Negotiations were conducted by U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff directly with Ukraine’s acting president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, importantly without his European support crew in the room, for five and a half hours on Dec. 14 in Berlin’s Chancellery—and they were carried over to the morning of Dec. 15 for at least two more hours. Afterwards, Europe’s Coalition of the Willing issued a hardline, maximalist list of conditions, with the audacity to suggest they were working in tandem with U.S. President Donald Trump. Those are the basic facts of Dec. 14-15 in Berlin’s hosting of negotiations.
Amongst all the reports, rumors, and opinion-shaping, apparently Zelenskyy was offered favorable security arrangements from the U.S. if he would accept, in short order, the territorial arrangements. In brief, all Ukrainian forces would be removed from the Donetsk Region, whose population had voted to join the Russian Federation (and Russia’s central military commitment is to remove them, should a diplomatic settlement be spurned). Russia would withdraw from some or all of the Kharkiv, Suma, and Dnipropetrovsk Regions—where no such referendums had taken place.
Politico, citing U.S. officials, reported: “The offer is the strongest and most explicit security pledge the Trump administration has put forward for Ukraine, but it comes with an implicit ultimatum: Take it now or the next iteration won’t be as generous.” They cite a senior U.S. official as saying: “The basis of that agreement is basically to have really, really strong guarantees, Article 5-like. Those guarantees will not be on the table forever. Those guarantees are on the table right now if there’s a conclusion that’s reached in a good way.” Those officials tell Politico that Washington estimates that “Russia would accept such an arrangement in a final deal, as well as permit Ukraine to join the European Union.”
