US says Ukraine regaining pre-2014 borders 'unrealistic'

European countries including Germany, France, and Britain, and the European Commission, issued a joint statement on Wednesday in support of Ukraine.

The countries also said they were keen to work with the United States on securing Ukraine's future.

"We are looking forward to discussing the way ahead together with our American allies. Our shared objectives should be to put Ukraine in a position of strength," according to the statement, which also included Poland, Italy, and Spain.

The statement comes amid contact between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The pair spoke on the phone on Wednesday, with the ongoing war in Ukraine on the agenda. Trump once again vowed to end the conflict without giving details on how or when.

Trump also said Putin would visit each other countries following an initial meeting in Saudi Arabia at an undetermined time.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in March 2023 issued an arrest warrant for Putin — which was welcomed at the time by former US President Joe Biden — over alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

Moscow has denied the allegations and the warrant is unlikely to come to fruition as the ICC has no powers to arrest suspects without the cooperation of a country's government.

Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of blocking the rotation of IAEA employees at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

It is the second such delay in the past week.

"Russia has once again deliberately disrupted the rotation of IAEA experts at the Zaporizhzhia plant," Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Georgiy Tykhy said.

But Russia's Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, said the Ukrainian army blocked the IAEA team from traveling to an agreed meeting point and that "IAEA experts came under attack by drone and mortar strikes."

The UN's nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, has had staff at the Zaporizhzhia facility since September 2022 to monitor safety.

Russian troops seized the power plant in southern Ukraine in the early days of its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy met the new US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kyiv on Wednesday. 

The hedge fund manager was pursuing access to Ukrainian resources like rare earths, as Trump tries to leverage US support for Ukraine into future financial gains for the wealthy. 

Bessent and Zelenskyy presented a draft agreement regarding the mining of the valuable materials by US investors. 

"We will do everything to ensure that our teams can get down to work, agree on something very quickly and sign the document," Zelensky said after the meeting. 

"We are talking about the joint development of deposits," Zelensky emphasized. 
 

UK Defense Secretary John Healey responded cooly to Donald Trump's announcement in an television interview on Wednesday. 

"It's the Ukrainians that are doing the fighting. It's for them to decide when to start talking and on what terms," Healey said on Sky News. 

Trump's new administration and the center-left government of Keir Starmer in Britain, typically seen as the closest US ally in Europe with the closest cultural and historical ties, have clashed repeatedly in the first months of Trump's tenure.

This is in large part a result of Elon Musk's public support for white supremacist Tommy Robinson and his repeated spreading of misinformation about a years-old grooming scandal in northern England. 

However, new US Ambassador Peter Mandelson and Foreign Secretary David Lammy had on Tuesday unleashed a flurry of flattery, which Musk promptly reposted on his X playground.

Any peace deal for Ukraine can only be achieved with the government in Kyiv, the foreign ministers of France, Spain and Germany said at a meeting in Paris on Wednesday. 

This followed Donald Trump's claim that Vladimir Putin was ready to start talks "immediately" after a bilateral phone call. 

"There will be no just and lasting peace in Ukraine without the participation of the Europeans," French Foreign Minister Jean Noel Barrot also said, after his Spanish and German counterparts had said the same about the government in Kyiv. 

Germany's Annalena Baerbock said it was an overdue step that Putin was apparently ready to negotiate, almost exactly three years after Russia's full-scale invasion. She told reporters in Paris Europe would stand united in any talks. 

Polish Foreign Minster Radoslaw Sikorski, meanwhile, said "continued cooperation with the US" was a topic of discussion at the meeting. 

"There is no better guarantee for the security of our continent than close transatlantic cooperation," Sikorski said. 

US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he spoke with Russian President Vladmir Putin in a lengthy phone call, with the Russian president agreeing to begin negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.

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The Kremlin says Moscow will never consider trading the territory it occupies in Ukraine for Ukrainian-held parts of Russia's Kursk region.

"This is impossible. Russia has never and will never discuss the topic of exchanging its territory," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

The land swap was floated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who told The Guardian newspaper he wanted to offer Russia a straight territory exchange to help end the war.

"We will swap one territory for another," Zelenskyy said, adding that he did not know which areas of Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine he would ask for in exchange.

"All our territories are important, there is no priority," he said.

Ukrainian forces seized parts of Kursk in Russia's west during a lightning incursion over the border in August last year. Russia is still trying to recapture those areas and push back Ukrainian units.

According to open source maps of the battlefield, Russia controls just under 20% of Ukraine. That amounts to more than 112,000 square kilometers, while Ukraine controls around 450 square kilometers in Kursk.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius says Germany needs to up its defense spending to more than 3% of GDP, but he rejected US President Donald Trump's demand for a 5% NATO target.

"There is a demand from the American president that it should be 5%. The Americans themselves are still a long way from achieving this," Pistorius said in Brussels following his first meeting with new US defense chief Pete Hegseth.

During a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on Wednesday, Hegseth called on NATO to be "a stronger, more lethal force," and urged European countries to play a bigger role in supporting Ukraine.

Pistorius acknowledged that the current defense spending levels of 2% or 2.5% of GDP were not enough. He added that increasing that to 5% was unrealistic, but stressed it was nevertheless crucial there be "a clear, continuous increase."

The German government says this week's Munich Security Conference is unlikely to herald any major developments to bring about peace in Ukraine.

"I haven't had any concrete indications that a decisive step could be on the horizon" towards peace talks, government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told a press conference.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected to meet US Vice President JD Vance on the sidelines of the Munich meeting on Friday. It follows comments from Washington, Moscow and Kyiv in recent weeks that have suggested the possibility of negotiations to end the conflict, which is about to enter its fourth year.

Hebestreit reiterated Germany's position that "nothing must be decided over Ukrainians' heads, they must decide how they enter talks with the Russian side."

He also said that "the easiest way" to end the war "would be for the Russian president to withdraw his troops and break off this campaign which has already claimed hundreds of thousands of dead and injured and led to unbelievable destruction and suffering."

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius echoed Hebestreit's comments, saying there was no "glimmer of hope on the horizon," when it came to the prospect of a peace plan emerging from the Munich conference.

The end goal of any negotiations, Pistorius said, has to be "a secure and sovereign Ukraine."

New US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says Ukraine becoming a NATO member or regaining all its pre-2014 land is not realistic.

Speaking at a NATO meeting in Brussels, Hegseth also stressed that Washington would not deploy troops to Ukraine under any peace deal.

"To be clear as part of any security guarantee, there will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine," he said.

The defense chief went on to say that Europe must provide the "overwhelming share" of future aid to Ukraine, and that the US would not tolerate an "imbalanced relationship" in NATO.

"Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO," Hegseth said.

He called on members of the military alliance to donate more arms, step up military production and spend more on defense. He gave 5% of GDP as a minimum goal for NATO countries' military spending.

The US is currently the biggest provider of aid to Ukraine, followed by Germany.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said that he agrees with US President Donald Trump that there needs to be more burden sharing between the US and its European allies on aid for Ukraine.

The members of the trans-Atlantic alliance agreed to provide Ukraine with €40 billion ($41.5 billion) in security assistance last year, but ended up sending over 50 billion, with over half coming from European allies and Canada, NATO said.

The aid "takes a big step in the direction of what President Trump has called for," said Rutte.

According to Rutte, NATO allies in Europe and Canada invested $485 billion in defense, which makes a nearly 20% increase compared to 2023.

Two thirds of the alliance members are reaching its spending target of at least 2% of gross domestic product (GDP), Rutte said.

Rutte is also aiming for securing a new defense spending pledge at NATO's next summit in The Hague in June, which would be "north of three percent."
 

Ukraine says it has detained a high-ranking official inside its security services who was allegedly working for Russia.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on Wednesday said the agency's head, Vasyl Maliuk, had personally carried out the arrest and that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been informed of a "complex" evidence-gathering operation against the suspect.

Kyiv claims to have detained or convicted hundreds of people, including senior officials, for allegedly colluding with Moscow since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

"The chief-of-staff of the SBU Anti-Terrorist Centre was working for the enemy," the SBU said in a statement.

It said more than 14 instances of illegal activity by the unnamed suspect had been documented. In a video published with the statement, Maliuk said a high treason investigation had been opened.

The SBU described the operation as both "extremely complex" and "multi-stage." It said this had revealed how the suspect collected and transmitted information to Russia.

The agency added that it had used the suspect to feed "disinformation" to Moscow.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has arrived at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he is set to meet with officials from various countries that form part of the Ukraine Defense Contact group and NATO defense ministers.

"Arrived at NATO HQ. Our commitment is clear: NATO must be a stronger, more lethal force —  not a diplomatic club," Hegseth wrote on X. "Time for allies to meet the moment."

The Ukraine Defense Contact format, a grouping of some 50 nations was formed after Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The format is sometimes referred to as the Ramstein Group after the US air base in Germany where it first met.

The grouping has been previously led by the US. But this time, the grouping is set to be chaired by the British Defense Secretary John Healey. 

Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday that he would push European allies to spend more on defense, signaling that he is going to expect European counterparts to assume a greater role for Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials say a pre-dawn Russian missile attack on the country's capital killed at least one civilian and injured four others.

The Wednesday salvo also sparked several fires across Kyiv, they said.

Ukraine's military said it shot down six out of seven ballistic missiles and 71 drones launched by Russia overnight.

However, a series of powerful explosions rocked the capital at about 4.30 a.m. (0230 UTC/GMT) as local officials said air defenses were working to fend off the attacks.

"This Russian terror against Ukraine will not stop on its own," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said after the attack, calling for partners to show unity in pushing for a just end to the war.

"Putin is not preparing for peace — he continues to kill Ukrainians and destroy cities."

The military said 40 out of 123 total drones launched were likely impacted by electronic countermeasures and did not cause damage. 

 

United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is set to attend meetings at NATO headquarters in Brussels as Washington's allies seek clarity on continued support for Ukraine.

During his two-day visit to Brussels, Hegseth is due to attend a gathering of the so-called Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which coordinates weapons deliveries to Ukraine.

The continuation of the United States' vast support for Kyiv has been called into question, with US President Donald Trump saying he wants to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible.

The group's meetings often lead to new military aid pledges. It was initiated by the US almost three years ago but will be convened for the first time by UK Defense Secretary John Healey.

On Thursday, Hegseth plans to meet counterparts for a session on defense spending and the expansion of defense manufacturing capacity.