The Trump administration has just sliced away key negotiating options for Ukraine, giving the invading Russians a catastrophic advantage even before any so-called peace talks can begin.
Now, in any future negotiations, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky’s position will be weaker.
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s military capacity was immediately undermined in the medium term by Pete Hegseth telling his fellow Nato defence ministers that “Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine”.
Shortly after Hesgeth’s press conference, President Donald Trump said he had spoken to the Russian president Vladimir Putin about starting negotiations to end the war and would “inform” Zelensky about the conversation.
The US has provided about $120 billion to Ukraine, about half of that military aid, and the rest of Nato has matched that military spend too. But in ruling out any future funding increase from the US for Ukraine, Hegseth is sending a signal to the Kremlin that the US is backing away.
Zelensky has argued that any future settlement with Russia, which currently controls about 22 per cent of his country, would depend on 150,000-200,000 foreign troops as a guarantee against another invasion.
He recently insisted that this could only be achieved with American involvement.
Hegseth has ruled that out.
There would be no American boots on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force. “To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine,” he said.
There was no need to spell this out before talks with Russia. Part of Zelensky’s negotiating tactic would have been the mere suggestion that US troops could be on Ukrainian soil. That would have given the Russians pause for thought.
But if foreign troops from Europe, Canada, and other Ukraine-supporting nations were deployed they would have brought the full weight of the Nato alliance with them.
Not any more.
“If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-Nato mission and they should not be covered under Article 5,” Hegseth said.
Article 5 is the all for one and one for all clause in the Nato foundation document that says that an attack on a Nato member is an attack on all of them. It has only been invoked once, when the US was attacked by al-Qaeda on 9/11.
