As Kyiv prepares for a possible meeting with American and Russian representatives, former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has argued that Moscow is treating the latest round of diplomacy as a tool to secure gains it cannot achieve on the battlefield. In an interview with Ukrainska Pravda, Kuleba, who led Ukraine's Foreign Ministry for more than four years, said this negotiation cycle differs from all previous ones because it was initiated by US President Donald Trump, with Europe being drawn into what he called a vortex.
According to Kuleba, Trump is trying to build a new format in which Europe is represented not by the E3 of Germany, France and the United Kingdom, but by Finland and Norway. A warm-up round took place in Oslo, where President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff. Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre also spoke with Vladimir Putin, an exchange that produced little more than a lecture on medieval Slavic history, while the Russian side refused to consider broader European involvement. Kuleba said the new participants are being tested as people from whom greater compliance is expected. Norway, he stressed, matters most to Kyiv as one of its largest donors: "He who pays the piper calls the tune."
Kuleba described himself as belonging to "the apocalyptic school of thought," saying the talks are "ripples on the water" that serve three purposes for Putin: to learn what can be won at the table that cannot be won in the field, to appease Trump by appearing constructive, and to set the Americans against Ukraine. He pointed to signs that Washington is tightening the screws, noting that Zelenskyy reported for two consecutive days that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had not signed off on the transfer of Patriot and NASAMS systems that had already been purchased. Ukraine, he said, is being pushed toward greater compliance, though he personally does not believe Putin is genuinely seeking a deal.
The worst moment for Kyiv, Kuleba said, came at the end of February 2025 after the infamous Oval Office meeting, when intelligence sharing was halted and support programmes were wound down. Ukraine has since adapted, he added, invoking Charles Darwin's observation that survival belongs not to the strongest but to the most adaptable. The open question, he said, is how much longer everyone can keep adapting.
Kuleba said he sees no evidence that European governments have joined Washington in pressuring Kyiv. Europe's real problem, in his view, is an inferiority complex about being excluded from the table. Capitulation pressure, he warned, would show up in one simple issue: money. A battle is under way inside the EU over its budget, and while funds for Ukraine are currently allocated and cuts to Ukraine specifically are not on the table, that could change at any moment, especially with elections in France next year and continued marches by Alternative for Germany.
Discussing the new European intermediaries, Kuleba said Stubb had brought a country that, in Trump's words, "has no cards" to the centre of world politics through personal charisma, including golfing with Trump. But Finland has no leverage over Ukraine, while Norway does, through weapons, participation in the F-16 programme and above all macro-financial support. Norway, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark form the backbone Kyiv cannot afford to lose, he said, adding that he has no reason to believe Støre would abandon Ukraine. He questioned why the leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom and France were removed from the process.
Kuleba said the battlefield remains balanced, shifting the burden of the war into the air, where strikes are meant to break the will of the defending side. He insisted the Russian imperial project is incompatible with an independent, sovereign, European Ukraine. He also noted that a sort of "peace now party" has emerged in Ukraine, arguing that Kyiv should give Moscow what it demands, and that Witkoff appears to belong to the school of thought that treats Putin as a rational player open to mutually beneficial deals.
Such thinking, Kuleba warned, ignores documents Western partners "are trying desperately to forget," including a memorandum Russia's Foreign Ministry handed to the US delegation in November 2021 demanding that NATO's borders be rolled back to where they stood in 1997, leaving the whole of Central Europe defenceless. Putin, he said, models himself on Stalin, and second-term Trump is "not a businessman anymore, he's a messiah." "In my view, we can't buy him off. Neither can Europe. There will be a war in Europe," he said.
Asked whether Ukraine could have secured far better terms in March 2022, Kuleba called the Belarusian track, which later became the Istanbul track, "an act of capitulation" dressed up for appearances. The talks contemplated capping Ukraine's military at 50,000 personnel against Kyiv's proposal of 250,000, its lawful peacetime strength, and handing over missiles and long-range weapons to depots accessible to Russian forces. He drew parallels with the Hetmanate era, when Moscow's infiltration of Ukraine began with troops stationed in key cities, and recalled Baturyn and the Holodomor. Today's proposals, he said, sound the same: renounce NATO aspirations, accept limits on the military, lift sanctions and let Russian gas flow again.
