There is a public side to the negotiations, and a private one. The Ukrainian delegation has just been in the United States, including the Head of the Presidential Office Yermak and the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Umerov. They held official talks and met with Witkoff. But the main question is where the American president stands now, and in which direction the negotiations will move, as the Kremlin keeps returning to its old ultimatums.I agree with that in terms of the Russian position. I think we have to back up and start with what happened in Alaska, which in my opinion was a real disaster for diplomacy. The president, I think, was right. President Trump was right to try to talk to Putin directly.In diplomacy, sometimes you have to talk with autocrats. You have to talk with dictators. Certainly, when I was in the government, I did so. But you don't have to treat them as your friends, and you don’t have to check your values at the door. And I think all the pomp and circumstance, including literally a red carpet for Mr. Putin, was unnecessary.Second, if you are going to do all that, you need to get something in return. That’s just elementary diplomacy. That’s the art of the deal, as President Trump would call it. And what came out of Alaska was, in my view, a weaker position for the United States and for the free world than we had before Alaska.And President Trump said on his way to Alaska that he was going to seek a cease-fire agreement from Mr. Putin, but he did not achieve that. He also said that he wanted to secure a second meeting — his words, not mine — between President Zelensky, President Trump, and Mr. Putin, and he didn’t achieve that objective either. Even more troubling, when I heard the president speak, and when I heard his special envoy Mr. Witkoff speak, they were echoing some of Putin’s talking points. I think that was a major setback for the peace settlement and a setback for America’s national interest as far as I’m concerned.That is why the meeting in Washington was so necessary. President Zelensky came immediately after the Alaska summit, and I think it was a very smart decision. That he came with other European allies was also a very smart decision.In that meeting in Washington, they began to walk back some of the talking points from Alaska, which was necessary. But more importantly, they began to discuss security guarantees, which I believe are an absolutely necessary condition for ending the war in Ukraine.But that negotiation has to take place between your country, Ukraine, and the free world, Europe and the United States. The conversation about security guarantees cannot include Vladimir Putin at the table. And the fact that security guarantees were discussed in Alaska with Putin was, I think, a very big mistake.I hope that in the future those two sets of negotiations remain on separate tracks, not linked tracks. That brings us to the diplomacy ongoing today. I think it is a very positive sign that Mr. Yermak is meeting with Mr. Witkoff. Until now, Mr. Witkoff has not had any contact with Ukrainian officials, and I think that was a mistake. The same person who flies to Moscow must also fly to Kyiv. But if they have to come to New York to meet with him, that’s acceptable.I believe this is a very important development in the negotiations, because the Ukrainian delegation, the Ukrainian government, now has direct contact with Mr. Witkoff.There are differing interpretations of what we mean by a guarantors’ club and by security guarantees for Ukraine. Putin sees them as a means of control. He speaks of the “root causes of the war,” but his goal is to dominate Europe by force. That is not a question for Ukraine, but for NATO.For us, guarantees mean the readiness of NATO member states to come to our aid, including militarily – with ground troops and air units prepared to act if Russia violates agreements. How do we reconcile these divergent interpretations of guarantees?First, with respect to Putin, as I listen to his words and the way he talks about these underlying conditions that he continues to repeat, I don’t see that his position has changed at all since February 2022.That makes me pessimistic that he is serious about negotiations.I think the way to get his attention is not by rolling out red carpets for him, but by providing more weapons to Ukraine, especially defensive weapons to protect your citizens against the terrorist attacks that Moscow launches against your people every night, and also long-range fires, long-range missiles that give you greater capability to strike military targets inside Russia.We could do that. We have those capabilities, and that would get his attention. Second, we should impose new sanctions that would reduce the amount of money and the technology that Russia has to fight its horrific, barbaric war against your people.President Trump, since becoming president for a second time in January, has not imposed a single new sanction against Russia. Not one. He has threatened sanctions against India, but he has not imposed those either. I think that is a mistake.In diplomacy, you need to have an engagement track, but you also need to have a coercive track. If you are not threatening to take action, then Putin has no incentive to cooperate. To create better conditions for negotiation, we have to arm Ukrainian warriors and we have to impose greater sanctions to get Putin’s attention and push him to the negotiating table.That is the first question about Putin. With respect to the endgame and security guarantees, it is my firm view that the best and most credible security guarantee for Ukraine is membership in NATO. Why this is not discussed more sincerely and more genuinely, I do not understand.Russia has never attacked a NATO member. The Soviet Union never attacked a NATO member. That alone is the evidence needed to underscore what a credible security guarantee looks like. But tragically, President Trump does not agree about NATO membership for Ukraine right now, so we have to talk about alternative scenarios.I would say two things in this regard.First, I believe it requires active military participation of a coalition of the willing. Preferably, that would mean European soldiers in Ukraine and American military hardware, especially jets and fighter aircraft, positioned closer to the Ukrainian borders in countries like Romania and Poland. This would increase the credibility that an attack on Ukraine would trigger an attack on the coalition of the willing as well.Second, it is vitally important that President Trump and European allies resist Putin’s insistence that Russia should be a member of an international coalition for a security guarantee. The idea that Russia should participate in such a mechanism is completely absurd.Your country has a tragic history of Russian participation in security guarantees, most notably the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. They have no credibility given what they did afterward, and therefore they cannot be part of those negotiations. I think it was a big mistake to talk about security guarantees with Putin.I want to remind everyone that when we created NATO in 1949, President Truman did not call Stalin to ask for his permission. When we brought West Germany into NATO in 1955, President Eisenhower did not call Khrushchev to ask, “Are you okay with that? Are you willing to go along with that?” We didn’t do that.Nor did President Clinton call Yeltsin when NATO expanded in the 1990s. Nor did President Bush, or any other NATO leader, call Putin to seek his permission to bring in the Baltic countries in the 2000s. To give Putin a veto over the conditions of a security guarantee is incredibly unproductive.Instead, negotiations about the border have to happen between President Zelensky and Putin, with the approval of the Ukrainian people for anything President Zelensky agrees to. That is one negotiation. The second and separate negotiation is between Ukraine, Europe, and the United States.Sadly, President Trump is no President Kennedy. Kennedy’s position during the Cuban Missile Crisis was far tougher and clearer, and Khrushchev had no choice but to take it into account. Putin, however, is not Khrushchev. You know him personally and understand well what is happening around him in the Kremlin. It is clear he was not bluffing when he threatened a full-scale war. Unfortunately, many leaders refused to believe it.Putin is determined to stick to his demands, his ultimatum to the Euro-Atlantic community that borders be pushed back to their 1997 lines. In practice, this means the demilitarization of Central Europe. At the same time, he reacts aggressively to individuals, especially to President Zelensky of Ukraine. And like all dictators, from Louis XIV to Stalin, Putin believes that he himself is the state. The question is whether, behind closed doors, he is willing to yield on any of these demands, or whether he is deliberately instructing Lavrov to keep repeating the so-called Istanbul memorandum ultimatum of 2022.Well, I don’t know the answer to that. I have negotiated with Putin before, and he is a tough negotiator with lots of ultimatums.I don’t see any flexibility yet, so I’m not optimistic that he is serious about negotiations. Therefore, the answer from the free world, from Europe and the United States, has to be to do more to create a stalemate on the battlefield that would force Putin to negotiate. Simply asking him to negotiate, when he thinks time is on his side and that he is winning on the battlefield, is not a successful strategy. We have to compel him to negotiate by creating more of a stalemate on the battlefield.Secondly, about ultimatums. The West needs to reach the hard conclusion that we cannot keep trying to appease Putin. Appeasement does not work. If you appease Putin, if you roll out the red carpet for him, if you say you want to go along with whatever he wants, he just asks for more. That is exactly what has happened recently. When President Trump kept offering him concessions rather than saying, “That’s enough,” Putin increased his demands. He even demanded rolling back NATO to where it was in the 1990s, as you just said. Completely absurd. He increased his demands by asking your soldiers, your warriors, to leave territory in Donbas that they currently control. He also increased his demands by insisting that the West should stop providing weapons to Ukraine. That strategy has not worked, and it means the West and President Trump need to change their strategy.I think your point is well taken. It is hard to compare President Trump to President Kennedy. But I also believe that Trump does not like to look weak, and he does not like to look as though he is being taken advantage of. The longer Putin tries to do that, the more tension it creates for President Trump and for people in his administration.Another point about Putin: it is a misconception that he is always a tough guy who follows through on his ultimatums. Yes, when he threatened to launch a full-scale invasion of your country in 2022, he followed through. That is true. But I think we have overestimated his threat, for example, to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine in 2022. That caused caution in the West at a time when providing more military assistance to Ukraine more quickly might have helped to end the war sooner, when Ukraine was on the offensive and Russia was on the defensive.I would also remind you that others, from time to time, have called his bluff and he has backed down. There was a very famous episode between President Erdogan of Turkey and Mr. Putin, when Putin kept violating Turkish airspace with his air force in Syria. Erdogan told him to stop, but Putin kept doing it. Eventually, Erdogan shot down a Russian military jet that was in Turkish airspace. And everybody said, “Oh, Mr. Putin is going to invade Turkey, he’s going to really retaliate.” But he did exactly the opposite. He backed down. He didn’t retaliate. When Prigozhin launched his military coup attempt against Putin, he didn’t obliterate those soldiers as they marched toward Moscow. He backed down. He negotiated with Prigozhin. He later killed him, of course, but he didn’t escalate at that moment.And we can go further back in history. In 1948, Stalin threatened to take over Berlin. We said we would not tolerate that, and everyone thought a major war was about to break out. But because of the Berlin airlift, it didn’t happen.The same thing happened in 1955, when many of my colleagues, great Americans like George Kennan, said that if we brought West Germany into the NATO alliance, there would be war between the Soviet Union and NATO. People predicted conflict. The phrase people used back then was, “You can’t poke the bear.” But it didn’t happen.I think that sometimes when you show strength, the bear in Moscow backs away rather than attacks. And I believe these important lessons of history are the ones European leaders and American leaders should be studying today.Putin’s negotiators keep raising the issue of buffer zones. Ukraine’s position is clear: in a high-tech missile and drone war, the idea of buffer zones is meaningless. It may simply be a tactic by Putin to force our troops out of fortified positions and to displace civilians from these areas. How will this issue be handled?Yes, tragically, I think that is what Putin wants. He wants to expand the Russian Empire, to take those territories, annex them, and russify them. His greater aim is to do the same to all of Ukraine. There is no doubt in my mind about that.I have heard Putin say it myself. I have been in the room with him when he talked about Ukraine as a false country, a false nation. He claimed Ukrainians are just Russians with accents, and that it was the Bolsheviks in 1917 who falsely divided the so-called Slavic nation. In his view, we in the West repeated that mistake when we brought about the destruction of the Soviet Union.Of course, that is not what happened. It was Ukrainians, Estonians, Georgians, and even Russians who protested against the Soviet Empire. But that is not how he perceives it. And so, tragically but necessarily, the West must do all we can to help preserve the independence, sovereignty, and democracy of Ukraine.And we do this not just out of compassion, but out of national self-interest. It is in our security interest to have a strong border with this imperialist dictatorship along the Russia–Ukraine border, and not further inside Europe.Ukraine today has the most experienced and best fighting force in all of Europe. I want that fighting force to be an ally of the United States and an ally of all the NATO countries. That makes us all stronger together.Secondly, what Putin really fears is not NATO expansion. He knows NATO has never attacked Russia or the Soviet Union and never will. Those are facts of history. He knows them. He just tells his people otherwise, portraying this as a replay of the Great Patriotic War. But he knows that is not true.What Putin truly fears is Ukrainian democracy, Ukrainian freedom, and Ukrainian markets. He has two arguments. On the one hand, he claims Ukrainians are not a free people, that they are not a different people, just Russians with accents. But if Ukrainians practice democracy, it undermines his argument at home about the necessity of dictatorship for the so-called Slavic nation.We in the West must understand that this is what Putin fears the most. And that is why we need to do everything we can to help Ukraine preserve its sovereignty and independence, but also to build its market economy and its democracy. Because those are ultimately the things that scare Putin the most.