BRUSSELS -- A US peace proposal has helped bring Kyiv and Washington closer together on the way toward ending Russia's war on Ukraine, Europe's biggest and deadliest conflict since World War II, NATO's chief said.
Speaking to RFE/RL from the alliance's headquarters in Brussels on November 24, Secretary-General Mark Rutte characterized weekend talks over the proposal -- which blindsided Kyiv and its European allies -- in Geneva between US and Ukrainian negotiators as "very successful."
"Well, obviously some of the elements have to be really thought through," Rutte said on the 28-point plan, adding that "clearly as a base it served its purpose yesterday to get the two parties to really dialogue."
The plan, leaked to several media including RFE/RL, late last week sent alarm bells ringing in several European capitals as well as in Kyiv with some calling it a Kremlin “wish list.”
The terms required sweeping concessions by Kyiv and appeared to mirror many of the Kremlin's demands -- including the surrender of Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions -- known as the Donbas -- and Crimea, along with setting limits on the size of Ukraine's military.
The proposal also would allow Moscow back into the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations as well as gradually easing Western sanctions on the Kremlin.
As the proposal became public, European diplomats scrambled to draft a counterproposal that is easier on Kyiv.
The 58-year-old former Dutch prime minister said "elements more concerning the EU or NATO will be discussed separately."
US President Donald Trump initially gave Ukraine until November 27 to agree to the proposal, although he later softened that deadline.
There was no public statement on how a revised plan would handle issues such as how Ukraine's security would be safeguarded against future Russian threats or how to finance a reconstruction of post-war Ukraine.
Rutte confirmed that he had been in touch with both Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the weekend, and was reluctant to discuss the proposal line by line.
But he stressed that the “end state” of the talks “is a sovereign Ukraine going forward, a strong nation, and Russia never trying again to attack it.”
“I know one thing about the Russians in general and Putin specifically. Whenever you make an agreement, you have to make sure it is in his interest to keep to it," Rutte said.
"So that's why it is so important that whenever a peace deal is reached on Ukraine, that he will never try again," he said. "And he will never try again when he knows that the consequences for him will be devastating if he tries to invade Ukraine again after a long term cease-fire or a preferably a peace deal.”
NATO Membership For Ukraine?
Rutte commented on two aspects that the plan touches on with regard to the military alliance: future dialogue with Russia and potential membership in NATO for Ukraine.
The NATO chief, who took over as head of the alliance in October last year, said future discussions will not happen under the auspices of the NATO-Russia Council, which last met just before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, or through the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, which codified relations between the 32-member military alliance and Moscow.
“These things are dead, these two institutions, the NATO-Russia Council and the NATO-Russia Founding Act are dead since Putin invaded Ukraine," Rutte said, adding that the Kremlin's invasion of its neighbor went "against all the fundamentals of our Western values and what the NATO-Russia Founding Act stood for and what the NATO Russian Council tried to achieve."
Similarly, he didn’t completely rule out future NATO membership for Ukraine, even though the initial US proposal stated that the military alliance should not advance further.
Rutte was quick to add, however, that Kyiv's membership in NATO isn’t in the cards right now.
“Every country in the realm of NATO -- so in the Euro Atlantic area who wants to become a member of NATO and this is the Washington Treaty of 1949 -- can apply for membership. But to become a member you need unanimity. And at the moment that unanimity is far off,” he said.
“At the moment we have a couple of allies stating explicitly we are against Ukraine accessing to NATO," he said. "Of course we also have had the language from the Washington summit last year, which said there is this irreversible path into NATO. So that's one reality.”
