Ukraine offers to drop Nato membership demands

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he is ready to give up on demands for Nato membership in exchange for security guarantees from the US and Europe, in a move aimed at advancing peace talks in Berlin on Sunday. 

US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner have pushed Ukraine to accept painful concessions, including ceding frontline territory to Russia, ahead of talks with Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s European allies on the White House plan to end Russia’s invasion.

Ukraine has admitted that it was unlikely to join Nato in the foreseeable future owing to strong opposition from Russia, which has long demanded that the transatlantic alliance pledge to halt its eastward expansion as a condition for ending the war.

But Zelenskyy told reporters on Sunday that Ukraine still requires security guarantees from the US and Europe, similar to Nato’s Article 5 clause of mutual protection for any member under attack.

“We are talking about bilateral security guarantees between Ukraine and the United States — namely, Article 5-like guarantees . . . as well as security guarantees for us from our European partners and from other countries such as Canada, Japan and others,” Zelenskyy told journalists in a WhatsApp chat. “And this is already a compromise on our part.”

Zelenskyy said Ukraine had yet to receive a response from Washington to revised proposals sent earlier this week from Kyiv after consultations with European leaders. 

“The plan will certainly not be one that everyone likes. There are many compromises in one or another version of the plan,” he said.

Russia has said it would probably reject all the proposals from Ukraine and Europe, throwing doubt on whether Trump’s push to end the nearly four-year war could succeed.

Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said any Ukrainian and European suggestions for the plan were “unlikely to be constructive” and Russia would have “sharp objections” if the US adopted them. “It’s not like there’s going to be anything good there,” Ushakov said in comments broadcast on state television on Sunday.

Both sides appeared to reject Trump’s proposal that all troops be withdrawn from the Donbas region to create a “free economic zone” in parts of eastern Ukraine now held by Kyiv. The proposal would require Ukraine to withdraw from the “fortress belt” of cities that Moscow’s forces have failed to capture in more than 11 years of war.

Zelenskyy said on Sunday he did “not consider this fair”.

“If Ukrainian troops withdraw five to 10 kilometres, for example, then why should Russian troops not also withdraw deeper into the occupied territories by the same distance?” he asked. “This is a question to which there is still no answer, but it is extremely sensitive and very heated.”

Zelenskyy said the “only fair and possible option” for a true peace is that “the sides stop where they are, and then try to resolve all broader issues through diplomacy”.

“We stand where we stand,” he added. “That is precisely a ceasefire.”

Ushakov also seemed to oppose the demilitarised zone plan, saying this week that Russia would only accept full control over the Donbas. Russia, he added, had not discussed a “Korean scenario”, which could involve freezing the current frontline, with the US.

Ushakov also rejected Zelenskyy’s earlier suggestions that Ukraine could regain control of Crimea, which Putin annexed in 2014, or join Nato. Both proposals “one million per cent won’t happen”, Ushakov said.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz hosted talks with Zelenskyy, Witkoff and Kushner at the Federal Chancellery on Sunday. Europe is pushing to regain influence over the talks, from which the bloc has largely been sidelined despite their far-reaching consequences for the continent.

When the negotiations ended after five hours, Witkoff wrote on X that the delegations had “held in-depth discussions regarding the 20-point plan for peace, economic agendas, and more”.

“A lot of progress was made,” he said, adding that the delegations would meet again on Monday morning.

In a speech in Bavaria on Saturday, Merz had compared Putin’s war in Ukraine to Adolf Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking border regions in 1938, to which western allies had failed to react.

“This war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine is a war against Europe. And if Ukraine falls, it won’t stop, just as the Sudetenland was not enough in 1938. Putin won’t stop,” Merz said.

Additional reporting by Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in Berlin