US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Wednesday that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders when it controlled Crimea was “unrealistic” in any prospective peace deal with Vladimir Putin.
He added that Donald’s Trump administration does not see NATO membership for Kyiv as part of a solution to the war triggered by Russia’s invasion.
Speaking at a meeting of Ukraine’s military allies at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Mr Hegseth delivered the clearest and bluntest public statement so far on the new US administration’s approach to the nearly three-year-old war.
He also told Washington’s NATO allies that they would have to step up and assume greater responsibility for Europe’s security.
“We want, like you, a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine. But we must start by recognising that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” Mr Hegseth told the meeting of more than 40 countries allied to Ukraine.
“Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering,” he added.
Russia annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014 and then backed pro-Russian separatists in an armed insurgency against Kyiv’s forces in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine.
Moscow currently controls about 20% of Ukraine’s territory, mainly in the east and south.
Mr Hegseth said any durable peace must include “robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again”.
But, he said, “the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement”.
Instead, security guarantees should be backed by “capable European and non-European troops”, the Pentagon chief said.
“If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission and they should not be covered under Article 5,” he said, referring to the alliance’s mutual defence clause.
But Foreign Secretary David Lammy said last year that there was no “evidence” yet that Putin was serious about seeking to end his war in Ukraine despite it leading to hundreds of thousands of Russian military casualties and hitting the Russian economy.
The Russian president appears to be digging in with his demands for any peace deal.
The terms he has set out include that Ukraine must drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw its troops from the entirety of the territory of four eastern Ukrainian provinces claimed and mostly controlled by Russia.
Moscow has rejected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s offer to swap a swathe of the Kursk region of Russia, seized by Kyiv forces last summer, with Ukrainian territory under Russian control.
Trump has vowed to bring a swift end to the conflict and Putin has been seeking to seize as much territory in Ukraine in recent months, even at the cost of heavy losses.
