It has been an eventful and, for Ukraine and its European allies, alarming past week or so. First they heard that the US president, Donald Trump, had spent 90 minutes on the phone with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. In one stroke, Trump upended three years in which his predecessor, Joe Biden, had sought to isolate Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
On the same day, February 12, Trump’s newly installed secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, told a gathering of senior defence officials in Brussels that Europe would no longer be the primary focus for US security policy, and that Ukraine could not hope to regain the territory Russia had illegally occupied since 2014, nor join Nato.
Hegseth added that not only would the US not contribute to any peacekeeping force in Ukraine in the event of a peace deal, but that any European peacekeeping operation would not be done under the protection of Nato’s article 5.
