US switches stance on Ukraine war, seeking $500bn in payback
A war of words has broken out between Trump and Zelenskyy, while Europe feels the US is no longer a dependable ally.
Ukraine’s diplomatic situation was upended during the past week, as its main ally, the United States, reversed several positions.
US President Donald Trump announced on February 12 that he was beginning direct talks with Russia to end the war, overturning his predecessor’s promise that there would be “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”.
list of 3 itemslist 1 of 3 Fact-check: Did Ukraine start its war with Russia, as Trump claims?
list 2 of 3 Trump calls Zelenskyy ‘dictator’: What’s behind escalating war of words?
list 3 of 3 Putin rates US talks ‘highly’, says Russia ready to negotiate over Ukraine
end of listOn the same day, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed Russian diplomatic language invoking “realism”, when he told Ukraine Defence Contact Group partners in Brussels that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” and that “the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.”
Eventual NATO membership has been a US promise to Ukraine since 2008, and the US has, throughout the war, supported a restoration of the border Russia recognised with Ukraine in 1991.
German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius called the one-sided concessions “clumsy” and “a mistake”.
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Worse was to comeOn Tuesday, as Trump’s negotiating team arrived in Riyadh to begin talks, Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war and implied it had stolen aid, provoking an angry response from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Today, I heard, ‘Oh, we weren’t invited’ [to talks in Riyadh]. Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it,” Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago.
The full-scale war started in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Trump said Zelenskyy’s approval rating was at 4 percent, and that he’d “never seen an accounting” of what he alleged was $350bn given by the US to Ukraine.
The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, which conducts nationwide surveys in Ukraine, polled Zelenskyy’s approval rating at 57 percent this month.
According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, the United States has donated $114bn and the European Union $132bn over three years.
Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv the next day that Trump had been caught in “a web of disinformation”.
Trump responded with more criticism of Zelenskyy, posting on X that a “modestly successful comedian”, had become “a dictator without elections” who had “done a terrible job”.
Europe, too, has been shocked by the US government’s stance.
Director of a local lyceum, Yurii Bilyk, walks next to its building destroyed by a recent Russian air strike in the village of Novopavlivka, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine on February 18, 2025 [Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters]US Vice President JD Vance scolded Europeans for restricting free speech and curtailing democracy in an address to the Munich Security Conference on Friday, suggesting that extreme-right parties shunned by mainstream politicians were the true expression of the people’s will.
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“We see in America a president who admires autocratic systems,” said Germany’s next chancellor-presumptive, Friedrich Merz, and a “vice president who tells us how to run our democracy”.
“We are no longer sure if the Americans still stand by our side as they did after 1945,” he said.
‘Quick fix is a dirty deal’Ukrainian politicians have also expressed reservations about NATO’s credibility as an alliance.
Other European leaders slammed the Riyadh process as a sham.
“Any quick fix is a dirty deal … any deal behind our backs won’t work,” said European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas on X.
“Peace will only come through strength,” said German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. “This requires tough and long-term security guarantees for Ukraine, a strong NATO and progress in Ukraine’s accession negotiations with the European Union,” she said.
Zelenskyy twice in the past week rejected US proposals to formalise US-Ukrainian economic relations because they lacked security guarantees. Hegseth presented him with a payback plan based on the exploitation of Ukraine’s mineral wealth on February 12, and Vance brought it back to Munich on Friday.
That plan appeared to be based on what Trump said in an interview on February 10. “I told [Ukraine] that I want the equivalent of, like, $500bn worth of rare earth, and they’ve essentially agreed to do that,” Trump told Fox reporter Bret Baier.
Zelenskyy estimated that Ukraine had received $98.5bn in US military and financial support.
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“But one cannot count up to $500bn and say, ‘Give us back $500bn in minerals.’ That’s not a serious discussion,” Zelenskyy said on Wednesday.
No seat for UkraineMoscow has been bullish since the talks in Riyadh were announced.
Deputy chairman of Russia’s National Security Council Dmitry Medvedev on February 12 upheld Moscow’s defiant stance against swapping any of the Russian land Ukraine holds in Kursk with any of the Ukrainian land Russia holds.
“The proposals of Ukrainians about the ‘exchange of territories’ are nonsense, the only way to heal is to ‘feel like Russians again’, Dmitry Medvedev wrote in his Telegram channel,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov went a step further on Sunday, denying that Ukraine had any seat at the negotiating table because it lacked sovereignty.
“That country cannot really answer for its words,” Peskov said in an interview on Russia Today. “Each time it is necessary to make a certain adjustment when negotiating with them, for their deficit of sovereignty and the deficit of trust in them. Which will not go anywhere.”
On Monday, Russia’s permanent UN representative, Vasily Nebenzya, insisted on the terms for peace that Russian President Vladimir Putin outlined last June. Ukraine should surrender the parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson that Moscow doesn’t control, he said, because it had “irrevocably lost those regions, abjure NATO membership and remain neutral.
Moscow currently controls an estimated two-thirds of Donetsk, three-quarters of Zaporizhia and Kherson, and 99 percent of Luhansk.
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Denmark’s Defence Intelligence Service declassified a report on February 11 saying Russia was rebuilding its military in preparation for a war against NATO, with the backing of China, Iran and North Korea.
Estonia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published its annual intelligence report the following day, agreeing that Russia was preparing for a war with NATO, and saying that the length and outcome of the Ukraine war would be determining factors in whether that wider war was pursued.
The Institute of the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, published a report on Russia’s economic, industrial and manpower weaknesses.
“Russia will likely face a number of materiel, manpower, and economic issues in 12 to 18 months if Ukrainian forces continue to inflict damage on Russian forces on the battlefield at the current rate,” it said.
Russia’s economy was suffering from “increased and unsustainable war spending, growing inflation, significant labor shortages, and reductions in Russia’s sovereign wealth fund,” it found, concluding, “The United States can use the enormous challenges Russia will face in 2025 as leverage to secure critical concessions.”
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