KYIV, Ukraine: European and NATO leaders announced Sunday they will join President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington to present a united front in talks with President Donald Trump on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine and firming up US security guarantees now on the negotiating table.
Leaders from Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Finland are rallying around the Ukrainian president after his exclusion from Trump’s summit on Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Their pledge to be at Zelensky’s side at the White House on Monday is an apparent effort to ensure the meeting goes better than the last one in February, when Trump berated Zelensky in a heated Oval Office encounter.
“The Europeans are very afraid of the Oval Office scene being repeated and so they want to support Mr. Zelensky to the hilt,” said retired French Gen. Dominique Trinquand, a former head of France’s military mission at the United Nations.
“It’s a power struggle and a position of strength that might work with Trump,” he said.
Putin agreed at his summit in Alaska with Trump that the US and its European allies could offer Ukraine a security guarantee resembling NATO’s collective defense mandate as part of an eventual deal to end the 3 1/2-year war, special US envoy Steve Witkoff said in an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
