The American special envoy Steve Witkoff speaks during a swearing ceremony for Jeanine Pirro as an acting prosecutor for the Columbia district, organized by US President Donald Trump in the White House in Washington, DC, United States, on May 28, 2025.
Leah Millis | Reuters
Steve Witkoff Special Envoy said on Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to allow the United States and European nations to give Ukraine “article 5 protection” as a security guarantee to end the war.
“We were able to win the following concession: that the United States could offer type five protection, which is one of the real reasons why Ukraine wants to be in NATO,” said Witkoff on CNN on Sunday.
It was “the first time that we heard that the Russians agreed,” he continued.
Article 5 of NATO says that “if an ally of NATO is the victim of an armed attack, each other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack on all members and will take the actions which it will deem necessary to help the attacked ally”.
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said on Sunday that she had welcomed the security guarantees for Ukraine and that “the European Union … was ready to do her part”, according to the Associated Press.
Witkoff’s remarks come only a few days after President Donald Trump met in Alaska with Putin in the middle of the war during his country with Ukraine. Trump and his administration welcomed talks as “productive”, but the details of the meeting have so far been rare.
Trump, in the approach of his meeting with Putin, underlined several times the need for an urgent and lasting ceasefire in the war.
The talks did not give such an agreement, arousing a concern among the officials of Ukraine and the European countries that Trump was moving away from the objective.
In the days following the talks, Trump, however, said that the “best way” to end the war is “to go directly to a peace agreement”.
Witkoff said on Sunday that Trump and Putin “covered almost all the other problems necessary for a peace agreement” at their hour, without providing additional details.
“We have started to see a certain moderation in the way they plan to conclude a final peace agreement,” he said.
Peace deal “still very far”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said on Sunday that Russia would face “additional consequences” if Trump’s efforts to end the war “do not work”, but warned against additional sanctions.
“In the minute you allow additional sanctions, strong additional sanctions, speaking stops,” he said on ABC News.
Rubio added that “we are still far” from a peace agreement.
“We have made progress in the sense that we have identified potential agreements of agreement, but there are still major areas of disagreement,” he said. “We are not in the precipice of a peace agreement, we are not at the forefront of one, but I think that progress has been made to one.”
Trump is expected to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders on Monday.
What is at stake
If the Kremlin actually accepted security conditions for Ukraine similar to article 5 of NATO, it would be a brutal gap of at least one of the previous justifications of the Russian president to attack the country.
Russia has said that any resolution of the war should tackle the “deep causes of the conflict”, the most important in Ukraine demilting and abandoning its aspirations to join NATO.
The Kremlin also indicated that it wanted any peace agreement to include international recognition of its annexation of Crimea and important parties in eastern Ukraine.
After Friday summit Trump said that a peace agreement could be concluded if Zelenskyy agreed to abandon the Donbas region, the New York Times reported, quoting senior European officials.
But Zelenskyy was categorical that kyiv will never recognize any of his sovereign territory within the framework of Russia, even the regions that Moscow has already annexed. The Ukrainian president said it would violate the constitution of the country. Ukraine has also said that it wanted any peace agreement to include guarantees that Russia will never dice again.
“We must talk about what the territories will look like and what the border lines will look like at the end of this conflict,” said Rubio on NBC News on Sunday.
“We must talk about how Ukraine is rebuilt, and how to rebuild a country that has been attacked as often as in the past three and a half years,” he added.
– TERRA CULEN DE CNBC contributed to this report
