LONDON
The EU foreign policy chief on Friday warned against forcing Ukraine to give up territory, saying this is actually a “trap that Russia wants us to walk into.”
“I mean, the discussion all about what Ukraine should give up, what is the concessions that Ukraine is willing to do,” Kaja Kallas told the BBC.
Kallas said Russia is the one that started the war and has not made any concessions yet.
“If we walk into this trap that we are putting the pressure on Ukraine, what they are willing to give up, then we will see this again, because aggression will pay off,” she added.
Turning to the last week’s Alaska summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kallas said Putin got “everything he wanted.”
“Putin is just laughing, not stopping the killing but increasing the killing,” she added.
Touching on the need for “credible and robust” security guarantees for Ukraine, Kallas, however, admitted that there were not many concrete steps for a deterring force at this stage in negotiations.
“The strongest security guarantee is a strong Ukraine army,” she said, stressing the importance of establishing guarantees that were “not just on paper.”
Kallas said it was up to the “Coalition of the Willing” member states to determine exactly what they could provide.
Trump on Thursday said prospects for peace between Ukraine and Russia will become clear “within two weeks.”
Discussions around peace negotiations and security guarantees around the Russia-Ukraine war intensified following last week’s Alaska summit between Trump and Putin, followed by a White House meeting between the US and Ukrainian presidents, along with the NATO chief and European leaders, on Monday.
Major sticking points for a potential peace deal are said to be land swaps and security guarantees.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions in September 2022.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday that Moscow must be included in talks on Ukraine’s security guarantees.
Meanwhile, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said Moscow will not accept “security guarantees” in the form of NATO troops in Ukraine as “peacekeepers.”
“It has been explicitly stated: NO NATO troops as peacekeepers. Russia will not accept these ‘security guarantees,'” he said in a statement through the US social media company X.