NEW YORK (AP) — Special U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff said Sunday that Russian leader Vladimir Putin agreed at his summit with President Donald Trump to allow the U.S. and European allies to offer Ukraine a security guarantee resembling NATO’s collective defense mandate as part of an eventual deal to end the 3 1/2-year war.
“We were able to win the following concession: That the United States could offer Article 5-like protection, which is one of the real reasons why Ukraine wants to be in NATO,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Witkoff said it was the first time he had heard Putin agree to that.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, speaking at a news conference in Brussels with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said that “we welcome President Trump’s willingness to contribute to Article 5-like security guarantees for Ukraine. and the ‘Coalition of the willing’ — including the European Union — is ready to do its share.”
Witkoff, offering some of the first details of what was discussed at Friday’s summit in Alaska, said the two sides agreeing to “robust security guarantees that I would describe as game-changing.” He added that Russia said that it would make a legislative commitment not to go after any additional territory in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy thanked the United States for recent signals that Washington is willing to support security guarantees for Ukraine, but said the details remained unclear.
“It is important that America agrees to work with Europe to provide security guarantees for Ukraine,” he said, “But there are no details how it will work, and what America’s role will be, Europe’s role will be and what the EU can do, and this is our main task, we need security to work in practice like Article 5 of NATO, and we consider EU accession to be part of the security guarantees.”
Witkoff defended Trump’s decision to abandon his push for Russian to agree to an immediate ceasefire, saying the president had pivoted toward a peace deal because so much progress was made.
“We covered almost all the other issues necessary for a peace deal,” Witkoff said, without elaborating.
“We began to see some moderation in the way they’re thinking about getting to a final peace deal,” he said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted there would be “additional consequences” as Trump warned before meeting with Putin, if they failed to reach a ceasefire. But Rubio noted that there wasn’t going to be any sort of deal on a truce reached when Ukraine wasn’t at the talks.
“Now, ultimately, if there isn’t a peace agreement, if there isn’t an end of this war, the president’s been clear, there are going to be consequences,” Rubio said on ABC’s “This Week.” “But we’re trying to avoid that. And the way we’re trying to avoid those consequences is with an even better consequence, which is peace, the end of hostilities.”
He also said “we’re not at the precipice of a peace agreement” and that getting there would not be easy and would take a lot of work.
“We made progress in the sense that we identified potential areas of agreement, but there remains some big areas of disagreement. So we’re still a long ways off,” Rubio said.
