By John Irish and Tom Balmforth
PARIS/LONDON (Reuters) – President Volodymyr Zelenskiy used his first meeting with Donald Trump since the U.S. election to explain Ukraine’s need for security guarantees in any negotiated end to the war with Russia, two sources familiar with the Dec. 7 discussions said.
French President Emmanuel Macron hosted the meeting in Paris, during which Ukraine’s leader sought to build a rapport with Trump, whose promise to end the conflict swiftly has raised concerns in Kyiv that it could be largely on Moscow’s terms.
Reuters spoke to a total of five people who were briefed on the meeting.
The three leaders, who talked for 35 minutes without advisers, did not discuss specific details of any vision for peace, but Trump repeated that he wanted an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the war quickly, four of the people said.
The meeting offered some early clues as to how negotiations on ending the conflict might play out, although the process that would involve Russian President Vladimir Putin is fraught with difficulty and the role of the United States as yet unclear.
Trump behaved in a friendly, respectful and open manner and appeared to be in listening mode, one of the sources said. Trump’s team did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this article.
Neither Trump nor officials close to him dealing with Ukraine have been forthcoming on how exactly they envisage a solution to the war and to Ukraine’s insistence that it has to receive security guarantees as part of any settlement.
That has created a mounting sense of uncertainty in Kyiv that has been compounded by months of steady Russian territorial gains in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and nightly drone attacks on cities far behind the front lines.
“Some key points were mentioned during the meeting – for example, it was said that peace needs guarantees because a ceasefire alone isn’t enough, Putin could break it again, as he has done before, without proper guarantees,” a source in the Ukrainian president’s office said.
Asked how that was received, the source said, referring to Trump, “He’s thinking about all the details.”
Kyiv has been pushing the outgoing U.S. administration for an invitation to join the NATO military alliance, having long made the case that it will need security guarantees to prevent any new Russian invasion later on.
The latter message has been consistent even as Zelenskiy has recently acknowledged that a diplomatic end to the war would save lives, softening his earlier insistence that all Moscow’s forces must be expelled from Ukraine in order for peace to be achieved.
BUILDING A RAPPORT
Several officials close to Trump have said he has geared his meetings to building a personal rapport, which is key to how he conducts diplomacy, and that he will ultimately make the call on how to proceed.
The generally cordial nature of Trump’s direct dealings with Zelenskiy differs from some of his public pronouncements about the Ukrainian leader on the campaign trail, including calling him “the greatest salesman on Earth” for having solicited and received billions of dollars of U.S. military aid.
Macron and Zelenskiy were on the same page at the Paris meeting, but were careful not to seem like they were cornering Trump, one official said.
The French leader – who over the years has developed a knack for using personal relationships to advance his diplomatic efforts – and Zelenskiy worked in synergy to outline how they viewed the situation, while underscoring that without U.S. support it would be very difficult for Kyiv, the official added.
Zelenskiy believes Putin fears only Trump and possibly China in the international arena and that any lasting peace would require Washington to be “truly strong,” the Ukrainian official said.
Trump has regularly accused European powers of not pulling their weight in NATO security issues on the continent.
Macron used the meeting to make the case that Europeans have done a lot already to support Ukraine and that they were also willing to share the security burden more evenly with the United States, two of the sources said.
Another official said Macron and Zelenskiy explained to Trump that Putin in 2024 was not the same as he was in 2017, when the U.S. president-elect previously dealt with the Kremlin leader while in the White House.
The same official added that the rapid fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the setback that has dealt to his close ally Russia was also used as an argument for a tougher stance on Moscow in future peace efforts.
“It was about explanation without pushing Trump into a corner.”
(Reporting by John Irish in Paris and Tom Balmforth in London; Additional reporting by Elizabeth Pineau in Paris and Gram Slattery in Washington; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Matthew Lewis)
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