LUXEMBOURG— Ukraine shouldn’t have to give up territory as part of a peace deal with Russia, the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said on Monday after U.S. President Donald Trump pushed Kyiv to give up land to end the war.
“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.”
The comments come after Trump’s chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff, pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cede the Donbas region in the east of the country as part of a ceasefire deal, and the U.S. president told Fox News Sunday that Russia would be keeping some of the territory it has taken over in the war.
EU leaders rallied around Zelenskyy after the White House meeting last Friday, which one person briefed on the encounter said had left the Ukrainian side “unhappy.” However, leaders were cautious about saying that Ukraine should keep all its territory as part of a deal.
“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.”