Russia’s top diplomat rejects key part of deal to end war with Ukraine
KYIV — Despite optimistic pronouncements from President Donald Trump and other U.S. officials about imminent results in efforts to resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Moscow’s top diplomat on Thursday rejected a central condition of the proposed deal.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed a bilateral security agreement between the United States and Ukraine — a key condition Kyiv that officials say is needed for them to sign any deal — saying “that such security guarantees are unlikely to ensure lasting peace.”
The minister’s statement threw into doubt the fundamental basis of ongoing talks, namely that Ukraine will trust a peace agreement with Russia if its security is guaranteed by the United States.
Details of the security agreement are not known, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this week that the U.S.-provided guarantees were “100 percent ready” for signing. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Wednesday that “you could argue” that the guarantees “are agreed to from our side of the equation.”
Lavrov told journalists in Moscow that he did not know the specifics of the agreement, but he said that “apparently, these are guarantees for the very Ukrainian regime that pursues a Russophobic, neo-Nazi policy.”
Russia justified its brutal invasion of Ukraine four years ago, in part, by fabricating reports of attacks on a Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine and claiming falsely that Ukraine was led by a regime following a Nazi ideology.
“If the goal is to preserve this regime in some part of the territory of former Ukraine and continue to use this regime as a springboard for creating threats to the Russian Federation,” then there would be no peace in the future, Lavrov said in his remarks.
In the past, Moscow has insisted that it must be part of any security framework for Ukraine — potentially giving it a veto over any response to Russian violations.
As U.S.-brokered peace talks to resolve the conflict in Ukraine are set to resume Sunday in Abu Dhabi, Lavrov’s remarks were a stark reminder that significant hurdles are blocking, and may eventually doom, a final settlement — not the least of these being Russia’s stance toward an independent Ukraine.
This comes as Trump remarked Tuesday that “we’re looking at some very good things happening on Ukraine and Russia,” without providing further details.
In addition to security guarantees, the issue of territory is also hindering the talks, officials say.
U.S., Ukrainian and Russian officials have made no secret that the main sticking point is the fate of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. The Kremlin insists that the whole region should be given to Russia as part of a final settlement — citing what it calls a “formula” reached with Trump during the summit in Alaska — despite its inability after nearly four years of fighting to seize the final, heavily fortified portion of the region.
The issue of Donetsk is “still a bridge we have to cross. It’s still a gap,” Rubio told the Senate. “But at least we’ve been able to narrow down the issue set to one central one, and it will probably be a very difficult one.”
But for the Ukrainians, any territorial concessions must also come with ironclad security guarantees, to dissuade Russia from resuming hostilities in the future. Foremost in Kyiv officials’ minds is the failure of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which stipulated that Moscow would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for Kyiv giving up its nuclear weapons.
Then more than a decade ago, Ukrainians and Russians sat down for negotiations in Minsk, Belarus, to end an insurgency in eastern Ukraine that was supplied, backed and directed by Moscow. Security guarantees for Ukraine were again on the agenda but never resolved.
For the Ukrainians, the issue is not only what is being promised, but also the timing of the agreement. Zelenskyy and other top Ukrainian officials say they need to have the guarantees signed before they embark on any territorial concessions.
A Western diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, characterized the impasse over signing security guarantees as a “sequencing issue.”
“From the American side, they don’t want to sign this unless everything is agreed on the other aspects, including the territories, which of course is not agreed,” the diplomat said. “But it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue. The territories can only be dealt with at the highest levels, and then you need Putin and Zelenskyy involved. We are turning around that.”
Zelenskyy understands that for Ukrainians, a peace plan is impossible without security guarantees, said Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies.
“Without any meaningful commitment out of the U.S., Zelenskyy won’t be able to sell a deal to Ukrainian society,” he said.
Putin hopes to force Zelenskyy to withdraw Ukrainian troops from the area in Donetsk that Ukraine still controls. Western analysts estimate that more than a million Russian soldiers have been killed, wounded or gone missing in the conflict, and that Moscow lacks the personnel and resources to conquer Donetsk before mid-2027.
“If we do not agree, he will tell Trump, ‘I was ready for peace, for a compromise, and Ukraine refused,’” said Oleksandr Merezhko, chairman of the Ukraine parliament’s foreign affairs committee. “If we agree, it will undermine our stability and unity.”
“So Putin is trying to put us on a stretcher with the help of Trump,” he added.
A breakthrough in the discussions needs to involve talks among the leaders — otherwise, the Western diplomat said, the negotiators risk going “on and on in circles because these decisions can only be taken by the heads.”
It is precisely the lack of high level officials in the Abu Dhabi talks that show they aren’t serious, said European Union foreign policy head Kaja Kallas, noting that the Russian delegation consisted of military and intelligence officials.
The military officials “do not have a mandate to agree on anything, which means that they are definitely not serious about peace,” she said ahead of a meeting of the E.U.’s Foreign Affairs Council on Thursday.
“It is the opposite,” she said. “They are bombing Ukrainians, trying to bomb and freeze them to surrender.”
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• Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed.