BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Keith Kellogg, U.S. President Donald Trump’s Ukraine envoy, said on Monday that no one would impose a peace deal on Kyiv and that questions about whether Washington would provide guarantees for any future European peacekeepers would be addressed later.
Senior U.S. officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio – but not Kellogg – are due to meet on Tuesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for talks focused on ending the war in Ukraine and on Russia-U.S. ties.
Kellogg, who said he would visit Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv this week, told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels that nobody would impose a deal “on an elected leader of a sovereign nation”.
He also reiterated that he was speaking with European allies, who have been pushing to be included in negotiations, but that in his view it was not feasible to have everyone sitting at the table.
European officials have been shocked by the Trump administration’s moves in recent days to court Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago, triggering a barrage of Western sanctions and ostracism.
Washington has sent a questionnaire to European capitals to ask what they could contribute to security guarantees for Kyiv, adding urgency to discussions among European allies on how to respond to changing U.S. policy.
The leaders of France, Britain, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands as well as top officials from NATO and the European Union were holding an emergency meeting in Paris on Monday.
Britain, Sweden and Germany said they were open to sending peacekeepers to Ukraine, given a clear and acceptable mandate. Many officials have stressed they would only consider sending troops to Ukraine if the U.S. provided a security guarantee.
Asked whether the U.S. would do this, Kellogg said: “I’ve been with President Trump, and the policy has always been: You take no options off the table.”
“Before any type of discussion and security guarantees is finalised, of course those discussions are going to take place,” he said. “Answers to those questions will be determined as you come up with the final process.”
(Reporting by Lili Bayer and Makini Brice, writing by GV De Clercq, editing by Benoit Van Overstraeten and Kevin Liffey)
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