By Sabine Siebold and Andrew Gray
MUNICH (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is expected to meet with U.S. Vice President JD Vance in Munich on Friday after Donald Trump startled U.S. allies by calling Vladimir Putin and announcing the start of peace talks.
Zelenskiy is due to meet with Vance and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio before the Munich Security Conference, an annual international gathering of political leaders, military officers and diplomats in the German city.
U.S. President Trump’s move stoked fears among European governments that they may be cut out of a deal to end the war, which could end up being too favourable to Russia and undermine their own security.
Trump said on Wednesday he had held a “highly productive phone call” with Russian President Putin and they had agreed to start negotiations immediately. He then briefed Zelenskiy on the call.
Zelenskiy has been publicly cordial about Trump’s call with the Russian president but also warned world leaders against “trusting Putin’s claims of readiness to end the war”.
The Ukrainian leader may face a challenge in convincing Vance to provide strong backing for Kyiv’s war effort.
As a senator, Vance expressed blunt scepticism about U.S. support for Ukraine. At the Munich conference last year, he said U.S. strategic priorities lay more in Asia and the Middle East.
Speaking on a podcast in 2022, he said: “I don’t really care what happens in Ukraine one way or the other.”
POLICY REVERSAL
Trump’s call with Putin and his upbeat description of the conversation reversed years of U.S. policy under the Biden administration of treating the Russian leader as an international pariah since his 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth added to unease among U.S. allies by declaring Ukraine would have to give up on war aims such as a return to its borders before 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, and NATO membership.
Trump said on Thursday that U.S. and Russian officials would also meet in Munich on Friday and Ukraine was invited. But Kyiv said it did not expect to hold talks with Russia in the city.
No Russian officials are invited to the three-day conference, which takes place in a luxury city centre hotel, but that would not prevent a meeting elsewhere in Munich.
The city was in shock on the eve of the conference after a car driven by an Afghan asylum seeker ploughed into a crowd in what the state premier said was probably an attack rather than an accident.
The incident came ahead of a national election on February 23 in which security and migration have been major campaign issues.
(Additional reporting by Tom Balmforth in Kyiv; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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