European officials fear they will have to bear the cost of postwar security and reconstruction as they reel from being cut out of US-Russia peace negotiations on Ukraine.
Donald Trump said on Wednesday, after talking to Russian President Vladimir Putin, that their delegations would “start negotiations immediately” to end the war, blindsiding European capitals.
More than half a dozen senior European officials told the Financial Times they expected the US president to tell them they must pay for Ukrainian reconstruction and deploy troops there to maintain a peace deal in which they would not be involved.
“The Americans don’t see a role for Europe in the big geopolitical questions related to the war. It’s going to be a real test of unity,” said one senior EU official.
“Trump sees us as money. And frankly we haven’t been clear on what our seat at the table would look like in exchange for that money.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who received a call from Trump after the Putin conversation, said on Thursday: “I articulate this very clearly to our partners . . . Any bilateral negotiations about Ukraine without us, we will not accept.”
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, told state television on Thursday the US and Russia would “expand working contacts in the coming days and weeks”. The Kremlin considers Washington its main counterpart in the talks, even when Ukraine joins discussions “one way or the other”, Peskov said.
Putin and Trump have discussed meeting in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. The Russian president would also welcome his US counterpart in Moscow for its Victory Day parade on May 9, the Kremlin has said.
António Costa, the EU Council president who represents the bloc’s 27 national leaders, said any peace talks that ignored Brussels and Kyiv would fail. “There will be no credible and successful negotiations, no lasting peace, without Ukraine and without the EU,” he said.
Germany’s defence minister Boris Pistorius on Thursday expressed regret that Washington had made concessions to Moscow before the start of peace talks, including ruling out Nato membership for Ukraine.
“It is unfortunate . . . that Trump has already made public concessions to Putin before negotiations have even begun,” Pistorius said before a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels. “It would have been better to talk about Ukraine’s possible Nato membership first at the negotiating table.”
He also warned that the threat from Russia may not abate after a peace accord.
“Putin is constantly provoking the west and attacking us again. It would be naive to believe the threat would actually diminish after such a peace agreement.”
European leaders and ministers are hoping to extract more clarity on Trump’s plans from discussions with US vice-president JD Vance and the president’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, at the Munich Security Conference, which begins on Friday.
Nato officials said they did not expect Kellogg to outline the US objectives for the negotiations in Munich but would sound out European capitals in the weeks to come.
Prior to Wednesday’s announcement, Trump’s team, including his special envoy Steve Witkoff, had been quietly holding talks with Moscow, and on Tuesday announced the release of an American teacher imprisoned in Russia in exchange for a Russian prisoner.
Trump described Marc Fogel’s release as a potentially “very important element” in ending the war and named Witkoff as part of the negotiating team with the Russian side. The other three negotiators are secretary of state Marco Rubio, CIA director John Ratcliffe and national security adviser Mike Waltz.
In Kyiv, officials have expressed frustration with European leaders. “It’s clear that everyone is waiting for Trump to tell them what to do,” said a senior Ukrainian official.
Zelenskyy is set to attend the Munich forum. He has repeatedly said that a European-only security guarantee will not be credible.
However, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday ruled out US troops being deployed or any role for Nato in co-ordinating boots on the ground after the end of the conflict. “Any security guarantee should be backed by capable European and non-European troops,” he said.
A scenario in which “the US says, ‘We did the ceasefire, and all of the rest is for you to clean up’ . . . wouldn’t work [for us]”, said one EU diplomat involved in discussions between European capitals.
“There is a limit to what the EU alone can realistically provide in terms of money, arms, and at some point maybe boots on the ground,” they added.
EU diplomats are increasingly nervous about the difficulties that senior officials, including European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, have had in securing meetings with members of the Trump administration.
National governments are often resorting to contacts they have been able to establish bilaterally to glean information on the peace plan before sharing it with their EU partners.
“The EU institutions are still struggling to find the right person with direct access to Trump to talk to,” said a western official with knowledge of the attempts.
A meeting between Vance and von der Leyen on Tuesday contained few details regarding the outlines for negotiating Ukraine’s future, people briefed on the discussion said, adding that Kellogg was seen as the more important interlocutor regarding Trump’s stance.
Past US administrations valued a dialogue with Brussels in a bid to shore up the transatlantic alliance and maintain unity, said Jeremy Shapiro, research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Trump and his team, however, had shown little interest in doing so, he said. “His role for the Europeans is: pay for everything. Get no credit. Don’t necessarily even attend the meetings. And shut up.”
Additional reporting by Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Max Seddon in Berlin