Making concessions before peace talks on Ukraine 'huge mistake,' says EU Council president

ANKARA

Making concessions before any peace talks on Ukraine is “a huge mistake,” the EU Council president said Saturday.

Antonio Costa told the Munich Security Conference that Europe is “not giving up” and will continue supporting Ukraine, now just shy of the war’s third anniversary.

“Only Ukraine can define when they are conditions for a negotiation. Assume concessions before any negotiation is a huge mistake,” the EU official said.

His remarks came amid US President Donald Trump's statement that peace talks between Ukraine and Russia could start "immediately," a move that raised concerns among some European allies about potential concessions.

He stressed that a “comprehensive peace cannot be a simple ceasefire,” and cannot “reward the aggressor.”

“It must guarantee that Russia will no longer be a threat to Ukraine, to Europe, to its neighbors, that Russia ceases to be a threat to international security,” Costa added.

He vowed that the EU will “fully assume its responsibilities” in building peace in Ukraine, adding that there will be “no credible and successful negotiation, no lasting peace without Ukraine, and without the European Union.”

Czech President Petr Pavel also stressed that Europe must be at the negotiating table. He added that countries supporting Ukraine should focus on financial resource issues, military capability issues, and postwar reconstruction.

“But also we can start (the) preparation of Ukraine for EU accession, in a very successive way, step by step,” he said.

NATO membership ‘best thing to give Ukraine’

Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she never believed that “the war in Ukraine is primarily about Ukraine,” but about Russia and its “imperial dreams.”

“The best thing to give Ukraine, let's be honest, I know some allies are against this, it is NATO membership. If they were a member of NATO, we would never have the war in Ukraine,” she said.

She added that European countries must improve their economies and ramp up military production in order to better provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs on the battlefield.

“I'm not saying we are at wartime, but we cannot say we are at peacetime anymore. So we need to change our mindset. We need to have a sense of urgency,” the prime minister warned.

Germany’s Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz said that it is “absolutely unacceptable that Russia and the United States of America are negotiating without Ukraine without Ukraine and without the Europeans on the table.”

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson criticized some allies’ recent stance on Ukraine’s NATO membership bid.

“If NATO one year concludes that Ukraine has an irreversible path to NATO, and the year after that, decides we were not really telling the truth … it really questions the character of decision-making in NATO,” he said.

Earlier this week, at a NATO meeting in Brussels, new US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US “does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” and called it an “illusionary goal.”

UK Defense Secretary John Healey said, for his part, that Ukraine's place is in NATO but it “will take some time.”

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told reporters in Munich on Friday that "NATO membership (was) never promised to Ukraine as part of peace deal."