Forever War: Europe Won’t Accept Possible Trump Peace Plan Moves, Says Kallas

The United States hailed a new step toward the negotiating table this week, stating Ukraine was willing to “give up land” occupied by Russia for the sake of achieving peace, but a top Eurocrat has called that unacceptable, insisting the Union will stick to pursuing an absolutist total victory position.

The European Union’s high representative for foreign and security policy Kaja Kallas — almost the bloc’s Foreign Minister, except the budding super-state hasn’t quite got one yet — says the Union will never accept Russian occupation of any Ukrainian land, nor any loosening of sanctions on Russia. Kallas, the former Estonian Prime Minister turned Eurocrat told London’s Financial Times that the European Union had plans afoot to prevent the United States either from abandoning Ukraine on one hand, or forcing peace on the other.

The paper paraphrased that she had said: “no EU country would accept recognition of Crimea as Russian, an element of the US proposal that is a major red line for Kyiv”, and directly quoting: “I can’t see that we are accepting these kind of things… we have said this over and over again . . . Crimea is Ukraine.”

American leaders, President Donald Trump included, have repeatedly emphasised there are no negotiations without giving enough to just get the parties around the table to talk. Washington has made clear it believes Ukraine accepting that some of its territory isn’t coming back — Crimea has been under Russian occupation for over a decade now — would be a major step towards making negotiations possible.

A series of major developments in that direction came this week, with first President Trump using unusually complimentary language about Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying the “hard working” leader is now ready to cede Crimea for peace. He said: “Crimea was given away by Barrack Hussein Obama and by Biden, that’s eleven or twelve years ago, that’s a long time ago. I don’t know how you can bring up Crimea, because that’s been a long time, nobody brought it up for 12 years and now they’re bringing it up now so I told them you can maybe go back to Obama and ask them why they gave it up. They gave it up without a shot being fired, by the way.”

Days later, Trump’s Ukraine envoy General Kellogg made similar remarks, saying Ukraine had now agreed it would “de facto” concede land for a ceasefire. As reported, he said of that: “The Ukrainians have already said they are willing to give up the land the Russians — not de jure, forever, but de facto because the Russians actually occupy that land — they’ve agreed to that land, they know you have a ceasefire in place where you sit on the land you currently hold. That’s what they’re willing to go to, that’s what they told me last week… [a] ceasefire in place, you have your lines set, and they’re willing to go there…”.

Whether this will materialise in talks is yet to be seen, yet the sudden agreement by Ukraine to sign President Trump’s rare earths minerals deal this week also heralded a thawing of position and willingness to compromise. The deal is seen by the Trump administration as an important step on the path to peace.