By now you have likely heard about the high drama at the Munich Security Conference, where U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance scolded a crowd of European leaders about their continent’s retreat from “some of its own fundamental values.” Though Vance told Europe early on in his speech that “we are on the same team,” FP’s Rishi Iyengar and Keith Johnson report that the more lasting impression for the audience came with his final words: “Good luck to all of you, God bless you.”
So, with the postwar consensus lost somewhere over the Atlantic, what happens to Ukraine? An answer seems imminent. On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Saudi Arabia to discuss the future of Ukraine without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the table. Waning U.S. support for Ukraine has been received in Moscow “like Christmas, Easter, and New Year’s all rolled into one,” journalist Alexey Kovalev writes.
Meanwhile, is the rare-earth deal that U.S. President Donald Trump seemed excited about—and which Zelensky hoped to strike in Munich—dead? That agreement, in which Ukraine would exchange its mineral resources for continued U.S. aid, was always going to be tricky for both sides to pull off, FP’s Christina Lu reports.
If a peace is to be achieved, Russia must be convinced that “its gains will outweigh its losses,” former Ukrainian diplomat Vasyl Filipchuk argues. That means Ukraine not joining NATO, which U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week was off the table. But Filipchuk argues that the United States must be prepared to defend that neutrality. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Russia and Ukraine, laid out a plan along those lines last year.
Though Kellogg is a key member of Trump’s national security brain trust, his mention of “security guarantees”—presumably issued by the United States—is starting to look marginal to the America First project as asserted by Vance, Hegseth, and others. Perhaps that’s why Kellogg is headed not to Saudi Arabia but to Ukraine this week.
Whether in Riyadh, Kyiv, or elsewhere, negotiators might need to give up on hoping for grand bargains. Two experts from the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, Michael Kimmage and Maxim Trudolubov, argue that “[n]egotiations should have the more modest goal of depriving the war of its intensity.” To that end, and as FP’s Keith Johnson has written, there is still plenty of scope for Washington to put a bigger squeeze on the Kremlin via sanctions. That’s assuming, of course, that Trump still wants to.—Amelia Lester, deputy editor
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