NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Thursday ruled out the United States withdrawing from Ukraine-Russia peace discussions, after closed-door meetings with President Donald Trump and his cabinet members at the White House.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House, the NATO chief praised Trump’s leadership in trying to bring Russia’s war in Ukraine to an end, saying that “this could be brought to a positive end.”
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“Huge steps” have been taken in the last several days on a peace deal and now the “ball is in Russia’s court” he said.
“There is something on the table now, I think, where the Ukrainians are really playing ball, and I think the ball is clearly in the Russian court now,” Rutte emphasized, without offering further details.
The NATO chief also said that he had a “very good meeting” with Trump, his Secretaries of State and Defense, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, as well as National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, during which they discussed both the Ukraine issue and the upcoming NATO summit in the Hague.
“They all [are] very excited about the fact that you see a NATO which is spending so much more on defense, particularly the European and Canadian side,” he said, adding that other members should equalize what the US is spending.
“This is really a NATO which is stronger, which is fairer, which is also more lethal… We all agree in NATO that Russia is a long-term threat to NATO territory, to the whole of the Euro-Atlantic territory.”
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Rutte declined to get into details of what concessions Russia or Ukraine might be willing to offer, saying doing so would not be helpful to talks. When asked whether Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin wanted peace, Rutte said, “I don’t know.”
“I worked with him for four years between 2010 and 2014 when I was Prime Minister of the Netherlands and I’ve stopped trying to read his mind,” he later said.
Rutte’s last-minute trip to Washington came just days after US President Trump announced a deal with Russia was “within reach” while on Wednesday claiming that dealing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had been “harder” than with Putin.