LUXEMBOURG— Ukraine should not have to concede territory in a peace agreement with Russia, stated the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas on Monday, following U.S. President Donald Trump’s suggestion for Kyiv to cede land to end the conflict.
“If we just give away the territories, then this gives a message to everybody that you can just use force against your neighbors and get what you want,” Kallas told journalists in Luxembourg after a meeting of foreign ministers. “I think this is very dangerous. That’s why we have the international law in place, [so] that nobody does that.”
These remarks were made after Trump’s chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to surrender the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine as part of a ceasefire agreement, and the U.S. president stated on Fox News Sunday that Russia would retain some of the territory it has seized during the war.
EU leaders expressed support for Zelenskyy following the White House meeting last Friday, which reportedly left the Ukrainian side “unhappy.” However, leaders were cautious about asserting that Ukraine should retain all its territory in an agreement.
“What you can conquer back is one question, but the other question is also what do you recognize as the territory of another country?” said Kallas, a former prime minister of Estonia. “I come from a country that was occupied for 50 years, but [a] majority of the countries in the world didn’t recognize them to be Russian territories. And that also meant a lot.”
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