WP: U.S. gave Russia an early win before Ukraine peace talks in Abu Dhabi

American negotiators’ call for a broader agreement on European security echoes Kremlin talking points, European officials and experts worry, The Washington Post writes.

The Trump administration believes that the only way to reach a deal to end the war in Ukraine is to simultaneously make a broader agreement with Russia about Europe’s future security arrangements, officials said Monday, acceding to a long-standing Kremlin demand that the United States and its NATO allies had resisted.

Tuesday’s talks in Abu Dhabi over the Russian war in Ukraine offer President Donald Trump his first chance to reassert his position as a global power broker following bruising Republican losses in last week’s midterm elections. But his negotiators — led by special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law — appear to have already bowed to a key Russian goal by opening a broader discussion of European security in the meetings…

U.S. officials appeared to be open to the bigger discussion about Europe’s security that Putin has demanded.

To solve territorial issues inside Ukraine, “you do have to work on the postwar security architecture. It’s a very logical step,” a U.S. official told reporters, speaking on the condition of anonymity to frankly discuss the sensitive negotiations. “If both parties know how to finish, they have to know what they’re finishing into.”

European leaders have previously said that they would only be willing to discuss broader security issues with Moscow after it halts its war.

The U.S. official said the Trump administration was prepared to offer “an Article 5-like security guarantee to Ukraine” — a reference to the NATO pledge that an attack on one of the members of the alliance would be treated as an attack on all of them.

“Maybe the sanctions over time can be used as a way to to incentivize Russia to keep whatever deal they have, and you leave them where they can spring back in place if Russia violates the agreement,” the U.S. official said. “So you do that where you create real incentives and costs to to break a future deal.”

Witkoff and Kushner may be wading into a quagmire that they have little understanding of, these observers said. The White House defended their envoys. Witkoff and Kushner “are proven dealmakers who have done more for global stability in the past year and a half than many government bureaucrats have done in their entire careers,” said Olivia Wales, White House spokesperson.

Further adding to the concerns that the U.S. administration could try to force through a deal favorable to Moscow, Trump said in an interview with CBS News’s “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday evening that he believed “we’re very close to making a deal” and that Ukraine probably would “end up with a little bit different shape” after the war.

Until this autumn, the Trump administration had appeared to adhere firmly to a position that it would not be willing to go ahead with any business deals the Kremlin had been dangling as part of efforts to win U.S. favor, or discuss European security, until Russia had agreed to a ceasefire on Ukraine. But now “we are seeing at least erosion on these fronts,” said Nate Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Russia director at the National Security Council.

“I suspect Moscow will see it differently. The Kremlin will see that the American resistance… is eroding,” he added. “It will think it can make side deals with Washington to create fissures with Ukraine and Europe. It can then try to exploit the cracks to get a better deal on Ukraine down the line.”

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