Activists await the arrival of delegates to the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, 13 February 2025. EPA-EFE / Glasgow Actions Team
Kyiv has denied that Ukraine has any plans to begin peace talks with Russia and the US at the Munich Security Conference, just hours after US President Donald Trump told reporters that US, Russian and Ukrainian officials would meet at the forum on Friday.
“You don't meet with the Russians at an empty table. At the moment, there’s nothing on the table. No talks with the Russians are planned in Munich,” Dmytro Lytvyn, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told journalists on Thursday.
Lytvyn added that Ukraine's position was “unchanged”, namely that the United States should speak to Ukraine first, and that “Europe must be a part of any serious conversation for a real and lasting peace”.
Indeed, Russia is not even formally attending this weekend’s conference, though Zelensky is expected to meet on the sidelines of the event with US Vice President J.D. Vance, who told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that the US had “economic [and] military tools of leverage” it would deploy against Putin should Moscow fail to negotiate in good faith.
Those tools included sanctions and the potential deployment of US troops to Ukraine to ensure the country’s “sovereign independence”, Vance said, though he conceded it was too early to say how much of Ukrainian territory would remain under Russian control and what security guarantees the US and Europe would be able to provide to Kyiv.
Vance’s comments, which indicated the Trump administration’s strongest support yet for Ukraine, struck a markedly different tone from those made by Trump and US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who both offered significant concessions to Moscow this week before formal negotiations to end the war had even begun, including ruling out Kyiv’s bid for NATO membership and any prospect of Ukraine returning to its pre-2014 borders.
Trump also said on Thursday that he would “love” to see Russia rejoin the Group of Seven (G7), calling its expulsion from the group in 2014 over its illegal annexation of Crimea a “mistake”.
Walking back comments he made to reporters on Wednesday about a planned first summit he intended to have with Putin in Saudi Arabia, on Thursday Trump said that while talks between the US and Russia would indeed be held in Saudi Arabia next week, they wouldn’t be between him and Putin “but with top officials, and Ukraine will be a part of it too”.
