Trump signals Ukraine could reclaim some land, but rifts with allies deepen at UN

Donald Trump said the United States will attempt to return some Ukrainian territory, but his administration openly sided with Moscow at the United Nations on Monday, as countries around the world marked the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The U.S. President suggested sharp limits to future American military involvement in Ukraine, saying any peace there will likely be safeguarded by European troops.

His administration also deepened an adversarial position toward traditional allies, voting with Russia, North Korea, and China against UN resolutions that demanded Russia end the war.

Mr. Trump nonetheless described a “great unity” between Western leaders, saying he expects his most important legacy to “be as a peacemaker and as a unifier. I want to bring peace, not war.”

He joined a virtual meeting with G7 leaders Monday, and spent hours in talks with French President Emmanuel Macron, who was in Washington.

Speaking alongside Mr. Trump at the White House, Mr. Macron struck an optimistic tone, calling the meetings a “turning point” toward agreement on guarantees for Ukrainian security. He indicated that his country, Britain and other European countries may be willing to dispatch peacekeeping soldiers.

“The Europeans will shoulder their part of the burden,” he pledged.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was in Kyiv Monday for a world leaders’ summit on the conflict, also indicated an openness to sending troops, saying that “Canada will be involved” in ensuring peace, although he did not specify exactly how.

Mr. Trump, however, has exhibited a greater interest in pursuing U.S. economic interests than in defending Ukrainian territory. Restoring Ukraine’s borders is “not an easy thing to do,” he said, describing Russian-occupied territory as land that Kyiv has ”lost.”

Analysis: When Ukraine lost a seat at its own table

“We’re negotiating everything and everything is on the table. And we’ll see if we can get some land back,” he said.

It is a sign of progress, Mr. Macron said, that Mr. Trump has agreed to meet in the near future with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, after recent talks in Saudi Arabia brought together high-level officials from the U.S. and Russia, but excluded representatives from Ukraine and Europe.

But the show of amity – Mr. Macron addressed the U.S. President as “Dear Donald,” while Mr. Trump posted to social media a picture of the two men smiling with their thumbs up – did little to mask deep divisions between a White House that has sought to bolster its own fortunes in ending the war, and other Western countries determined to prevent the simple dividing of Ukrainian spoils by Mr. Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

“No one in this room wants to live in a world where it’s the law of the strongest – and international borders can be violated from one day to the next by anyone,” Mr. Macron said.

“This peace must not mean a surrender of Ukraine,” he added. “It must not mean a ceasefire without guarantees. This peace must allow for Ukrainian sovereignty.“

But the U.S. under Mr. Trump has adopted a considerably different tone. At the UN General Assembly on Monday, the U.S. voted with Russia – alongside Belarus and North Korea – against a Ukraine-sponsored resolution, which passed. But a similar resolution failed at the UN Security Council, where Russia vetoed language proposed by Britain, affirming international commitment to the “independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally-recognized borders.”

Russia and China instead backed a U.S. resolution that Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, praised as “a step in the right direction.”

The U.S. resolution called for a swift end to the war, but failed to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Dorothy Shea, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, decried the language put forward by other countries as promoting “a war of words rather than an end to the war.” The past three years have shown, she said, that critical language from the UN has “failed to stop the war.”

For Mr. Trump, a major priority with Ukraine lies in securing what he sees as just compensation for the hundreds of billions of dollars in defence and other supports provided by the U.S. since the Russian attempt to fully annex the country. The Trump administration has sought a deal that would provide the U.S. access to critical and rare-earth minerals from Ukraine.

U.S. taxpayers, Mr. Trump said Monday, “deserve to recoup the colossal amounts of money that we’ve sent.”

He said he hopes to secure something similar from Russia, pointing as well to that country’s large deposits of rare earths. “They have very valuable things that we could use and we have things that they could use,” he said.

Striking such a deal – which would transform Cold War enemies into trading partners – “would be a very good thing for world peace and lasting peace,” Mr. Trump said.

He has called Mr. Zelensky a dictator. Asked Monday if he would apply the same label to Mr. Putin, he demurred. “I don’t use these words lightly,” he said.

Opinion: Europe’s dithering on Ukraine allowed Trump to fill the void

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has come at an enormous cost in lives and physical destruction. Russia under Mr. Putin has also been blamed for sabotage of important subsea telecommunications infrastructure, in addition to past poisoning of dissidents on foreign soil.

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly said Monday that the new approach to Ukraine adopted by the Trump White House “has changed the relationship that a lot of countries have with the U.S.”

Canada and its traditional allies “don’t agree with the position of the U.S. advocated at the UN,” she said.

Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the UN, was more blunt: “We must not accept the lie that of all equal sovereign states, Russia’s course is now somehow fixed, unmovable – and that we must discard the UN charter to accommodate President Putin’s imperial ambitions,” he said.

For Europeans, U.S. rapprochement with Russia has raised fears of a less secure future. Parisians live just 1,500 kilometres from Ukraine, Mr. Macron noted. For Poland, which borders both Ukraine and Russia, proximity has made anxieties even more acute.

”By normalizing relations with Moscow, you would be entrusting your security and economic stability to an autocrat and a war criminal,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski warned Monday.

Appeasement of Russia in Ukraine, he added, would embolden Mr. Putin in other regions where he might covet land and resources, such as in Africa or Latin America.

“If Ukraine is abandoned today, who will be next?” he asked.