Securing Ukraine's Future

 

FROMAN: Good morning, everybody, and welcome. My name is Mike Froman. I’m president of the Council on Foreign Relations. And it’s a great honor to welcome you here all today to our symposium on Securing Ukraine’s Future. 

About six months ago, the Council launched a special initiative on Securing Ukraine’s Future, led by senior fellow Paul Stares. The initiative is really focused on three areas: Achieving peace, how can a just and durable peace deal be reached; preparing for and realizing Ukraine’s economic reconstruction and recovery, what needs to be done to boost economic growth and rebuild critical infrastructure; and, thirdly, building a framework for Europe’s long-term security. In these areas, as well as the state of play in Ukraine, those will drive the issues of today’s symposium.  

In a moment, we’ll play a short video that explains some of our work in this area, but before we do I’d like to provide just a little framing context. Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine just marked its third anniversary just a week ago. And President Trump is determined to bring a swift end to the conflict. Needless to say, we are meeting at a particularly dynamic time for the situation in Ukraine and the relationship of the United States to that conflict. And as a response to that dynamism, we have a full day of sessions in store for you, including this morning’s keynote address on the path to peace in Ukraine, Ukraine and the future of European security, and reconstructing Ukraine.  

It’s in that spirit that I have the great privilege of introducing this morning’s speaker for the keynote discussion, General Keith Kellogg, assistant to the president and special presidential envoy for Ukraine and Russia. He previously served as the national security advisor to former Vice President Mike Pence and chief of staff and executive secretary of the National Security Council in the first Trump administration. And our presider this morning is Margaret Brennan, the moderator of Face the Nation and the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News. We’re also lucky to have her as a member of the CFR board of directors.  

After the introductory video, General Kellogg will come up to the podium, give some framing remarks on Ukraine’s path towards peace. Then Margaret will come up and moderate a session with him before taking questions from all of you. We also have about 300 people on Zoom. And after that, we’ll move to a panel on Ukraine and the future of European security to discuss how the war has upended the region’s security and how the NATO alliance might evolve.  

All of this is made possible with the support of the Wachenheim Program on Peace and Security. And we’re very grateful to Susan and Edgar Wachenheim for their support of the Council more broadly. I’d like to remind you that today’s discussion is on the record. And with that, we’ll turn to our introductory video. Thanks for joining us this morning.  

(A video presentation begins.) 

NARRATOR: More than three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the conflict has devolved into a war of attrition. The war has exacted a heavy toll on the Ukrainians and the Russians alike. Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded. Millions of Ukrainian civilians have been killed or displaced. Ukraine’s infrastructure, from residential buildings to the energy sector, has been damaged or destroyed.  

Against all odds, Ukraine has prevented Russia from achieving its initial objectives and maintains control over hundreds of square kilometers of Russian territory, after a surprise offensive in the Kursk Region last summer. But Russia continues to occupy some 20 percent of Ukraine, making significant gains late last year. Now, Ukraine’s future and the broader transatlantic security relationship is in question.  

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It is—I believe I will be able to make a deal between President Putin and President Zelensky quite quickly. 

NARRATOR: Here at home, President Donald Trump has promised to deliver a quick end to the war. The United States has benefited from the order and stability that’s existed across Europe for the greater part of the last century, but questions abound about the United States’ role as Europe’s security guarantor and the future of economic and military assistance to Ukraine. At the same time, Europe has struggled to find its footing and step up to not only defend Ukraine but provide for its own long-term security. A secure, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine, grounded in the West, is in our interests. Losing Ukraine would undercut the strength of the transatlantic alliance and encourage adversaries to take actions against U.S. partners. It would also mark the first victory for the emerging axis of autocracies.  

There’s never been a more critical time to inform U.S. engagement on Ukraine than now. That’s why we’ve launched the Council’s Special Initiative on Securing Ukraine’s Future, led by senior fellow Paul Stares, to analyze the various challenges the U.S., Europe, and Ukraine must overcome to end the war. The initiative focuses its efforts on the following issues: Achieving peace. How can a just and durable peace deal be reached? What are the necessary conditions for all parties? How can the United States best facilitate that peace? Preparing for and realizing Ukraine’s reconstruction and economic recovery. What does Ukraine need to boost its economic growth and rebuild its critical infrastructure? How can this be achieved? What external support is needed? Building a framework for Europe’s long-term security. How can Ukraine be integrated into the European framework? What does Europe need to do to deter Russian aggression in the future? What will the U.S. role be in the continent’s security architecture?  

Since its inception in 2024, the special initiative has convened meetings with top experts and policy officials and commissioned actionable policy reports that provide innovative solutions for the complex—most complex challenges. We’ve already seen the direct impact of our work. In 2025, we plan to continue this momentum. Securing Ukraine’s Future is not just about strategizing an end to the war within the next twelve months. It requires looking past the cessation of hostilities to tackle the long-term economic and security challenges for Ukraine, Europe, and the United States. In the months and years ahead, we hope you’ll engage with us on this effort. 

(Video presentation ends.) 

KELLOGG: Well, thank you to the Council and President Froman for the invitation to speak to you today. And thank you to the audience for joining this conversation. I see some friends in the audience that have been here before, Elliott, Doug, the rest of the team out there. And today I think we’re going to be discussing what is arguably the most complex foreign policy challenge the administration is faced with. And that’s ending the Russian-Ukraine war, the largest war in Europe since the end of World War II.  

President Trump recognizes this and has acknowledged the gravity and complexity of bringing peace to this war. In a December press conference at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump remarked that ending the Russia-Ukraine war would be, quote, “even more difficult than resolving the ongoing Israeli-Hamas war and the turmoil in the Middle East,” end quote. President Trump’s assessment is well founded. The Russia-Ukraine war has become the largest land war in Europe since World War II. The death and destruction is what could be called industrial grade. After three years of war, combined casualties on both sides have surpassed one million individuals.  

Think of it this way, just on the Ukrainian side alone more soldiers have been killed, the Ukrainians, than the United States lost in the Vietnam War and the Korean War combined. Russia has over 490,000 soldiers deployed to Ukraine, a force that is larger than today’s active United States Army. Russia has destroyed Ukrainian cities like Mariupol, a city the size of Denver proper. The city of Izium, city that I visited, the city of once 70,000, now holds less than 20,000. Where, when I was there, cooking was done in the streets because of no electrical power. The hospitals were running on generators.  

Russia’s actions have been a catalyst for a broader crisis throughout Europe, to include ongoing refugee, energy security, food scarcity, inflation, and defense readiness issues across the entire continent. I’ve seen the destruction of Russia’s war firsthand, having visited Ukraine, including the Donbas region. While the kinetic action and direct military engagement of this war is bound to Russian and Ukrainian territory, this war is ultimately being waged by a competing alliance structure who are all proxies to this war. Russia’s war effort has led to a deepening of alliances with the Chinese, the Iranians, and North Koreans, where the Europeans are supporting Ukraine by proxy, in a simple fear that if Russia is not stopped in Ukraine the war will spill over to the rest of Europe.  

Recently, spending three days at the recent Munich security conference talking to them, their fears and concerns look palpable. So when we discuss the complexities of ending this war it comes from an understanding that bringing this war to a conclusion not only requires mitigating the root causes of the Russia-Ukraine war itself, but it ultimately entails the United States and European allies confronting a global adversarial alliance structure. Our allies in Europe claim they will pick up any slack in support, but also openly proclaim that the United States must be involved. In this foreign policy crisis, President Trump has been clear that the United States’ primary objective in this war is to stop the killing, get both sides to the table, and implement an enduring peace structure.  

America has funded this war with over $170 billion. This year alone, with the most recent tranche of over $60 billion, is an amount larger than we funded the United States Marine Corps this year. Donald J. Trump is a peacemaker, and he is a president of peace. President Trump has committed to the American people that he will put the interests and security of our citizens first, and he will keep our nation out of endless wars. You know, I’m reminded of what President—I’m sorry—I’m reminded of Professor Paul Kennedy from Yale University wrote in his seminal work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers—what he noted, that great powers historically fail when they involve themselves in strategic overreach. He called it imperial overreach, but I’ll make it simple so you don’t have to buy the book.  

When a nation is concerned about filling somebody else’s potholes than their own potholes, they fail. Ushering in peace between nation-states was a legacy of his first administration. And this is the same mission he is bringing into the second administration, and towards this war. This war did not start on Donald Trump’s watch. I believe he’s absolutely right. It would not have started if he was in office and the strategy of the previous administration—as much as it takes, as long as it takes—to me was not a strategy but a simple bumper sticker. Despite the past, President Trump is working hard to bring a peaceful resolution to this war. You can see the high priority he is placing on this goal when you look at how many senior individuals he is asked to pitch in and help negotiate peace.  

From Marco Rubio, to Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, to me, to Mike Waltz, he has worked out more in the last forty-five days than we saw in the previous years. And we’ve only been at it for forty-five days, but we already have teams in Moscow and in Kyiv. And we all want the same thing. We are working as a team to explore every avenue we can for peace. But, as we know, and as this administration knows, peace is only possible through strength. Which bring us to where we are today, how the Trump administration is deploying strength in this urgent moment to bring a peaceful resolution to this devastating war.  

To start, President Trump’s America first approach towards engagement abroad is a driving force behind this administration’s approach to the war, which is notably different than the preceding administration and the broader U.S. foreign policy establishment and status quo approach to U.S. national security apparatus. President Trump has already engaged President Putin. He’s engaged President Zelensky. We have found from previous approaches, you cannot avoid talking to your adversaries or your friends alike. President Trump has elevated the United States priority as bringing peace to both sides, rather than framing this war as one side winning over the other—an approach that would only serve to drag America into an endless proxy war, to the detriment of our own national security interests.  

When President Trump was asked in a May 2023 town hall, if he wanted, quote, “Ukraine or Russia to win this war,” he responded by saying, “I just want everybody to stop dying.” This statement was not only a public commitment to peace and a commitment to keep our nation out of an endless war, but it was a proactive signal that the United States would serve as a positive force in bringing a resolution to this conflict. We saw this very approach towards that war play out in the recent Oval Office meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky last Friday. And I had a ringside seat, standing right behind vice president and Secretary Rubio. What happened was two nation-state leaders coming into a meeting with objectives that were clearly not in alignment with one another, and there was a disconnect, publicly, between the goals of the two administrations.  

President Zelensky approached this engagement with President Trump as an effort to get the United States to cosign on the U.S. to continually funding Ukraine, to give Ukraine an advantage over Russia. President Zelensky clearly wanted President Trump to side publicly with United States—with the United States against Russia. It would have negated an objective interlocutor role. President Trump, however, was not approaching as a matter of one side gaining advantage over the other but was instead focused on peace. Stating, quote, “President Zelensky is not ready for peace if America is involved because he believes our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations. I don’t want advantage. I want peace.” End quote.  

There is the human cost of this war which deeply resonates with President Trump. The casualties of this war have surpassed one million. And on an average this war is costing an average of 600 soldiers killed in action per day. Short of U.S. efforts to end this war and stopping the killing, Ukraine is quickly approaching the lost generation. That is a term that Britain used and experienced from the bloody trench warfare in World War I. Just about a year ago at this time, I was with President Trump as we’ve traveled on a campaign trip to Iowa. And we discussed the war. He is not new to the issue of conflict resolution. He understands the damages of war and what it brings.  

And I just returned from Ukraine where I did a visit to a Ukrainian military hospital in Irpin, where you see physically the toll that this prolonged war has had on the Ukrainian soldiers. One item became very clear, is the urgent need to stop the killing. The visit to Irpin, one that treats soldiers with combat-related amputations, was both uplifting and depressing. Uplifting, in seeing soldiers recovering from grievous injuries with a positive attitude, yet at the same time depressing because their physical losses were absolutely catastrophic. This is where President Trump is coming from. He sees the war from both a human dimension and from an American strategic view. 

There is also a broader strategy at play in President Trump’s approach to this war that is informed by the realization that the United States needs to reset relations with Russia. Not engaging with both allies and adversaries is essential in diplomacy. In the previous administration, a mistaken approach was taken in which the United States failed to engage with Russia and leverage strong diplomacy, coupled with credible deterrence, to end the war. Nation-state leaders, particularly during times of war, have a primary duty to engage in direct diplomacy with each other, and exhaust every lever of statecraft, to resolve conflicts and keep our nation out of endless wars.  

For the president of the United States to not engage with the leader at war has had immense ramifications for our national security. The continued isolation and lack of engagement with the Russians as the war in Ukraine continued is no longer a viable or a sustainable strategy and is certainly not a responsible approach diplomatically for the United States to continue. For these reasons—the human cost of this war, the need to reset relations with Russia to secure America’s vital national interest, and ultimately to stop U.S. entanglement in an endless proxy war—are the driving reasons why President Trump’s approach and the framing of this war is distinct from the broader conventional approach that we see publicly to the war.  

So what you are seeing now, what you are witnessing, are urgent efforts by the Trump administration to bring both sides to the table in order to get to a peace settlement. And bringing both sides to the table means applying pressure points and incentives, sticks and carrots, on both sides, to get them to the table and agree to peace terms. There are aggressive movements from the administration underway to apply pressure points towards the Russians, and obviously to the Ukrainians as well.  

The seizing of frozen Russian sovereign assets to rebuild and rearm Ukraine, maximum pressure sanctions on Russian energy are a few of the tools the president is leveraging to get Russia to a peace deal. Look at the current sanctions, especially against the shadow fleet that carries 70 percent of the oil—illicit oil—that comes out of Russia. We sanctioned those vessels by name. Seventy percent of that oil comes through the Baltic Sea. The president has been clear that all options are on the table to end this war.  

For Ukraine, the president is also applying both pressure points and incentives to get Ukraine to the table. The critical minerals deal is an important part of this effort to get Ukraine to the table. And President Trump approaches diplomacy and engagements in a very transactional manner, with economics as the foundation and driving force behind international affairs in President Trump’s America’s first, quote, “transactional diplomacy,” end quote, model. The transactional diplomacy approach is why, in his discussions with foreign leaders, is the first question to them is often to ask, as I found the very first time we were in the Cabinet room and a foreign official came in, the comment was, quote, “What is the trade imbalance between our two nations?” That is the same underpinning of the proposed critical minerals deal between the United States and Ukraine. It sets a foundation in which the United States can receive a direct return on its investment in Ukraine.  

The United States has been Ukraine’s leading partner in supporting Ukraine’s defense I the war from Russia to the extent of over $170 billion. This deal, the critical minerals deal, in one sense, is a mechanism in which the American taxpayer can begin to be recoup—can begin to be recuperated from the costly financial sustainment of this war. More broadly, however, this critical minerals deal also offers a partnership deal between the United States and Ukraine which can underpin a security architecture for Ukraine going forward. If the United States has direct economic interest in Ukraine, then the United States has a direct invested interest to protect its economic interests as well. Which serves, in fact, as a de facto guarantee, a security guarantee, for Ukraine.  

You will continue to see strong efforts from the United States to bring both sides to the table in order to reach an enduring and sustainable peace effort. We are at the early stages and, very candidly, the road will be bumpy. All peace negotiations are. But failure to end this war, now over three years old, could be consequential not just in Europe but the world as well. And thank you for having me. And I await your questions and the discussions. (Applause.) 

BRENNAN: Thanks to all of you for joining this morning. And thank you for your remarks.  

KELLOGG: Thanks. 

BRENNAN: For all of you here, we’re going to have about twenty-five minutes of conversation before we open it up to questions from all of you. So this meeting is on the record. And I see my fellow reporters in the—in the gathering here. 

There are a lot of very specific questions. I know you don’t want to talk in specific terms, but we’ve seen just such a flurry of news in the past twenty-four to forty-eight hours from the administration, including the CIA director just yesterday going on Fox News and announcing that intel sharing with the Ukrainians was being cut off. My network, CBS, is reporting that’s all intelligence sharing including targeting data for U.S.-provided weapons, like HIMARS. There is some defensive intelligence being allowed for Ukrainians to protect themselves. Last night, European Command also issued a statement to CBS saying that there is a pause to security assistance to Ukraine, including what was already in train from the Biden administration. So that’s on top of the pause of the 3.85 billion (dollars) that President Trump just issued. What is the intention here? What is the specific ask that Ukraine has to deliver on for all of this to be lifted? 

KELLOGG: Margaret, I believe—thanks for the question. I believe the push is to get them to engage in diplomatic activities. Give us their—for lack of a better term—their term sheet to get this to the table and say this is an approach to going forward. We know that both sides are going to have disagreements and agreements as well. So I think it’s like a forcing function that you want to get there. You know, it’s—you know, it’s sort of, like, you know, the Russians may say, well, for you to get involved in the talks, we want you to sell us Alaska back. That probably won’t happen. But the same thing is going to be with Ukrainians. So it’s—more than anything, it’s a forcing function to get to the realization that we want to go to a peace discussion, a peace deal.  

Look, my experience in the reading of history, in studying the Russian at war—in fact, there’s a great book by—Russia at War, by a guy named Alexander Werth, that—when it comes right down to it, the one thing you never want to do with the Russians is get into an attrition war. I mean, this is the same nation that in World War II lost 70,000 troops dead in Stalingrad in six months and continued to fight. So you have to kind of think about how do they look, however you want to go to it, and you don’t want to get into a war like that. So, again, bottom line is it’s a forcing function to get them to the table. 

BRENNAN: But that’s a pretty major concession to Russia, to constrain Ukraine’s ability to target and hit Russian forces. This pressure really seems to be directly impacting, potentially, what they can do on the battlefield. 

KELLOGG: Yeah, but, you know, this is one of those—very candidly, they brought it on themselves, the Ukrainians. What do I mean by that? Look, when we were in the Oval Office last week on Friday—and I’ll kind of give you the background a little bit of it—is when we talked with President Zelensky before that meeting, there were thirteen U.S. senators at the Hay-Adams. And we said, OK, this is like stage managing. This is what you want to say. It’s basically, we’re going to come in, we have this precious metals deal. You’re going to sign the deal. You’re going to have lunch, have a press conference, exit stage right. And you’re good to go, we continue to go.  

What happened became a very combative press conference that went on for almost, what, fifty minutes. That caught everybody a little bit by surprise.  

BRENNAN: Seen around the world. 

KELLOGG: Yeah. (Laughs.) I was right there. And I think what happened is they said, wait a second, this is not what we thought this was going to be. You don’t negotiate peace discussions in public. You don’t try to challenge the president of the United States in the Oval Office that, in fact, you need to side with me and not the Russians. You don’t become an—you don’t become an independent interlocutor if you look at something like that. And he was forewarned. It’s not like President Zelensky was not made aware that this is what—this is what we wanted out of the Ukrainians, to basically say, go here, it sets the next stage, it opens up, it goes forward. So I don’t blame the president of the United States at all. I think he made a decision, as he is commander-in-chief under Article II, Section 2, that he wanted to do. And it’s almost like saying, OK, if this is (where you ?) want to go, we’re going to play it realpolitik.  

BRENNAN: So President Zelensky has, at least twice now, said, though, that he is willing to sign that deal. 

KELLOGG: Mmm hmm, right. 

BRENNAN: That he left the White House without signing, after he was kicked out. He’s also offered some public remarks that seem somewhat contrite, conciliatory. What does he need to do to turn the intelligence and weapons back on? Or is that off the table entirely? Is the U.S. position now that we do not support Ukrainian military operations against Russia?  

KELLOGG: No, I—look, I’ll do the second part of the question first. Is, look, what President Trump said in the State of the Union. He was very magnanimous. He was very magnanimous in the Oval Office. And it were—it’s very clearly, he’s going to—basically, there’s a pause. He didn’t say it was over. He said it was a pause. And— 

BRENNAN: How long is the pause?  

KELLOGG: Well, it’s going to—and here’s where—and I’ll answer the first part of the question now, because it’s a great question. Look, my experience working with him is—it’s sort of, like, if all of you have a contract—you know, you sign a contract for a car or for a house, before you go forward you have a signed contract. And part of it now is, OK, he signed. The reason he came to the White House was to sign a document that was going to say, this is us going forward. It was not signed. My point would be, and my personal belief would be, you don’t move forward until you get a signed document, period. When we get a signed precious metals deal, and we had—and he had an option to do that when I was in Ukraine and they didn’t do it. They had the option to do it last week, and he didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do anything until I have a signed document— 

BRENNAN: But he’s offering to do it. 

KELLOGG: Pardon? 

BRENNAN: He is offering, publicly at least, to do it.  

KELLOGG: There’s a difference between offering to do it and doing it. 

BRENNAN: What’s the—what’s the hold up now? 

KELLOGG: Sign the document. 

BRENNAN: Can he DocuSign it? (Laughter.) Can he email it? 

KELLOGG: That’s a—that’s a great question. (Laughter.) 

BRENNAN: Because that seems pretty quick to resolve.  

KELLOGG: But it’s, like, you know, who’s going to sign it? Was it was Secretary of State Marco Rubio? He’s the chief diplomat in civilian. From Ukraine, or is it, you know— 

BRENNAN: Is that being—is that where we are now, it’s protocol that is being— 

KELLOGG: Well, I think the protocol is you sign a document, and once you sign the document that you want to go forward, that you’re serious about it, then I think you can move forward.  

And I think we’ve seen too many, you know, starts and misses as we go forward on this. And I think that’s part of the issue is how serious are you to get to peace discussions? And you look at the public comments, and you look at the private discussions, and it’s one of those it’s over to you. You figure it out. By the way, this is not something that is unusual. When I was in Kyiv two weeks ago I was very clear to President Zelensky the outcome if we didn’t have a signed agreement. I was—I was blunt and clear that this was a thing that could have happened. Sometimes—and I will be very honest with you—some people always misread the room with President Trump. And you better understand when you play with President Trump where he’s going to and when he’s—you know, when he goes for some type of a deal. And what happened is President Zelensky, he misread the room last Friday, and I think—and he misread what I was telling him when I was in Kyiv as well. 

BRENNAN: That sounds personal at this point, rather than strategic.  

KELLOGG: No, well, I think it is strategic. It’s not personal at all. I think what it is, it shows a negotiating style. It shows an understanding what you’re—what you’re presented with. And it’s basically that’s how negotiations work. Negotiations are a lot of times personal. I mean, when you go back historically, when you look at, you know, negotiations, how they’ve been solved, they are done personally. You know, go back to what happened in the Treaty of Portsmouth with Teddy Roosevelt, between then the Russians and the Japanese. It was his personal involvement on a personal level that caused that—the Treaty of Portsmouth to eventually be signed. And I look at it—when you look—I don’t care if it’s Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho or whoever’s out there, they’re always personal. But I think there’s underlying themes behind them.  

BRENNAN: But, to be clear, once we get through the protocol and the signing of this economic agreement, which is what the Treasury secretary calls it, not a minerals deal, does the intelligence switch back on?  

KELLOGG: That’s up to the president of the United States.  

BRENNAN: So it’s not necessarily do this, and this is the result. Sign this— 

KELLOGG: No, it’s up to the president of the United States. I am not the president. He was—I didn’t get a single electoral college vote. It’s up to the president. And he’s the commander-in-chief and he’s the president. And I would never, ever speak for the president. It’s going to be his call.  

BRENNAN: Well, I’m asking that because it’s confusing, frankly. You know, I had the treasury secretary on Face The Nation on Sunday. And he had previously described the minerals and economic deal. He said I was wrong when I called it minerals deal. He said it’s an economic partnership deal. But he said that initially was a building block towards peace. After the Oval Office confrontation, he said, now we need peace before we see the economic deal. That was Sunday. I know things change really quickly and there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen. But what is the position now? It still sounds like it’s an open question if U.S. military and intelligence support for Ukraine will ever be turned back on, is that right?  

KELLOGG: Well, I look at the word and define the word “pause.” “Pause” is not—the president of the United States did not say it has ended. He said it is paused. That is transitional. And he is the one who makes the decisions. None of—no one in the administration, none of us, should ever try to speak for the president. That’s his call. And I would leave it up to him to make the decision when he thinks it’s equitable or when it’s—when a pause should be lifted.  

But, to me, Margaret, I think he’s got a great team of advisors around him, from Marco Rubio to Scott to Howard to Mike Waltz, to that whole team that you see there. It’s a synchronized team. We’re all in sync together. We’re all talking about it. The lines of communication are open. But we all say one guy owns this, one guy runs the ship. You know, I’m a westerner. You know, and a westerner, you’ve ever heard the term you ride for the brand? You know, if you ride for the brand, the trail boss is Donald J. Trump, then you’d ride for the brand. You’re with him. 

BRENNAN: So you are based—you have an office at the State Department. 

KELLOGG: And at the White House. 

BRENNAN: And at the White House. Steve Witkoff, the envoy to the Mideast, is also now involved in the Russia portion of this. He also has an office at the State Department. 

KELLOGG: And in the White House. 

BRENNAN: And in the White House. (Laughs.) OK. How much coordination is there between the two of you? Or is this completely parallel?  

KELLOGG: No, working with Steve is—Steve’s a great guy. And we’ve got a really good relationship. And my deputy, John Cole, and we’re going to take this—we’re working well together. We talk well together. My offices in State are on the seventh floor; his are on the fifth floor. You know, I know where his offices are in the White House. And we’re in sync together because we understand the importance behind it. And I think what’s happened is, because the relationship that Steve has on the Russia side, that actually started because of MBS, Mohammed bin Slaman, the crown prince in Saudi. And he brought in Kirill Dmitriev, who’s the interlocutor with Russia.  

BRENNAN: He runs the sovereign wealth fund.  

KELLOGG: And so he brought them together. So it made a lot of sense to strategically say, OK, you know, with Steve—and I’ve talked with Steve—hey, Steve, you run this lane really hard, and I’ll run this lane really hard, and we’re like this together. We’re talking about it and we’re sort of comparing notes, where we want to be, and providing that. And Marco Ruby made a great point when he was asked about it, because he was asked on a program about the special envoys. The beauty that Steve and I have is that that’s all our focus is. You know, I’m focused on this, and he’s focused on that. We build our teams out that way, and it makes it really good. So that’s a long answer to a short question, but Steve and I are in sync. We’re together. We talk. We’re on speed dial with each other. And we’re—our messages are basically coordinated. 

BRENNAN: So Envoy Witkoff was on Face The Nation recently. And when I was asking him about this, the three and a half hour meeting he had with Vladimir Putin—which I think all of us would love to be a fly on the wall for that one—he said he went by himself. There was no foreign service or intelligence officer with him. There were translators. He said two in the room. Were those U.S. translators? 

KELLOGG: I don’t know. 

BRENNAN: When he did that interview— 

KELLOGG: If you say he didn’t have anybody with him, probably not. (Laughs.) 

BRENNAN: That’s what he said. Yeah. So were there notes from that meeting? Is there any record? I wonder, because that’s an extraordinary amount of time with Vladimir Putin.  

KELLOGG: Yeah, he—there were notes that were brought back, that Steve brought back. And so we are aware—it’s sort of like a quid pro quo, where you want to go, what you want to do, and then discussions that were made. And— 

BRENNAN: It’s their term sheet, essentially? 

KELLOGG: Well, I use the term sheet. And term sheet’s—the answer is—yeah, in generalization. But it’s like—when I say “term sheet,” that’s kind of made, obviously, it was a bad joke. But in fact, it’s like conveying they want Alaska back. Nope, not going to happen. But we have an indication of where the Russians are. And we want to do the same thing with the Ukrainians as well. And to me, we had a wonderful opportunity to get there, and we lost it. 

BRENNAN: So Envoy Witkoff said on a different network, but I read the transcript, that the framework for a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia is the Istanbul Protocol Agreement.  

KELLOGG: Yeah. 

BRENNAN: Is that the framework you are working with?  

KELLOGG: No. Here’s why. Is we both work from different—that came out of the Russians, said maybe you go there. To me, when you look at the Istanbul accords, you know, that happened thirty days after the invasion. And the demands in Istanbul were fairly significant on a very weakened Ukraine. And here’s where I will agree with what Steve said. And Steve said, it’s a departure point. I think that’s a good word to use. It’s a departure point, at least he’s—but I think you have to look at those. I don’t think—I don’t believe, for all of us, that that is an equitable framework. And I think we have to develop something entirely new.  

You can start from that position, if you wanted, with the Russians, but that is going to be something up to the negotiation teams going forward, what they want to look at. And I know that President Erdogan would obviously like to use that as a starting point, but I think any reasonable person has to look at what those accords actually said. And you read each one of them quite clearly what was demanded. And I think now, once you look at it, even though Ukraine, at the time, was agreeable to some of the conditions there, you have to look at the time frame when that was done. And that was when the battlefield was in flux. It was thirty days after the start. They were still fighting around Bucha. You know, they were still trying to evict them from Kharkiv and regions around Kharkiv. And it was a pretty strenuous fight. So you have to go to today. You can’t go back three years ago.  

BRENNAN: Yeah. The Institute for the Study of War issued an analysis of that, saying the draft protocol leaves Ukraine helpless in the face of future Russian threats and aggression. It sounds like you agree with that assessment.  

KELLOGG: Yeah, I think— 

BRENNAN: It said it also restricted any bilateral security agreements. So this is not the Trump administration position.  

KELLOGG: No, I think Steve made the comment as a general comment. It is not the Trump administration policy, because they haven’t made their policy. You know, the president said, this is where we’re going to be, because we haven’t got to that point yet. We, you know, that’s what—you know, I use it—I like the term, the term “term sheet.” We know what the term sheets are going to be. And then you can, you know, pivot from it on point and say, OK, this is where you’re at. 

BRENNAN: In your remarks you used the phrase, “a credible deterrence to end the war.” In your mind, and you have a military background, obviously, what does that mean? Because that could be interpreted as a security guarantee. 

KELLOGG: Yeah, well, I think when you look at it there’s a tendency to default to kinetics when you talk about a security guarantee. That means 50,000 or 100,000 or 80,000 troops right on the border, right on the line of contact. It is more complete than that. I think you have to look at it—when you talk about security guarantees, it’s not always a kinetic piece, the military piece—which is clearly important—but it’s also the economic piece, the sanctions. What are you doing with the frozen Russian assets? There’s 300 billion (dollars) in Belgium right now. What are you going to use those for? And primarily that’s oligarchs’ money. 

BRENNAN: Do you want to seize that? 

KELLOGG: Pardon? 

BRENNAN: Do you want to seize that?  

KELLOGG: I think you have to have the—that President Putin needs to understand, those assets are—that can be seized as long as the Europeans are willing to do it. And that’s going to be to the Belgiques to want to do that. But it’s also diplomatic as well. And I think part of this process is it’s an unusual process in the sense that we were not confronted with this four years ago. You know, when four years ago you looked at North Koreans—think of a quad chart.  

The North Koreans were over here. The Iranians were over here. The Russians, you know, were over here, and working that issue, and the Chinese were over here. Well, now they’re all together. And they’re all together. You actually got a peace—a defense arrangement between the Russians and the North Koreans. North Koreans are fighting outside of Kursk right now. I mean, conceptually, you could see that if there’s a war in the Korean Peninsula, where over 20,000 of troops are, you could see Russian troops fighting, because that’s part of the agreement.  

And I’d say, we weren’t confronted with that four years ago. It’s a brand-new arrangement. And so what President Trump did before is he kept them all segmented. It’s sort of like a game of Whack-a-Mole, that every time a mole would come up you whack it down. Well, all the moles came up. And now we’ve got to figure, OK, how do we deal with this? That’s why I made the comment about geostrategically. This is not just a European problem. This is a global problem. And I think we have to approach it that way as well. You can’t just isolate Europe. So that’s going to be the issues going forward. And I think the president appreciates that. And it’s something that we appreciate. Steve, does, I do, Secretary of State Rubio does as well, that we’ve got to manage—stage manage this in a way that protects U.S. equities into the future.  

BRENNAN: So does credible deterrence mean that the Trump administration would backstop European peacekeeping forces? That came up in the in the Oval with the prime minister of the U.K. And it wasn’t clear what the U.S. answer was. 

KELLOGG: Well, I think that’s part of the discussion we’re having with the Europeans as well. When you talk about what does backstop look like, defining terms. You know, I and I—you know, back in my Jesuit education days when I had a professor said always define your terms. And I said, that’s going to be important, what does it mean? But the Europeans were very clear when I was in Munich. They said, we support Ukraine as long as you’re there. And I said, well, what does that mean? So I think that’s really up to the diplomatic side, with the presidents, and prime ministers, and chancellors of Europe. What does that look like? The economic side, what do sanctions look like? What is frozen assets, whatever it’s going to be? And then we also looked at the military side as well.  

Look, I made that comment a minute ago. It’s pretty interesting to me when you look at it—and isolated it to one issue—when you look about the sanctions U.S. put on, we actually sanctioned the shadow fleet by hull. 

BRENNAN: Sorry, the shadow fleet, are you talking about the sanctions on Iran?  

KELLOGG: No, the shadow fleet was the fleet that carries the illicit oil coming out of Ukraine that’s going to some of our allies out there, like the India. 

BRENNAN: From Russia. 

KELLOGG: From Russia. And 70 percent of the illicit oil is, in fact, going through the Baltics on that fleet. We have sanctioned each individual ship, by name, USS Kellogg, USS Smith, whatever it is out there. In 2018-2019, we did something very similar with the North Koreans. We actually sanctioned their fleet that was moving coal from Korea to China. And we used U.S. Coast Guard assets. And we’ve got ten world-class cutters that could do that. You actually start interdicting the fleet. And there’s ways to do that with the allies. And you start setting that down. And those are the kind of things that you do economically that would really make everybody understand, stand up, and say, OK, they’re serious about this. Bring them to the table. This is what you’re going to do. But those are the kind of options that we have to have.  

BRENNAN: So is putting further sanctions on Russia an option at this point?  

KELLOGG: Well— 

BRENNAN: Because we haven’t heard, at least, that they’ve been offering any concessions.  

KELLOGG: You know Margaret, it’s not so much more options. It’s the enforcement of the options. I think what’s happened, when you look at—if you ranked order the options, the sanctions, I think it was between one to ten, we’re probably at a seven. The problem is with enforcement we’re probably at a three. And so that’s where I keep going back to that one, to kind of make a point. If you’re serious about the sanctions, and you do it, not only the Russian sovereign assets but there’s other things that you can do if you want to do it, as allies, to do it. And, by the way, some of the allies are actually doing that in the Baltics. They’re actually intercepting some of those vessels. Now, people come out and say, well, there’s international laws, there’s international rules. And it’s—but you can seize or board some of those vessels to kind of make the point. So the sanctions are there. I think the most important thing is the enforcement sanctions, not to serve the sanctions themselves. 

BRENNAN: You think the Trump administration needs to enforce sanctions against Russia more strongly? Or you’re saying other countries— 

KELLOGG: Well, I think—I think we recognize the opportunity to do so. And I would remind everybody, the war has been going on for three years. We’ve been in office for forty-five days. You know, kind of, OK. We kind of know where we’re at. We’re trying to figure it out. And is it where we’re going. 

BRENNAN: Hmm. I want to take some questions from those in the audience as well. But as we gather those, can you quickly tell us what is in the economic partnership deal at this point? The term sheet? 

KELLOGG: Well, the deal—you know, when we talk about—and, you know, I’m going to be honest with you, you know, if a precious metal hit me in the face, I probably wouldn’t know what it was. But I didn’t know what they are. (Laughs.) And I think part of it is just not only oil infrastructure, but the rebuilding of that infrastructure. But also, you’re looking about some precious metals. And I’ll use titanium as an example. You know, titanium is—they export it, we import it, and it’s designed for a lot of things that we use in the defense establishment. And the ability to use those.  

And here’s the thing, and when I was talking to the president about it, I said, one of the things we probably ought to do before we really lock ourselves down is get the U.S. Geological Service to actually inventory that, because the last time that those precious metals were even inventoried were done in the Soviet days. So, you know, you kind of take a little bit of a leap of faith in what’s actually out there. We do know that it’s called the Ukrainian crescent, where—and it’s on the western part of the Dnieper River—that there’s a huge crescent of those precious metal areas that are there. Some of them are also, by the way, in Russian territory—or, Russian-occupied territory now.  

And part of it, I think the most important, is—I think the most important is an economic security deal. And what I mean by that, and we try to get across to President Zelensky and his team, look, when you get involved economically with somebody—I don’t care if it’s setting up McDonald’s hamburger franchises or the precious metals—when you invest yourselves, diplomatically, militarily, economically, in the future of this country. And that’s what we’re trying to get across to them that, look, this is something that is a big deal for us because President Trump is a transactional leader, and transactional starts with economics. And so we thought this was a good start for Ukraine and for an alliance that we’d continue to build with United States and Ukraine.  

BRENNAN: Michael Gordon, here in the front row, has the first question here in Washington.  

Q: Thank you. Michael Gordon, Wall Street Journal. 

Sir, you’re a retired Army General. And you’re familiar with the battlefield situation in Ukraine. What is the concrete effect of the abrupt end of military resupply to Ukraine, and the end of the provision of intelligence and targeting data? Ukraine may have—it may take some time for their military supplies to run down, but the cut off in intel does have an immediate effect. In your judgment, what’s been the effect to date, and what’s going to be the effect if it continues for another week, or two, or three?  

KELLOGG: Well, Michael, thanks for the question. I think in—the best way I can describe it is sort of like hitting a mule with a two by four across the nose. You got their attention. And it’s very—it is significant, obviously, because of the support that we give, OK, but it’s one way of sort of get your attention to do it. But it’s a pause. It’s not an end. And it’s then up to do it. And I know that the allied partners are—that has anything to do with U.S. support as well—are kind of paused as well. So I need anytime—as a military person, anytime you displace assets, primarily from the intelligence community, it’s pretty significant.  

And I’ll use the—I’ll use unclassified reports. There are certain reports that allow certain aircraft—that allows people to see deep, that we basically said, this unclassified reports on the news that have been withheld out there. So it’s like, OK, what do we see with their aviation assets, the Russian aviation assets? What does it mean? And I think that’s important. But it’s sort of like, OK, we’re trying to get your attention, OK? This is serious. This is what the support means. They understand it. You know, we had John Ratcliffe’s counterpart, Malyuk, was here last week. He knows, Ratcliffe knows. I made it very clear when I was in Kyiv the potential for this. It was almost like, well, OK, we hear you. Well, OK, no, we’re serious. We’re deeply serious about this.  

And it’s not to let them know that it wasn’t that we’re not serious. We let them know that this president is very serious about it. And we’re going to end this war. And this is one way to make sure you understand we’re serious about it. So is it hard? Of course, it is. But it was—they didn’t—it’s not like—Michael, it’s not like they didn’t know this was coming. They got fair warning it was coming. I told them and they were told last week as well. 

BRENNAN: It sounds like you’re saying you know there is going to be a significant impact on the battlefield. Do they have enough gear to get them until the summer? 

KELLOGG: You know, I think we’re—I think the pipeline’s—you know, they have an ability with the assets they’ve got to continue to prosecute the fight, to do it. But let’s be obvious—let’s be clear about it. I mean, as a military person I don’t care who you’re supporting. I don’t care if it’s Uganda, or Rwanda, or whomever. If you take away support like that, of course it’s important. We know that. But that’s one of the reasons why it was done. It’s almost like, you know, can I give you an example, a personal example? And you know, it’s—I’ve got two granddaughters. And their nickname for me is Pop-pop, OK? And sometimes when I talk to them, I’ll stray, you know? And they grab me like this, and they say: Pop-pop, listen to me, OK? This is one of those, listen to me.  

We’re serious about this. And you need to understand we’re serious about this. And this is one of the ways we made sure they understood. And I think as a result of that, they realize we’re serious. And they need to get serious about it as well. You know, that, Michael, and to go back a week, that fifty minutes in the Oval Office was entirely preventable. President Trump was very magnanimous for the first thirty minutes, I’d ask you to go back and look at the tape, not once, but two or three times, and everything he did. And that went—that went—as the term is, that went south real quick. 

BRENNAN: Mmm hmm. Jill here, and the senator. 

Q: Thank you very much, General Kellogg. Jill Dougherty from Georgetown University. 

I wanted to ask you about Russia. I believe you said that you—have the administration has seen a change in Moscow. Could you define exactly what that change is, because, at least publicly, it appears that President Putin has the same demands now that he had three years ago. Which would be, essentially, territory, they keep what they’ve got even if they don’t hold it. Zelensky goes. And no NATO. And there are probably others. But can you tell us specifically what is the change in Moscow?  

KELLOGG: Yeah, you know, that’s—you know, it’s a great question, because I think what you want to do—you have to—you know, I think leaders have to talk with one another. And President Biden didn’t talk to Putin for over two years. President Trump has. So to start, the change is we’re talking. Now, that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s important, that you’ve got leaders talking. The second is, of course they’re going to make their term sheet large. That’s why I made that comment about who knows what they’re going to ask about. But that’s a starting point. It’s not an end point.  

You know, I go back at the start of the SALT negotiations years ago, when I asked the leaders who were running the SALT negotiations—Ed Rowney was one of the guys who led that. And he said, understand how you negotiate with the Russians. You know, when you come into a room—two doors, you come into a room. You know, Americans come into a room and negotiate. We walk halfway across the room. The Russians come in, they stand on the side of the wall. So what do the Americans do? We go the other—we go another quarter way across the room. And we understand how they negotiate. We know this is going to happen. But the fact is that they’re talking is very, very important. And I think that’s the first step.  

So we say there’s a change, they’re willing to talk about it. And I think—so it’s not necessarily what the terms and conditions are. Look what President Trump has said about that. I mean, he’s—you know, he’s been pretty good about what he said. He said, basically, all options are on the table for the United States, where it wants to go. And he’s made that very, very clear to President Putin, when he talked with him, and when Steve Witkoff talked to him as well. So I think the very fact that you’re starting to talk is important because you don’t know where they’re at until you get that term sheet. And I think we’ve got a preliminary. We kind of know where they’re coming from and know what they want to do.  

We kind of need the same from the Ukrainians. And then you kind of put them together and you say to the president, our president, OK, Mr. President, this is what it looks like right now. This is what the picture looks like. Now, this is where we think—as a team, this is where we think that you can give and take and where you want to go. So are they—are we down to the absolute end state? No. But remember what President Trump said. He actually talked about the potential of getting territory back from the Russians. He said that. That’s a public comment from him. So— 

BRENNAN: Which territory? 

KELLOGG: Pardon? 

BRENNAN: Can you tell us which— 

KELLOGG: Well, he didn’t say. It’s almost like, you know, it’s—remember when the president said he was going to end the war in twenty-four hours? He didn’t say what day, what year. (Laughter.) So I think this is good, that they’re talking. And I think both sides talking is very, very important to get there. And, look, this is—let’s be very, very candid, there’s no love lost between Ukraine and Russia right now. But this war is a war that—and I’ve been over there—I mean, the loss of humans is critical. And in fact, by the way, just—and the reason I—and I know I’m diverting just a bit on that. I actually talked to President Trump on the campaign trail a little over a year ago. And we talked about this thing, the lost generation. It’s real.  

If you look at the demographics of Ukraine, I can show you where the demographics and the loss of military-age men at this time—twenty-five to thirty-five years old has gone down considerably, plus the amount of people that have left their country right now and middle-aged men—military-aged males as well. I mean, we’re talking over a hundred thousand. And so the Brits still feel that. They still talk about the lost generation. We don’t want Ukraine to be in that position where you’ve got a lost generation. 

But again, a long answer to a short question, the fact is we’re kind of getting the broad parameters of where the Russians are looking at, what they want to do. The president will see that. But you got to get both. You got to say: OK, this is what it looks like. OK, this is a ground view. And then put it together and say, OK, where do you think this is going to go from both sides. 

And we—look, we expect the Russians to be here. We expect the Ukrainians to be here. We want them to be here, and this—to end this war. And there’s long-term benefits for everybody for not only the stability of Europe, but it’s for us—on a geostrategic level, it’s a chance to break up this axis that we currently see that is global in nature, which is a real threat to the United States of America. 

BRENNAN: Terri (sp) had a virtual question, I think? 

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Steven Pifer. 

Q: Thanks very much, General, for the discussion here. Steve Pifer. I am affiliated with Stanford University and a former American ambassador to Ukraine. 

Sir, you talked about carrots and sticks. It does seem like the United States is applying some very heavy sticks against Ukraine with the cutoff of intelligence and the suspension of arms. Can you talk a little bit more, though, about the sticks we’re applying on Russia? Because at least publicly the Russians seem to be the much more recalcitrant party with a very inflexible negotiating position. You mentioned sanctions on shadow tankers. Has the Trump administration sanctioned additional tankers? You said something about seizing assets. Are we now moving to seize the Russian frozen bank assets? But what are the sticks we’re trying to apply on Moscow to get Russia to become more accommodating? Because right now it does look like we’re leaning pressure on—really on the Ukrainians but not on the Russians. Thank you. 

KELLOGG: OK. Thanks for the question, OK. And I’d challenge you with this: It’s almost a binary. It’s a question with a binary answer. Do we have a term sheet from the Russians broadly? Do we have a term sheet with the Ukrainians? The answer is yes and no. So when you look at applying the pressures, we understand the pressures, but we kind of understand the pressures we can apply—again, I remind everybody we’ve only been at this for forty-five days—to get there. But we know what we can’t apply pressure is where they want to go to. 

But they reached out fairly fast. Steve Witkoff went to Moscow, was able to talk with Putin for three hours. There was a call that was made between President Putin and President Trump. And we offered—when you talk about the pressures, the fact is when the Ukrainians came last week they had an invitation to sign a document in the Oval Office, have lunch with—they came to Washington, D.C., had that invite, and, frankly, walked out of here with nothing. So I challenge your notion about who’s being more reasonable right now because when you look at what is happening, I don’t see it the same way. 

I think that we’re going to get there. I think the options are to apply more pressures. I think that’s good. I don’t think it’s been done, but I think the opportunity is there to do it. And that’s going to be up to the president of the United States. 

BRENNAN: OK. If we—do we have time for one more, Terri (sp)? OK. I’m getting a wrap on time up here. But it sounds like you have a lot of people here who want to talk to you, so. (Laughs.) 

KELLOGG: OK. (Laughs.) 

BRENNAN: I’m going to—I’m going to leave it here for us today. Thank you all virtually for tuning in. Thank you, General Kellogg, as well, for your time and for taking questions. 

The video and transcript of this symposium will be posted on CFR’s website. And you can join for Session II, “Ukraine and the Future of European Security,” beginning fifteen minutes from now. Thank you. 

KELLOGG: Thanks, Margaret. 

BRENNAN: Thank you, General. (Applause.) 

(END) 

FIX: So welcome to the second session of today’s symposium, titled Ukraine and the Future of European Security. I’m Liana Fix. I’m the fellow for Europe here at the Council on Foreign Relations, and I’ll be presiding over this discussion. Thanks for staying with us for this, and there will be another panel afterwards. I’m more than delighted to discuss “Ukraine and the Future of European Security,” to discuss what General Kellogg has presented today morning, with a fantastic lineup of speakers.

Let me introduce first—he is going to join us virtually—this is Pavlo Klimkin—(inaudible, technical difficulties). He is foreign minister of—former foreign minister of Ukraine. He’s also a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hi, Pavlo.

We also have with us Philip M. Breedlove. He’s the former supreme allied commander Europe, and he is now a distinguished professor and CETS senior fellow at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech. Thanks so much for joining us.

And here on stage I have with me for Fiona Hill, who’s now a senior fellow at Bookings but formerly was the former deputy assistant and to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. She’s also a CFR member.

And we have with us Alina Polyakova, the president and chief executive of the Center for European Policy Analysis. A great panel here.

Let me start straight ahead with a couple of questions to you. This meeting is on the record, and then we will have enough time for questions and comments also from the audience. We have a big set of issues. Perhaps let me start with you, Alina, because you have authored a piece in Foreign Affairs—I think it was actually December 31 that it was published—(laughs)—just in time for the new year—where you argue that the Trump administration should pursue a maximum pressure strategy towards Russia. And it did seem, to some extent, in the first weeks of the administration that your advice was heard. General Kellogg argued this morning that the maximum pressure strategy continues, but now there are also sticks applied to Ukraine to come to the negotiation table. So what has changed, from your perspective? And how do you read the current strategy?

POLYAKOVA: Well, thanks so much, Liana. It’s always great to be part of these conversations at CFR, which I think tend to be quite insightful and revealing in various ways. Of course, the maximum pressure campaign continues. But it continues on Ukraine, not on Russia, is what we’ve seen. And that’s been a pretty profound, I think, shift in how the United States is pursuing its engagement with both Russia, Ukraine, and Europe. But I think that is an understatement, in the last week of events that we have all, I think, followed very, very closely.

So at the beginning of the administration I think there were multiple potential pathways that were being discussed by different individuals that were entering the administration, being appointed into various roles. One was—that seemed to be the trajectory early on—where we need to get the Russians to the negotiating table, but they had laid out their maximalist position, that they were not backing away from. So the question was how do we avoid a situation in which, you know, the Russians show up but it’s not in good faith, which is—tends to be the pattern of Russian negotiating, which is just negotiations for the sake of negotiations, to see what the other side is willing/able to offer, what the lines are, what the constraints are, But then there’s no—there’s no follow up, it’s not an actual negotiation. It’s just a way to assess your opponent.

The question is, how do we avoid that? My view has been always that the only way to avoid that vis-à-vis the Russians is to apply far, far more pressure on them to come to the negotiating table, make it painful for them, so that they have no other choice but to compromise. Because I think until we are in that situation, they have no incentive to compromise. I think the Russians and Mr. Putin think they’re winning. They certainly think they’re winning now. I was just looking at some Russian media, mainstream media, if you could call it that—state-owned propaganda outlets—in Russia this morning. And the rhetoric on the United States is shifting quite dramatically. You know, we’ve seen for decades Russian state media called the United States the enemy, the adversary, use all kinds of pejorative terms for the so-called West, as they say. Shifted pretty profoundly. And I think that’s always a signal that they see a major geopolitical shift happening right now.

So the administration has obviously moved away from pursuing that kind of negotiation tactic. And I think, as a result, we find ourselves in a much weaker position, as the United States. And then, on the other hand, we have seen a strategy of carrots for the Russians, and a strategy of sticks for the Ukrainians. You know, I hope that the carrots that we’re giving to the Russians right now, that are weakening our negotiating hand—because we’re basically playing with open cards, while the Russians are not. They have very clearly understood what we’re willing to give up, what we’re willing to give, because we’re just giving it all. And we can talk about what those things are. And I think, on the Ukrainian side, they are being pressured. They’re being pressured to probably accept a negotiation, eventually, that will not benefit them in the short, medium or long term.

And that I think we saw very much on display in the White House meeting last week, that I think we all watched and followed very closely the implications of. So I think that—what has shifted is that the administration’s policy has obviously gone in the maximum pressure direction towards Ukraine, and an incentive model to bring the Russians closer to the United States vis-à-vis the Russians.

FIX: Thank you, Alina. Now, Fiona, you have a lot of experience of negotiating with the Russians. You’ve been in Helsinki at that famous meeting between Trump and Putin, the one-on-one meeting. General Kellogg said today morning he understands, and the Trump administration understands, how the Russians negotiate. He told the anecdote that Russians are coming into the negotiation room and standing next to the doorways, the Americans are coming half the way into the room. What is—from your experience, what are the greatest pitfalls in negotiating with the Russian side that you see?

HILL: Well, first of all, I mean, I just want to commend the CFR for doing this, and actually also for being able to secure General Kellogg. And I know, because, actually, I think it was an extraordinarily important presentation. He was one thousand percent honest. And I worked with general colleague—Kellogg, he was a colleague, at the National Security Council in Trump 1.0. And he was just laying it all out for all of us. And I know Alina didn’t manage to make it in time, but I hope that she will listen to it afterwards. I think everybody should go back and listen to that again because there were some very important messages there from him.

Now, General Kellogg does know about the Russians and how they negotiate. He’s been around that block many, many times. And, you know, I think if General Breedlove was, you know, listening to this as well, and Former Minister Klimkin—Ambassador Klimkin, you know, I’m sure they’ll have some comments, particularly from the military perspective and from the on the ground in Ukraine. But I wouldn’t then, you know, attribute the views of General Kellogg, his analysis, to everybody else on the team around President Trump, because I don’t think everybody else there, including, with all due respect to Special Envoy Witkoff, have got that same experience.

And I can see Angela Stent here in the audience. And Angela’s often commented in the same way that Alina did, about, you know, the danger of giving carrots to the Russians. Depending on the texture of the carrots, they’ll either eat them or they’ll take them and hit you over the head with them. (Laughter.) And I think that that’s kind of, you know, one of the risks that we’re seeing at the moment, because what I’ve seen coming back in some of the pronouncements—again, not from General Kellogg but from some of the statements from Special Envoy Witkoff and others—is that they’ve taken completely on board both the Russian talking points and the Russian positions. I mean, earlier was the question—Margaret Brennan tried to get to this, other people did from the audience—and the question was asking about, what was the term sheet, you know, from the Russians.

I think we can see very clearly. First of all, “bilateral irritant” that was mentioned in one of the announcements is Russian code for absolutely every single thing that they’re angry with the United States about. So it’s not bilateral irritants from the United States’ point of view, because we mostly don’t pay attention to some of these issues. But it’s all of the—kind of the Russian positions. When General Kellogg, you know, was talking about the Ukrainian term sheets, I think the Ukrainians have been pretty consistent. Everything is a loss to Ukraine. Let’s be clear about this. Every single thing that Ukraine is having to negotiate with is a loss.

Every single thing. Every single thing is a concession because they’re the country that was invaded. And the Russians have made it very clear, which was also laid out in some of the discussion, that they want territory that they currently do not control. So is the concession from the Russians going to be that they’ll only take parts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, or Donetsk, Luhansk that they currently don’t control, and then they won’t go further? That would be, you know, not much of a concession, from the Ukrainian point of view. Every single thing that Ukrainians are being asked to do is to concede.

Now, I also understand from listening to General Kellogg very carefully—look, again, I just want to say, we should all be very grateful that he’s laid all of this out. It was very clear. That the Ukrainians obviously missed a beat because something was completely lost in translation. And, again, I think Zelensky made a fatal error by not having everything translated. And my advice from, you know, basically being in the administration, or any administration—all the people here who’ve worked in Foreign Service—would be: Do not negotiate, have a discussion, anything, that is not in your native language, no matter how you speak it. I say the same to Macron. If I was the Brits, I would have somebody translate from British to American all the time as well—(laughter)—because sometimes things are lost as well, just to be very clear.

And I know that, you know, Prime Minister Starmer was already here, and President Trump loved his accent. But have, you know, your American interpreter, you know, to be—because things are lost all the time. And I think that what Zelensky didn’t understand that he was being offered a treaty of sorts. That only actually occurred to me as I was listening to General Kellogg, because President Trump doesn’t abide by any of the contracts or treaties that were signed by any previous government. And when Zelensky said to President Trump—and I watched, actually, that press conference five times to try to kind of figure out where things went wrong. There were multiple points, but one of them was when President Zelensky pointed to your president, he kept saying to President Trump, who already signed agreements—either Obama or Biden. And President Trump cast those aside.

What President Trump was actually telling Zelensky is, you’re signing something with me. This will be the only thing that you’re signing, a basic exchange of letters, but it’s kind of a treaty of sorts. President Trump doesn’t care about the Budapest Memorandum from 1994. He wasn’t there. He doesn’t care about any of the other commitments or recognitions of Ukraine that have been made, or U.N. resolutions, because they weren’t made by him. And up until this point there’s been no agreement between Ukraine and President Trump. And that’s what we were being told. And I had a bit of a eureka moment sitting at the back when I kind of realized that that was the case.

And I don’t think that President Zelensky understood that, because, again, his English is not that good. I mean, even, you know, kind of, for those of us English speakers, we’re not always understanding the import because we don’t fully understand, as General Kellogg does. Because remember, General Kellogg has been with President Trump from the very beginning, from his first campaign. He understands him better than anyone. He’s still there with him. Other people don’t understand that in exactly the same way. And you have to have different levels of interpretation. What does President Trump himself mean, and what does the actual translation of the words mean? It’s the context and the content.

And that’s why I would kind of go back to your initial question, is I—with all due respect to Special Envoy Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and everybody else who went there—without any interpretation or context they have no clue what the Russians are actually talking to them about. Their interpretation is coming from directly speaking to Ushakov, Lavrov, and Kirill Dmitriev, who all speak excellent English, and who have been around this block forever, and who completely understand who they are, how they interact in their system, how the other system interacts. Remember, Kirill Dmitriev was at Harvard. He’s worked for a whole host of—Goldman Sachs, all kinds of other, you know, kind of Western entities. He knows exactly who he is, who he’s talking on behalf of, how far he can go. And his English is impeccable.

And so I think, you know, unfortunately—and this is what the Russians are telling us—I mean, if you look, as Alina is doing, at the Russian interpretation of all of this, you know, they’re being quite scathing. We haven’t even got the junior varsity on the team here. We’ve got the—you know, the intermural, or basically the pickup game. And they are thinking right now that they can manipulate this. Now, General Kellogg is saying, we’ll see when we get there. But, you know, at this point the United States is going out of the door with the Russians on their side of the table, not just reaching that point. And General Kellogg himself understands this, but I’m not so sure that the other people around him do.

FIX: That’s a very helpful analysis. Fiona, of both the speech of General Kellogg but also the past meetings. Let me turn now to Pavlo Klimkin. Thanks so much for joining us for this discussion. There has been some hope, from a Ukrainian perspective, that there could be a reset in U.S.-Ukraine relations after this meeting in the White House. Now it seems—and we’ve heard this again from General Kellogg today morning, that it is unclear how any reset would look like, that some of the negotiation levers that the administration sees it has towards Ukraine will be kept in their hands for longer period of time to try to use them not only for the economic partnership agreement or the minerals deal, but potentially also for other concessions that they want to see from the Ukrainian side. What is Ukraine’s strategy to react to that? And I know it’s tough to develop a strategy under such high pressure, but what would you recommend?

KLIMKIN: Good afternoon from Kyiv. We have to develop our strategy. And we have to get an answer. But if you talk to Ukrainians—and, I mean, not only in Kyiv, and I’ve been driving a lot around the country, it’s a sort of emotional shock for many, many people because, firstly, many welcomed the idea of peace through strength. But now people see a lot of strengths towards Ukraine and basically no strength towards the Russians. So someone should have, you know, exchanged the baskets with carrots and something else. It’s basically the sense if you’re not in Kyiv, if you just talk to people.

The second point, which worries me even more, it’s a kind of focus on eventual NATO expansion as a fundamental origin of that. And Putin has been talking about the origins. And it’s a fundamentally flawed understanding why the war is like that, and why the war had started. The reason for that is that anybody in Russia and anybody in the Russian leadership fundamentally reject the mere fact that Ukraine is there. Ukrainian history, Ukrainian language, Ukrainian statehood—basically everything.

And in 2014, when the invasion into the Crimea started, we were constitutionally a sort of non-bloc country. It’s really important to understand because the fundamental reason for that is that Russia sees us as a kind of ill-fated role, Russia and us as (long—as long ?) Russians. So if you kind of ask an AI app what to do if you need to eliminate (this odor ?), so you get—you get your answer. So if you ask a wrong question, and if you mention a set of wrong origins, you are fundamentally nowhere. And I’m afraid it’s partly what’s happening now.

Third point, we clearly understand that we need our European allies on our side. We need a strategy, sort of common strategy with them, because there is no way how European security or—European security architecture, but also by definition European security, can be there without Ukraine. Unfortunately, this point is coming down into the minds of many European politicians and also militaries, but not really into the European—into the European societies. There is a sort of clear asymmetry here. But what the new U.S. administration has already achieved is actually the Chinese talking directly to the Europeans and saying, yeah, of course, you should be at the table. Of course, Europe is important. So it’s the whole geopolitics now are kind of changing.

In our way, we are, of course, ready to show again that we need our allies. We are ready to enter into difficult negotiations, but not on our expense, and not over our head. What fundamentally would not work. Actually, both U.S. and Russia got us wrong in 2022, in the sense of our resilience, in the sense of our emotions, and in the sense of our understanding what is at stake in this war. And we understand that it’s about our existence as Ukrainians. So we are ready to engage in real conversation. Also, it’s a backdrop of these emotional spikes. But now if you talk to Ukrainians, just Ukrainians, not somebody from political classes or so, many people started saying, look, maybe it’s about Europe, and us about part of Europe.

But it’s a very dangerous development because it would lead to a total fragmentation of the West and probably the mere question what actually the West is about now. And our strategy in the coming weeks is, of course, to get back with our engagement, to repair what we can repair, and to build a decent conversation. And we are ready for that. But also to engage in every way possible with the Europeans. And we have a European summit now happening in Brussels. A number of ideas there. And it’s about how to include Europe as a fundamental, intrinsic part of the European reality, is how I see it now.

FIX: That’s very helpful. Thank you. And you mentioned two things which are so important, I think, the European strategy but also the China element in that. And I hope we can come back to that in the Q&A and in the comments section.

But, General Breedlove, if I could turn to you on the question of Europe. Europeans have been asked and invited by the Trump administration to take over the security guarantees question in Ukraine, right? So it seems that there is an idea for division of labor, that the United States negotiates the ceasefire and the Europeans secure the ceasefire. Now, Europeans have come to town asking for a backstop for that mission, although it’s unclear what exactly that backstop will look like. General Kellogg has also not specified it this morning. Under these conditions, would you recommend Europeans to go for the security guarantee, to go for a European mission in Ukraine? And how could this look like?

BREEDLOVE: Well, first of all, thank you all for having me. It’s a pleasure to be on stage with these two and with Pavlo as well. And before I go to your question, I just want to pass that, of course, I agree with what Pavlo has said, but I want to violently agree with a few points Alina and Fiona made, about how we’re being perceived in the world at dealing with the two sides of this issue. On one side, we’ve got a criminal aggressor. And in the world’s eye, we’re treating that criminal aggressor with kid gloves. On the other side we have a nation that’s been invaded, clearly the victim. And we seem to be dealing with them with a hammer. And so it’s—I don’t want to resurface all the conversation, but it’s hard for some of us who travel a lot in Europe to be able to sit down with our allies and discuss why this might be happening.

And I want to highlight two things. Right out of the gate we have given Russia huge policy wins. For decades and decades, Mr. Putin has wanted to deal with America about Europe without Europe. And we’ve always kept Europe in the middle of the conversation. And we fought hard not to allow Mr. Putin to establish this idea that he is above Europe, and he should be able to do European matters with the American president one on one, whoever the American president is. And we seem to now have caved on that, and that we are now doing business with Mr. Putin on Europe without Europe.

And in a similar fashion, since the winter of 2013 and ’14, when I was the SACEUR and Russia first invaded Crimea and then invaded the Donbas, we have all said that we will not deal about Ukraine without Ukraine. And now we are caving on that as well. So before the—before the negotiations even start we have given huge, huge policy concessions to Russia. And I don’t think we’re walking in the door with a strong hand when that’s the way we begin. So I’ll get off of that, and now get to the question you asked me. I just wanted to agree with what both Alina and Fiona had said, in my own words.

So, first of all, I applaud what Europe is doing, OK? So forever there has been some—and legitimate, I would add, complaints about how Europe has approached Article 3—not Article 5, but Article 3. Article 3, in a Georgia boy’s words, are that defense begins at home. In other words, these nations need to invest in themselves. Some people use the word wrong. They’re not paying. They don’t pay. They invest. And so these people are now really climbing on the stump and investing in their own militaries and their capabilities. So you can’t even have a conversation about Article 5 if you haven’t got Article 3 right. And I think we’re on our way to getting Article 3 right.

Article 4 is also not being taken care of right now because Article 4 says that the United States, as one of the allies—one of the allies—should be sitting at the table consulting with European allies about these matters. When Article 4 is declared, the allies of NATO come together and discuss. We don’t go off and have single combinations with the criminal aggressor about matters Europe. And so if we have Article 3 straight, if we get Article 4 straight, then it’s much easier to talk about what we need to do now. Which is, yes, maybe it’s a good idea that the Europeans are the bulk of the land contribution to what might happen to secure Ukraine’s future.

But America has to be a part of that as well. And I think we’ve sort of cleared the air, but early in these conversations one of our seniormost ministers sort of made an intimation that we would not article—we would not honor our Article 5 if something broke out. We’re telling the Europeans to go there, take care of this problem, and we won’t be with you if a dust up occurs with Russia? I think that’s—we’ve got to clean that up. We need to make a public, demonstrative, clear commitment to Article 5 as an ally in the NATO alliance.

FIX: Wonderful. Thank you, General. That has been excellent. First, Alina, do you want to come in with two fingers, and then we will open up for questions or comments from the audience?

POLYAKOVA: No, just a very quick comment to what General Breedlove just laid out on the backstop conversation. I think one of the epiphanies I’ve had recently in conversations with administration officials is that, just like the president sees the world very differently than perhaps many of us in this room, or the Ukrainians, and we need translation, there’s another element to this. Which is that it’s really hit me that he—and probably others around him—do not see Ukraine and NATO as connected issues. Meaning there’s a ceasefire in Ukraine. That’s one issue. And that’s what we’re trying to get to, from the perspective of the—of the president. And then there’s the NATO question, which is completely separate.

But of course, in Europeans’ minds these are deeply intertwined, interlinked issues, because of all the reasons that General Breedlove just laid out. We’re going to have a European-led coalition, may not be a full NATO coalition, five, six countries, you know, whatever that looks like, will the U.S. be there to protect and defend those forces in Ukraine, even if it’s not a NATO force? And so in the president’s mind tying NATO, Article 5, collective defense to the ceasefire in Ukraine is, like, completely incomprehensible. So he sees this as completely separate issues. And Europeans do not. So, to your question, I think, that you had posed, Liana, Europeans are coming asking for a backstop but, like, and it’s incomprehensible to the president as to why they’re talking about it.

FIX: Hmm. Yeah.

HILL: I want to do a two-finger to the—(laughter)—because it’s the global dimension of this as well. And I was actually, you know, heartened to at least hear general Kellogg, for the first time, frankly, of an administration, you know, official, really laying out the global dimensions of this, of China, North Korea, and also Japan being—and Japan, which I was not going to mention Japan, because this is why I’m raising this—and Iran being involved here, because this is important for our other allies—for Japan, and South Korea, and Taiwan, and many other countries out there watching all of this very closely.

But I was not heartened, you know, by the same issues that Alina is, you know, laying out here. When General Kellogg said that for President Trump these have always been, you know, before separate, that everybody was trying to keep North Korea, China, and, he said, Iran, and Russia all separately. Well, they’re not separate. They’ve become, you know, pretty fused together here. And that counts for Europe as well. You said it. You know, China is an important issue. Well, Europe and Europeans have their own relationship with China. China was the biggest single country investor in Ukraine before the war, and has then sided, you know, very consistently with Russia in this conflict. North Korean troops are in Europe. They’re not just in the Kursk region of Russia. They’re fighting in Europe for the first time. I think General Kellogg was absolutely 100 percent right that, are they preparing for something on the Korean Peninsula? South Korea and Japan have to worry about all of that.

So these have to be dimensions as well. And South Korea and Japan are watching this and, as I said, Taiwan and others, very closely. And then the Middle East. It was fascinating as well that General Kellogg said, you know, we all started getting involved in this with Saudi Arabia because of MBS. Well, yes, because they’re all watching Iran. And they’re watching, you know, how this has now become part of the Middle East conflict as well. The fact that meetings are taking part in Saudi Arabia, and in Turkey, and elsewhere just shows how things are really shifting here. So this isn’t just about Ukraine. You can’t just separate it off and then, you know, basically push Ukraine out the door, and figure out that you can then, you know, deal with this on, you know, the same kind of playing field as before.

FIX: Yeah, the global impacts there. General Breedlove, I’m going to pretend that I haven’t seen your two fingers, because I really—(laughter)—which is unfair, because you’re on screen, on Zoom. I know it’s unfair. But I will come back to you when we have first lot of questions, and you can—you can tie in what you wanted to say, because I really want to give our audience the opportunity to ask questions here. We have an audience here in Washington and on Zoom. And I will bring you in. Please identify yourself and also keep your question short. And if you can say to whom this question is directed, all the better. So I’ll take the first question from the room. Over here.

Q: I’m Alexandra Starr with International Crisis Group.

This is a question for Fiona. Why is Trump doing this? (Laughter.) You’ve worked with him for a long time. Well, you’ve had experience with him in the first administration. His comments during that press conference, you know, talking about everything that he and Vladimir Putin had been through together seems to speak to a psychological dimension to this that I’d be very grateful to get your comments on.

FIX: Fiona.

HILL: Well, look, I think General Kellogg also made some of the things, you know, very clear. President Trump is very interested in strength, and not in weakness. And, you know, if you go back again to that press conference, I think lots of things were very clear. It’s about respect. Remember, at one point when President Zelensky was asking him about, well, does nothing matter about what Obama or Biden, your presidents—you know, meaning United States presidents—have committed to in the past? You know, President Trump at that point lost his temper, basically saying don’t compare me with Presidents Obama and Biden. They were weak people. Nobody respected them. Everybody respects me.

So it gets back to—you mentioned Helsinki, which is kind of a painful episode, I think, for myself personally, and for many others, where President Trump has always made it very clear that the people who he sees as his peers are the strong men in the world. And that would be Putin. It’s not his staff. It’s certainly, you know, not his intelligence advisors or anything like that. It’s people like Vladimir Putin. He respects strength.

Now, I think, you know, General Breedlove is probably wanting to come in. And I remember actually being on a panel with him sometime before when he said, you know, a lot of the strength in Russia is illusory. You know, he commented on the—and you’ll remember this, General Breedlove—on the forces that the Russians had amassed on the border—180,000 200,000, you know, roughly. And pointed out that this was, you know, about the capacity of the Tennessee Volunteers stadium, for example. I think that was one of the ones that you used. I’ve been in that stadium. And, you know, when those people, you know, basically go out and kind of dissipate across a large area, it’s almost as if there’d be nobody there at all.

The strength of Russia at this point is more than, you know, it is in actuality. We haven’t mentioned, 870,000 Russian casualties—people killed in action and severely wounded. And I noticed, actually, General Kellogg made no mention of the Russian casualties. He mentioned the Russian—or, it was really Soviet—casualties in in World War II, and Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians, Belarusians, you know, you name it, Central Asians, Kazakhs, you know, and others fought in World War II as Soviet citizens. It wasn’t all Russian casualties. This is a staggering scale of casualties on the part of Russia because that’s what Putin is prepared to pay, the price he’s prepared to pay.

So I think in some respects Putin is strong in the sense that he’s willing to preside over a slaughter, which is something that clearly President Trump, and General Kellogg, and others are not, to their credit. But it’s a—basically, it’s a misreading on the part of, I think, you know, President Trump about who Putin is, and the way that Putin thinks about things. President Trump thinks that President Putin respects him. He wants him to respect him. He talks about this all the time. And I think, you know, most of us would be, sadly, you know, kind of reminisce—you know, kind of remiss if we didn’t realize that President Putin is playing that absolutely to the hilt. And that’s very unfortunate.

And of course, when President Zelensky tried to point that out, that was another reason that he got kind of bludgeoned in the White House. Anybody who points out, you know, kind of an unpleasant message gets absolutely and utterly bludgeoned. And at some point that message will become clear, when President Putin tries to manipulate something. But then, you know, I suspect that President Trump will blame other people and not blame President Putin.

FIX: Thank you, Fiona. I’ll give General Breedlove the opportunity to also quickly come in on that question.

BREEDLOVE: So I want to get to that two-finger I raised before as well.

FIX: That you can tie into. (Laughs.)

BREEDLOVE: You know, many of us remember when we were young, our parents said: People don’t care what you say. They care what you do. I’m often asked, what is our policy towards North Korea? Or what is our policy China-Taiwan? Or what is our policy about Iran? And I point out to them that these things are well stated. You can do a simple Google search and you will see that policy. But then I make them angry because I say, none of that really matters because people don’t care what you say. They care what you do. Our North Korea policy, our Iran policy, our Russia, China-Taiwan—all the policies in the world are now really being written every day in Ukraine. The world is watching what we do towards our commitments to Europe and Ukraine, about European security. So you can have all those other things written you want, but people are watching what we do.

It’s an interesting point that Fiona brings up about casualties and costs. I believe right now that Russia needs a ceasefire worse than anybody. They need it worse than anybody. They’re backing up in the last two days in the Donbas. And they’re throwing bodies at Kursk in an amazing way. They have now asked North Korea twice to send soldiers to help them recapture sovereign Soviet—or, excuse me—Freudian slip—(laughter)—sovereign Russian land, OK? So twice now they are asking North Korea to help them retake Russian land. That should tell you a lot about the state of the Russian army. They desperately need a ceasefire. And they want us to guarantee that ceasefire via these agreements, so that they can refit, rebuild. It’s going to take them three, four, maybe even five years to get really ready again, because their army has been decimated so badly. But they’ll—you know, unless we—unless they run into something hard, unless the bayonet runs into something hard, they will be back.

FIX: Thank you, General. I think we now have a question—or, we take another one from the room. So the lady over here.

Q: Thank you. Christina Segal-Knowles, former National Security Council.

I was interested in taking conversation back to the China dimension. I think we heard from General Breedlove that he sees connections here, but then when you turn to his comments on how are they putting pressure on Russia he talked about, for example, sanctioning the shadow fleet. China has clearly underwritten the Russian war effort, both through supply of materials and also because it is the purchaser, and increasingly the major purchaser, of Russian oil, keeping the economy afloat. I wondered, how should we think about—is it possible to bring about a lasting peace deal without a Chinese dimension? Is it possible to put maximum pressure on Russia without having China at the table, or in the conversation? And how should we think about the strategy in that context?

FIX: I would—thank you so much. I would like to give this question to Pavlo Klimkin, because I think it would be particularly interesting to have an answer from the Ukrainian perspective there, how you see and Ukraine sees the China dimension. Because I think there has been partly an ambiguous policy towards China from the Ukraine’s perspective throughout this war.

KLIMKIN: China was and is helpful to Russia in supplying basically everything beyond lethal stuff. But I also believe the Chinese are kind of not worried on Russia being eventually off hook, because they believe the level of dependence—and not just trade dependence, because Russia has 31 percent of export to China—39 percent of export and 31 (percent) of import. But in the sense of technology it’s basically a real dependency now. But even if you go to a normal Russian land bridge, in a kind of Russian town in the middle of nowhere, you can get now a deposit in Chinese currency. It’s something fundamentally different.

But the Chinese will be playing and are playing extremely smart towards Europe, now kind of going towards Europe and saying, look, guys, see? I mean U.S. is not reliable anymore. And with us, you have reliability. You have trade reliability. You have security. You have all kind of dimensions around Eurasia. Why not just start elevating our partnership? And the Chinese are also smart, understanding their possibilities and being engaged for the first time ever in their history in talking about European security, about Ukraine, or about everything else. And not just talking, with all kind of their initiatives, but probably being present. Not at the level of troops or so but probably monitors.

And the Chinese present at higher scale in the Western Balkans. Lukashenko is also under the umbrella. And probably they are instrumental, in the sense of delivering on his independence. So Ukraine would be extremely important for them, in the sense of understanding their future presence. So if they are ready to elevate their engagement with Europe, and now they feel the moment, if they are able to elevate their presence in the Central and Eastern Europe, they are in a fundamentally different position in Eurasia. So I believe the Chinese will try to use—to use this chance. The Chinese understand that if we go towards the West, it’s about the West to define what is possible and not possible in the sense of our security. So for them to be present in the European security is something fundamentally they would be—would be willing to go for. So it’s the real moment for the Chinese. And I believe they will use this opportunity at the full speed.

And last point, who could have imagined us and North Koreans fighting in the Russian Kursk region three years ago? It was something totally mind-blowing. The Chinese clearly understand that security is now—I mean, can’t be seen in fundamentally geographical terms. They see it globally. And for them, it’s exactly the moment. But it’s also about the U.S. credibility. We have now four areas where Russia would push to restrain our sovereignty. It’s about territory. It’s about our potential to defend ourselves. It’s about our military forces and technologies. It’s about our future choice, NATO and the EU, but also how the future Ukraine should look like, in the sense of what kind of Ukraine.

So in this sense, it’s also a moment where the Chinese would see the results of these negotiations as a fundamental weakness or strengths, in the sense of directions. And the Chinese will use it fully. I mean, believe me, they are good in analysis and they are good in feeling that the moment is there. There is a fundamental concept of the Chinese qi energy. It’s a kind of if you feel this moment or not. And I believe they do.

FIX: (Laughs.) Thank you. And let’s just add to that that, in some European capitals, there certainly is a temptation to use China as a hedge against the potential negative consequences, tariffs towards Europe, by the Trump administration.

Let’s take one more question from the virtual room, from Zoom.

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Ambassador Peter Galbraith.

Q: Thank you. I want to—this has been terrific. And, Fiona, I especially appreciate your comments about negotiating in language, having done that in the Balkans in the 1990s. It’s a huge question.

But I’ll preface this by saying we’re seeing very radical things from the Trump administration domestically—Elon Musk, DOGE, and so on. And therefore I wonder, General Breedlove, whether what we are seeing are actually concessions or a reorientation of U.S. foreign policy to an alliance of the strong, and where Trump can get what he wants—namely, to be part of the—of the—of the nexus of Russia, North Korea—you remember all the talk about the love letter from Kim Jong-un—and Iran, noting that at the time he applied maximum pressure on Iran he said he regretted doing it, or he had reservations about doing it. And the Russians recently have been saying they’d like to patch things up between the U.S. and Iran.

At the same time as he’s talking about—you know, he’s repeatedly critical of NATO, talked about pulling out of it. And possibly getting into a conflict with Europe if he, in fact, goes ahead and uses military force to seize Greenland. And perhaps he would even see letting Russia have what it wants in Ukraine as a quid pro quo for letting him take Greenland. I know it’s radical. We live in radical times.

FIX: Thank you. Yeah, so let me boil down the question too is this tactics in negotiations, or is there a strategy behind it, a strategic realignment, or reorientation? General Breedlove.

BREEDLOVE: So I’ve told a lot of people in Europe that if anybody comes to you and tells you they know what President Trump is thinking, you should put down your pencil and turn off your recording device. And I’ll be the first to say, I cannot tell you what President Trump is thinking here. But observing what’s happening, you used the term, Mr. Ambassador—and thank you for the question—reorientation. I have a much more simplistic view of this. I haven’t read his whole book, but a friend of mine gave me a copy so that I could read chapter six, about how he does negotiations. And when he—things I remember from that chapter is, set an abnormally or unusually high bar so that when you can back away from it you’re seen as a good guy in the negotiation.

So I look at a lot of these things, Mr. Ambassador, that you’re talking about, are grenades that have been thrown out on the table. And after they explode, we all see how it sorts out afterwards. So I take everything that is said, these very explosive kind of things that they said—have been said, as just that explosive grenade, and let’s get to the more serious conversation after they clear. This morning I was on another show—I’m sorry—(laughter)—and I got hit with the question that all of a sudden there was a statement that we might want to remove the SACEUR from being an American officer. And I said, you know, having been the SACEUR, I have some ideas about that. But I told them, I said: Listen, we need to let the dust settle. This could be Russian disinformation. When you see something that out of orbit, you should really just take the time to let the dust settle.

FIX: Good.

HILL: Liana, could I just say one quick thing about this? Because I do actually agree with General Breedlove that, you know, there’s a lot of grenade throwing here, cluster bombs actually more than just grenades. (Laughter.) And we can think of some other additions to the end of cluster as well—(laughter)—which is a result of all of this. But I think the problem is that other people do take it as a reorientation. And what we’re seeing now is our allies and our not-so-allies, adversaries and others, adjusting to this, just like the conversation about China. And other people have agency here. It’s not just one guy and one guy’s thoughts.

First of all, there are 330 million Americans. But there are 550 million Europeans. And there are eight billion people on the planet who are all making, you know, if they’ve got some information here, their own decisions and their own analyses about what is happening and how it affects them. So once you’ve blown things up you can’t necessarily, you know, put them back together again. And you can’t backtrack often, you know, from some of the positions that you’ve put out there. Because, I mean, the Russians are already acting accordingly, and lots of other people are as well.

FIX: Mmm hmm. Great. Thank you, Fiona.

We’ll take one more question from the room and one more question from online.

Q: Thank you. Benjamin Schmitt, University of Pennsylvania.

I just want to make a couple of points on the sanctions discussion that we heard earlier from General Kellogg. He’s mentioning that we put a maximum pressure campaign through designation of hulls of Russian channel fleet vessels. Yet, as he said himself, the enforcement has been lacking. I think that’s ongoing, but at the same time we’re also seeing what I think is to, you know, the rest of your points on a potential strategic realignment with the Russian Federation, when we see that there’s been notions that Trump has actually sent his envoy, Richard Grenell, to Switzerland a number of times to try to negotiate a return of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany, which is ludicrous. And there cannot be a return to business as usual in energy because, again, these—you know, we’re talking a lot—obviously, this is a Ukraine forum.

But the Russian Federation is a malign actor well beyond Ukraine. There is active and ongoing sabotage operations, subsea cable cuts, subsea pipeline incidents, assassinations, all of these sort of things going on across the West that do, as President Zelensky said, come back and impact us here in the United States as well. So what can we do to kind of head off this strategic realignment? I don’t think there’s any chance that we will actually have a, quote/unquote, “reverse Nixon” and peel Russia to our side against China. I think they’ll just pocket the win and move on. But any thoughts on this, and how we can actually reorient ourselves to push back on this?

FIX: Thank you so much. This has been reported about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, by the German Bild-Zeitung, which Grenell so far has denied. But I would like to give the question of sanctions to you, Alina, because there’s—and add one more, if I may, to your plate. (Laughs.) First of all, how much more could be done on sanctions with Russia? You have done some proposals on that. But also, could you comment on the Russian frozen assets? It almost seemed like General Kellogg in his presentation today morning was implicitly supportive of the European position to use the Russian frozen assets as leverage for Russia to adhere to a ceasefire. And to say, we will not take them now, but if you break a ceasefire then we take them? Which has been criticized by some economists, among others Irina Bokova, as too weak of a position. I would love to hear your views on that.

POLYAKOVA: No, thanks for that. I think I would just frame what you asked about sanctions, what can be done there, we haven’t used the full force of our sanctions abilities and enforcement abilities, as Ben just said. Certainly in the Russian energy sector, but also on the broader financial sector. The Biden administration, on its way out through executive order did more of that. Why they waited until the very last minute, I don’t know. But there’s still room for more. I think the question, to my mind, is how are we going to enforce all this when we’re also at the same time, you know, firing a lot of people that work on that? Because that’s a whole machinery that has to be set up. I don’t—I think Fiona and everyone else in this room knows that very, very well. So I don’t see much of a direction in which this administration is preparing for that.

In fact, they’re preparing for the opposite, to Ben’s point. It seems to provide sanctions relief to the Russians, as part of this ongoing incentivizing with carrots strategy, if you want to call it that. But I think there’s also kind of an interesting element that’s emerged in the conversations here about this perception of weakness and strength, right? And it struck me that there’s a similarity between how this administration is carrying out its current approach to Ukraine and how the Russians are carrying out their approach to us. Meaning that, to Fiona’s point on how President Trump thinks about strength and weakness and respect, if you show weakness, what happens is they just keep pushing more.

So I think now that Zelensky has come back to the table, which he has no other choice. He must come back to the table, as Pavlo also said. But what that signaling is that the U.S. is going to keep pushing more and more, because now he’s seen in a weak position. And when you’re in a weak position, that means you have plenty you can still push on, right? So it’s actually going to increase the pressure, not decrease it, in my view. And the Russians are doing the exact same thing. With all of these incentives and carrots that we’re giving them, and will continue to give, they see a massive historic opportunity, in my view. They’re thinking about geopolitics. They’re thinking about restructuring the—and having a seat in the future of Europe’s security order, and beyond that, I think.

And they are perceiving us as weak because we’re giving things away, which, to them, signals we’re going to keep pushing to see how far we can get. And they’ve obviously wanted regime change in Ukraine for a long time. And they have gotten us to talk about that now, right? This is their, like, ultimate goal. They can get rid of Zelensky, put in someone that’s going to de facto give them political control of Ukraine. So there’s a strange similarity here, right? Except the Russians perceive us as—perceive us as weak right now, and we are perceiving Ukraine as weak, and both sides are pushing. And I think that’s really, really troubling, when you kind of recognize that.

And we’re talking about these geopolitical shifts. And I agree that Beijing sees this in geopolitical terms. The Russians see it in geopolitical terms. And everything that Pavlo said about China’s opportunities is really befuddling, because there’s only one thing that we know this administration has been very clear on, the president has been very clear on, is how much he sees China as the key problem for the United States. Yet, everything we’re doing right now in Ukraine, vis-à-vis our allies, vis-à-vis the economic wars that we’re setting up, it is giving China a massive, historic opportunity to emerge as the major victor of this war, having a foothold in Europe. I think that is something that will happen unless things shift.

Really, we’re setting ourselves up for another confrontation from position of weakness, not a position of strength vis-à-vis China. It’s also moving the potential military confrontation over Taiwan closer and closer in time from the Chinese perspective, right? And so that’s, like, the thing we want to avoid, but everything we’re doing is speeding up, I think, Chinese decision making and when they will have the opportunity to grab Taiwan. And that is really befuddling, you know? And it signals to me, again, that certainly probably the president, maybe others in the administration, are not thinking about this in geopolitical, interconnected terms, as we’re talking about it here.

They’re seeing very separate issues that, in their minds—in some of their minds, certainly—are probably not connected to each other. Which, of course, is not the reality that we live in. But that is the perception. And so the question is how do we engage and how do we work with this White House, which I think we should, frankly—we should want the president to succeed. Any U.S. president, we should want him to succeed. But there’s a huge understanding gap here in the perception of the world and how certain actions have consequences that is just not coming together.

FIX: Can you also quickly say something about the frozen assets?

POLYAKOVA: Yeah, sorry about that. You know, the frozen assets part, you know, that’s been a befuddling—(laughs)—situation in Europe, in my view. Europe really needs to get money fast. And we’re seeing some of that happening in Germany and at the EU level as well. Those assets are just sitting there. Take them. Use them, now. You need the money. Ukraine needs the money. It’s right there. It’s not going to cost you anything. I think the concerns that are being raised about the implications of this, and is it precedent setting, the concerns raised by some, you know, economists that you mentioned, can be addressed.

You know, the best paper that I’ve seen on this is—and work on this is by Philip Zelikow, who wrote a paper a couple of weeks ago on the Hoover website that really takes a deep look as to what the situation is right now, because it’s changed in three years. The assets have been moved around. And they’re sitting as cash holdings, which also means they’re not making any money. Like this 300 billion (dollars) that can be invested and be earning interest rates, and it is not. So there’s also all kinds of questions about the mismanagement of these funds, basically, that could be actually also making money, far more interest rates. But I don’t understand, frankly, why there’s so much opposition in some parts of Europe against the assets. That is low, low hanging fruit.

FIX: And it’s the question of will it be that leverage not to break a ceasefire. We have to come to an end, so I will give Fiona a quick thirty seconds last word here on the panel, because we have another great panel that is coming up in the end next. OK, Pavlo, thirty seconds for Fiona, thirty seconds for Pablo, and then we will conclude, because we have another great session coming up in just fifteen minutes.

HILL: I think there’s an important point here, because we’re all members of Council on Foreign Relations, one way or another. So we tend to see the world from a foreign policy and a geopolitical perspective. And we heard from General Kellogg earlier this morning that that’s not President Putin—or, rather—President Trump—I always make that slip—(laughter)—because, you know, sometimes they see the world in the same ways, but very different ways. Because Putin does see it geopolitically, but Trump sees it economically and from a trade perspective. He doesn’t want a war with China over Taiwan. He’d give up Taiwan in a heartbeat for a bigger deal, a trade deal. And that’s essentially what he was telling Zelensky, that he needed to get with the program. I mean, again, it was very clear, from what General Kellogg said that Zelensky made a mistake because Trump sees the world in terms of everybody making some money and everybody getting something out of it.

And if there’d been a deal signed on the minerals with the United States, with Trump and Zelensky, then everybody could have made something out of that. That’s what he’s trying to say. And he’ll make a deal with Russia. There’ll be all kinds of economic deals. He did that 1.0, the same kind of thing, looking for deals. And it’s also what he’s looking for with China. So I think we have to just orient ourselves in a different way and realizing that we’re all probably—(laughs)—not on the same page as where Trump is as well. And this explains, getting back to some of these questions, why there’s a disconnect all the time. And he does see this as a big deal between Russia, the United States, and China. That is how he sees the world, the big three sitting down and making deals.

FIX: Yeah. Yeah, let me give just very quickly, Pavlo, the opportunity to say a very few last sentences, and then we will wrap this up. Pavlo.

KLIMKIN: Yeah, one sentence about sanctions. Sanctions are actually quite good. The problem is the implementation. It’s a set of lost opportunities. And now you can forget about any sort of real sanctions in the future towards someone else. You can play with tariffs, but playing with sanctions is over. No credibility. And what is happening with the assets, what Alina has just said, is a kind of joke for many countries, and I know it. In one sentence, about our stakes now. So we are talking about why the Russian aggression against Ukraine had started and has happened. And Putin is talking in his own way about the origins of the war. And if you just want to have a break, so fundamentally in some moment it would backfire. And it would backfire for everyone, in the sense of lost in translation, and would be backfire also in the sense of total loss of credibility. And this is a fundamental law, and the world should understand.

FIX: Thank you, Pavlo. I will—thank you. Thank you so much. Those were very good last words here, but also great lead over to the next session, which will discuss also Ukraine’s economic needs, reconstruction, and so on. So have a coffee break. Thank you so much for our panelists for joining us today. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

CREBO-REDIKER: So welcome and thank you for sticking around for our third panel today. I think we had a good segue from the last panel into the conversation on “Reconstructing Ukraine.” This is, obviously, session three, Council on Foreign Relations, “Reconstructing Ukraine,” as our symposium closes.

I’m Heidi Crebo-Rediker. I’m a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations. I’m delighted to have two of the leading thought leaders and experienced negotiators, and basically my go-to people on all things Ukraine here in Washington.

This is on the record. And I think what we’re going to do for the first thirty minutes or so is have a conversation amongst ourselves about the—about literally what we need to do, how we need to think pragmatically, what has been done, what is ongoing, because there has been reconstruction going on throughout the second round of the war, post-2022. And so I want to touch on that, as well as what the plans are in the future and what still needs to be done.

So, introducing Natalie Jaresko. She is the former finance minister of Ukraine from 2014 to 2016. And she’s the—she’s also a CFR member. But she’s also the chair of the Aspen Institute in Kyiv right now.

Vlad Rashkovan is the—is on the board of the IMF. He represents Ukraine. Has done so since 2017. And he also represents a number of other European countries on the board of the IMF, deeply involved with the conversations around the official sector and private sector components of the reconstruction question.

So we’re not going to touch on the politics because both of my guests today have some—have some lines that they are not able to cross. And so we’re going to stick to that question of reconstruction.

And starting with the fact that the World Bank, together with the government of Ukraine, the European Commission, and the U.N. just released their updated figure of what it will likely cost to reconstruct Ukraine. And that number is $524 billion. That is for social infrastructure, schools, hospitals, energy, transportation, you name it. And I want to emphasize the fact that the reason that they have $524 billion of reconstruction needs is because Russia has destroyed 524 billion (dollars) of Ukraine’s social and energy and even cultural infrastructure as well. So that is why we’re here to talk about reconstructing Ukraine.

To level set, I think we are also optimistic. In a postwar situation it’s rare that you have the talent and the opportunity, as Ukraine is on the path towards EU integration. It has a lot of friends and a lot of support from official institutions, from the IMF, World Bank, EBRD, EIB, you have bilateral support, you have multiple different fora that have gathered in order to provide support for Ukraine. So I’d like to get a sense—and I’ll start with you, Vlad, on—just level set. What have we seen so far in terms of support for Ukraine in the midst of this horrible war that has been brought about by Russia’s 2022 invasion?

RASHKOVAN: Thanks, Heidi, and thanks, CFR, for organizing this event, especially in this time. There has been a lot of things done in the last few years. And, you know, I keep my Moleskine. And from start of the war, it’s the twelfth edition of the Moleskine, which is notes. Means that a lot has been at least written there. And it’s a road to victory, not only to peace. And so the—I think one of the major things which happened in the last three years is acceleration of the Ukrainian path to European Union. And I would remind that what we see now is an attack on Ukraine by Russia, brutal attack. I would say started in 2004 when Ukraine chose the European Union vector of development and decided, functionally, to run away from Soviet Union. And the actions of what European Union did, what Ukraine did in the last three years, in order to accelerate this process, are remarkable. And this was a part of the previous discussion.

The second thing is IMF program. And a program for Ukraine now has been approved in March 2023. And this is the first ever IMF program for the country which is an active war. And the program is done under the framework of exceptional uncertainty—lending under exceptional uncertainty. And I think what we have, at least in the last weeks, is pretty fitting to these words. But the program is working. We just came back from Kyiv, and—where they reached the staff-level agreement on the seventh review. And IMF program is in the center of the—of a lot of the different financial flows to Ukraine, is a catalyst for other programs. It’s not—it’s not so big by size. It’s big. You know, it’s $15 billion. But the total amount of money in which Ukraine received already during the war—I’m speaking only about the budget we support, not mentioning the military and humanitarian—is $120 billion for three years. And Ukraine played—IMF plays an important role in that.

There are other institutions who did a lot. World Bank used a lot of the instruments, the trust funds, in order to route the money from the U.K., from Japan, from other countries. The EBRD created a platform, co-investment platform with 19 different DFIs, G-7 and European DFIs, in order to co-invest in Ukraine. And EBRD is playing the role of the lead investor there, as one of the biggest investors in Ukraine. And therefore other DFIs outsource the underwriting, you know, to EBRD. EIB does a great job on Ukraine. But all of these, you know, together with the EU facility, 50 billion euro program, which has been approved by the European Union, and 50 billion ERA initiative, all of this is done somehow under the umbrella of the IMF program.

And there is a lot has been done in terms of building also infrastructure for reconstruction. There is an agency for reconstruction, was created in Ukraine. Under the IMF program we substantially improved the—so-named, like, public investment management framework for Ukraine, which is also important for future investors and for future economic treaty, which General Kellogg was saying. I think it will be very important for—also for U.S. investors, you know, to follow—I mean, to see the results of that.

CREBO-REDIKER: Thank you.

Natalie, can I ask you the same question, but also try and give us a sense of what it left to be done in terms of preparing, hopefully, for a period where we have a reduction in hostilities and aggression against Ukraine, and an opportunity for a peace that can actually underpin Ukrainian growth.

JARESKO: Thank you very much, again, for having me today. Thank you, Heidi.

I’m going to go back a little bit and give you a little color on those numbers that we talked about, so we all have a sense of the size of what we’re dealing with. First of all, that World Bank number, the 524 billion (dollars) is for only the war beginning with the full-scale invasion. So, three years. I want everyone to understand that it’s more than that because this war has been going on for eleven years. And we have no idea today, in the temporarily illegally occupied territories, what kind of damage has occurred. We don’t know what, in Mariupol, is the extent of the damage, what truly has been rebuilt. So that number is an understatement to begin with.

Second, I think it’s important to note that that number increases daily. And yesterday they bombed a hotel with a ballistic missile. They have promised to go from 150 drones to 500 a night. And this is in light of the intelligence being shut off, which I think you’ll see naturally increased activity, increased destruction. The last point I’ll say about the 524, to give you a sense of how large it is, it’s about 2.8 times 2024 GDP of Ukraine. And it’s estimated that that amount would be invested over ten years. Certainly, it’s important, I think, also to note that this isn’t about just when peace comes or when there’s a cessation of violence. As Vlad said, urgent reconstruction has been going on every day since the first day.

And there are multiple reasons for that. One is just pure need. When the Russians blow up the Kakhovka Dam, you need to get water back to people in the southern part of the country who’ve been denied potable water. Other parts of it have to do with, you know, creating a sense of confidence amongst the people that we have the capability to build back. So after Bucha and after Irpin, it was important to rebuild quickly to show people that we have that capacity. I think it’s also important to note that, for Ukraine, it’s important in terms of giving those refugees, seven million or more, confidence that there’s going to be something to come home to. And so, you know, when you look at what’s been done, the number one damage point and the number one rebuilding point has been housing. And there’s a reason it’s housing. That’s what would describe.

I agree with Vlad that a great deal has been put in place in terms of structures. Ukraine has moved very far along in terms of creating the public investment management system, in producing something called the DREAM system, which is a portal developed by civil society, together with the government, that has, right now, over 10,000 or so projects inputted. Donors can use it to identify—if I want to work on school bunkers or I want to work on hospitals, you can try to identify partners there. And it can also be used for monitoring going forward, as these projects move forward. I think it’s important to note that Ukraine does this not only in line with their needs, but also with a couple other goals.

And that is EU accession. So reconstruction is supposed to also fit the commitments of reaching the EU acquis. And that’s a very difficult thing, as you can well imagine. Rebuilding a road per EU standards and rebuilding a road per, you know, kind of emergency standards in Ukraine are very different, and very different cost. Not to mention that the legal basis is not fully there to use EU standards yet in Ukraine. But that’s an element. I think Ukraine is very focused on inclusivity and on sustainability. So it is building back better, to the extent that we understand the society that we have today and will have tomorrow. Private sector engagement. There is no way that bilateral governments, international financial institutions will be able to afford, or should be in a position to afford, that $524-or-more billion. There should be a significant and substantial private sector contribution.

I think the challenge for Ukraine today is very much in keeping people aware that we need to do this now, not to wait. And so that’s why I’m going to go back to it doesn’t have to be the cessation of violence. There may be areas you want to avoid that are on the front line, but there are many things that can be done today, again, in restoring medical, in restoring—in putting bunkers into schools. There are things that need to be done today, and can be done. I think the donor platforms and the systems that have been put in place, to some extent, are probably all we’re going to get in terms of systems and institutions. But I think Ukraine is prepared for that, both with its internal recovery agency and its Strategic Investment Council, the work that they’re doing to create a single project pipeline.

I think challenge is not in institutions. The challenge in Ukraine is capacity. This should not be, and it will not and cannot be, according to Ukrainian law, a centralized system. It has to be decentralized. Ukraine has a very decentralized governance system. And that’s why in that DREAM portal they’re being encouraged to bring projects in, even if they’re not at the top of the central government’s list. At the same time, the capacity at that local level is much, much less than at the central level. And I won’t even say that at the central level there’s sufficient capacity today. Yes, EBRD and World Bank are putting in two different centers, a project preparation unit and a project preparation facility. I can’t tell you what the difference is. But it won’t be enough. And there is a labor shortage in Kyiv right now. And so the skillsets to do this—project management skillsets, appraisal skillsets, all of those things are in dire need. To move projects along you have to have more than a desire and an idea. You have to have feasibility studies. You have to do a lot more than just identify the problem.

So from my perspective, the international community is there. They’re doing things now. They’re doing them consistently. You know, there’s about $7-10 billion probably of work being done a year. I think the needs have been outlined at 14 to 17 billion (dollars) a year. So it comes a little bit short. I think that the governments have done well in trying to provide war insurance for that private sector contribution. So you’ve got an EBRD project, you have the American DFC project, there are various ways to accelerate insurance available to private sector. But right now, I think what it what we need to do is increase Ukraine’s capacity and create the platform, create the environment that will get the private sector back in—slowly, until cessation—but back in one way or the other.

CREBO-REDIKER: Can I just pick up on the important point of the private sector investment, because the numbers are large and the opportunity is actually enormous, because it goes far beyond the critical minerals and rare earths, the titanium, the uranium, the gallium, you know, the lithium. Ukraine has enormous high-tech talent, leading cyber talent. It has a mining and metallurgy trained workforce that is, you know, largely out fighting a war right now. But it also has the leading edge of defense technology. And they’re building this whole mil-tech valley with, literally, the cutting edge of where the future of warfare is and the overlay of artificial intelligence, the creation of anti-electronic warfare systems, how you actually prosecute and innovate on the ground. I think it’s really an under—an underreported story of just how far Ukraine has been able to provide for its own ammunition and its own defense.

So I think, you know, when you think in a broader picture of what Europe needs to do and how Europe needs to actually, on a cost-effective basis, build up its own industrial—defense industrial base, Ukraine seems like an obvious opportunity for actually making that investment. So how do you get the private investors back to look at those opportunities?

JARESKO: I mean, I also want to make sure that we understand that even if defense-mil technology is not a part of reconstruction, it provides for jobs, it provides for exports, hard currency, and it provides for tax revenues in a country that’s going to need them, right? So, I mean, all of that contributes, in its own way, to reconstruction.

I think on the defense-mil side, it’s becoming—countries are becoming very aware, through their militaries, through the Pentagon, through others, that the Ukrainians have been able to, in a very accelerated fashion, not only learn what’s useful and successful in the field, but also to adapt. And, you know, if you take Pentagon as an example, that adaptation cycle is much, much longer. And it’s unrelated, let’s say, to what’s happening on the battlefield. And so what Ukraine offers is direct experience, day by day. As the Russians, day by day, change their electronic warfare, the Ukrainians are responding with theirs. And so I think—on the mil side I think that community, and you’re seeing venture capital funds focused on this, is starting to develop. And I think the world is becoming cognizant of that value.

I think overall we need to get private sector to understand that not all of the country is equally at risk. There is, through the National Security Council of Ukraine, a map of Ukraine that shows the data of what’s happened to date, where the bombings have been, where the destruction is. You can do it—you can look at it by sector, you can look at it by region. And I think we need to be starting to show that, you know, not all of Ukraine is equally at risk. I’m not saying not all of Ukraine is at risk, because it is—the ballistic missiles reach, you know, the border of NATO, for sure. But it’s not equally at risk.

I think the second thing is we’ve got to continue to create confidence that this is not the country that we all talked about for the last ten years. In other words, Ukraine has changed since, I’ll say, 2014, changed psychologically since 2004. But from a reform standpoint, from an anticorruption standpoint, from an institution standpoint, from the role of civil society in monitoring this government, any government, Ukraine is a different place than it was prior to 2014. And I think too many members of the private sector, in particular, kind of tell stories from pre-2014 about corporate raids or about legislation that’s already been changed. And there’s not a good script that’s been developed to say, it’s not that anymore.

There has been a piece of work done by the Ukrainian Bar Association that’s very valuable for corporates to see that that legislation that’s changed, but we have a—Ukraine has a big job to do to convince people that this is not the country you thought it was back in the 1990s or the 2000s. The governments since 2014—we were, you know, part of that—have proven that those reforms are stable. As an example for Vlad, I mean, when we came into government I think we had to close about 100 of 300 banks because it was collapsing. The system wasn’t properly regulated.

Today, in a full-scale war, the banking system stands—not a single bank has failed. That’s because of the strength of that regulator, that Vlad was involved in ensuring. And it’s the strength of the fiscal system today. And I think, you know, we have to change our view for the private sector to understand that there’s not only opportunity, because I think everyone’s always thought Ukraine has opportunity, but that you can realistically make those investments and the risk is not what you thought it was.

CREBO-REDIKER: Please.

RASHKOVAN: Yeah, I fully agree with Natalie. And maybe just to add still a few elements, just responding to the previous question on what has been missing. You mentioned the RDNA, and therefore the reconstruction needs. While I appreciate the World Bank job, and also Kyiv School of Economics was doing, you know, partially the job, I look at this figure with a little bit of skepticism. And then Natalie said already about that, because the war is continuing. And it’s only—it’s a static figure, and it doesn’t include everything. We don’t know a lot about controlled territories and does not include everything from 2004. But it’s not only that. The reconstruction needs is not only the function of damages. It’s a function of the postwar vision.

And this vision is so far—I mean, it’s not well formulated. We had a number of conferences in Lugano, in London, and Berlin. It didn’t come yet. You know, it’s true, because it’s difficult when you are in a hot war to think about the longer-term vision, and hoping that the war will be ended soon. So there will be a next conference in Rome in July, so maybe this will be a good moment to discuss it. Second thing, which I forgot to mention, one of the important things, which has been done also with a big support of IMF and the IMF leadership, is there was created so-named multi-donor coordination platform. It was done by G-7, but now it’s much wider. There are 23 different players, including the seven major global financial institutions, are member of it.

And this group, you know, already met twelve times. So it’s a steering committee. They’re meeting, like, every forty days with a structured agenda, with the steering committee there, the different workstreams. There is—I mean, it’s really an institutional mechanism. And I think in order to go further, you know, in the reconstruction, this institution—this institutional framework should be now probably evolving to something similar which we had during the Marshall Plan, the ECA, so a special agency which could be 100 percent time dedicated for Ukrainian reconstruction.

I agree with Natalie that Ukraine is a very decentralized process. And the majority of the reconstruction is not in Kyiv but in the regions. And the capacity there should be increased. And definitely the ownership of the vision should come from Ukraine. But still, you know, there can be an input, and there should be an input from our donor—our partners, foreign partners, European, American partners, you know, how we can build. And this is also the business opportunities, because I fully agree with Natalie, the majority of this money which will be spent for reconstruction is not public money. It will be still private money. And this is important.

The third thing is there is this discussion on how much money who we gave to Ukraine. In reality, we have today several things. We know what is the budgetary support, because this is the tracking of the—particularly of the both IMF program and Ministry of Finance. When you go a little bit wider, including reconstruction, the complexity of the process, number of the projects, number of the deals in the regions, you know, the number of potential players, you know, starting from bilateral countries for DFIs, IFIs, philanthropies, business. You know, this is a just too complex project now to monitor even how much money is provided to Ukraine on reconstruction.

The World Bank says the $524 billion is already net of what has been done. I’m still questioning if they really could capture all the amounts. So probably one of the things which could happen at the next stage, and this is—we can discuss it later about the Russian assets—there should be some sort of the Ukraine development bank or fund, a special fund, which could be still used for Ukrainian reconstruction. We were writing—last year a CEPR paper on that. And because if this kind of fund or development bank could work together with this reconstruction agency, you know, like ECA-type agency, this could bring together money and also could be a backstop for a lot of the private investments to Ukraine.

CREBO-REDIKER: So let’s go there with the Russian sovereign assets. There are a lot of conflicting views about how to utilize them, whether they should be used for military support, should they be used for reconstruction, and should they just be provided to Ukraine for reconstruction, pledged as a deterrent, or, you know, a reward to Russia for good behavior? There are a lot of ideas out there. And then still some pushback against what the implications would be around actually utilizing those assets. And reminding that there was a G-7 initiative for the 50 billion (dollars) that’s actually using proceeds that are generated from those assets to actually provide funding through the G-7 platform to Ukraine for a variety of different—variety of different purposes. So just if I can get your views on what do you think would be the best way to utilize the 200 billion (dollars) sitting in Europe right now?

JARESKO: From my perspective, you have to use it for the most critical need. And if today military is our most critical need, so be it. I don’t believe this money is in any way going to serve as a deterrent for Russia, or as a carrot, as the discussion earlier said, because I think—for the most part, I think Russia knows that this money is not going to be theirs. And it would be wrong to not have some type of reparations for the damage that one party has created in this country.

And so, you know, I would love it if it was available for reconstruction. However, reconstruction, in a sense, really depends on peace. And peace depends on Ukraine having strength. So I think it is incumbent upon Europe today, which is struggling with how do we fund this, to go ahead and find that way, not to be afraid of threats that Eurobonds won’t be purchased, not to be afraid of what this means to the euro because, you know, I’m kind of a student of Larry Summers. Whatever it meant to the euro, it happened when we froze it. It’s not going to be anything that happens going forward. So I think we need to find the way and find it fast.

RASHKOVAN: I think we need to start from the one simple principle, Russia must pay. And this is important. You know, any idea to appease Russia with this money, any idea to use as a collateral for their—you know, meeting their obligations on the ceasefire is a wrong way to do it. I agree with Natalie, Russia, you know, already does not assume this money, you know, to return back. But definitely they will try. You know, they will put it on the table. You know, and it would be interesting to discuss the—you know, and what General, you know, Kellogg and Witkoff could do that with that. But I think it’s right. I like the approach General Kellogg said today, so we need to use this money.

You know, and he also mentioned today the fact that some Ukrainian cities are completely, like, vanished after the result of the Russian destruction and invasion. And apparently, it’s true, you know. So let’s use this money, you know, to rebuild Ukrainian cities. Let’s build them—let’s build new cities according to the new standards. And this is also, again, business opportunity, you know, even for American companies. You know, it can be—it can be done, you know, to participate in the large, let’s use this word, real estate projects. And you can build there. And you can build also the factories there, and the business there. And this could be also, you know, American business and European business, which could be also interested in this economic treaty, which we also discussed today.

You know, but I also agree that the current stage is—this money could be also used for the military, you know, for buying, again, European, American weapon, as it deterrence, as to fight. This is already depending where—how far we go with the end of the war. But Russia must pay.

CREBO-REDIKER: So at this time I would like to take some questions from the audience. We will—we’ll do the next thirty minutes or so of Q&A both from Washington, D.C. and from all of the viewers that we have on Zoom right now. But if you have any questions, please raise your hand. Got one right here, sir.

Q: Thank you. Paul Jones from Squire Patton Boggs.

I wonder, speaking of the—whatever we call it exactly—the economic agreement, or the critical minerals agreement, or rare earths agreement—I wonder if you could each provide your assessment of the importance of that agreement for Ukraine’s economy, for reconstruction. Is it significant? Is it realistic? Under what time frame? Quite apart from the issues we spoke about this morning of is it a security guarantee or what are the political impacts. I’m just wondering, from your economic expertise, how do you assess that agreement? Thank you.

CREBO-REDIKER: So I’m happy to take—I wrote about this before anyone actually talked about Ukraine having critical minerals. And so—(laughs)—I think that with the Trump administration absolutely the shared economic security is the way that President Trump would see as the ultimate guarantee of national security. The devil is in the details in terms of what the terms of the term sheet or the framework, whatever it is that Ukraine’s being asked to sign. But the geology and the assets that are underground to be developed over the long term—and it’s not just critical minerals in rare earths, there are oil and gas, infrastructure that’s related on the table right now from the last version that I saw.

I think that Ukraine really does need to make sure that it works in their interest and that there is a shared economic development element to this that really binds the U.S., and particularly this administration, to open the channels so that they can actually move forward and release the pause on the military—provision of weapons and military support and intelligence provision. And I think until that actually—it’s, like, fixated right now in the president’s mind. And until that is signed, that I think Ukraine is going to be struggling.

JARESKO: Just from an economic standpoint, I think it’s important that the last version had the monies going into an investment fund for reconstruction for Ukraine. I think that’s critical. That was not in earlier versions. And I think, you know, again, the devil’s in the details. I think it’s important though also to note that much of this has not yet been truly geologically explored. As General Kellogg said, he’d like to go send in USGS. So I don’t think you could expect that this is going to provide an immediate economic benefit to Ukraine or the United States.

It’s going to be over a period of time. This is something that has to be properly surveyed. Then, you know, mining doesn’t take a short period of time. So I think it’s extremely valuable symbolically, in terms of our relationship with the United States. It’s certainly very valuable to the Trump administration, according to General Kellogg. I just think that, you know, it’s not going to do—it’s not going to put U.S. investors on the ground tomorrow. And that’s, I think—we should just be clear about that. It’s kind of a long-term strategy, medium-term strategy.

RASHKOVAN: If I may comment here, I see it as positive, you know, if we look at the current version of the agreement, because it touches the future revenue flows not the previous ones. So it’s not, like, extracting what has been already done and what was already, let’s say, in Ukrainian budget, assumed. For IMF it was important. And therefore, we need to look—I agree with Natalie that most of these things will require not only time but also investments, you know, for exploration, you know, for—even for building infrastructure. And would I like to have American investors in Ukraine? For sure, yes. You know, can we do it together? I hope, yes. You know, can we do it also with other countries? I hope, yes. And this is what would—exactly what would be the reconstruction of Ukraine, because you create a new added value. And this is—this is, I think, positive.

And if I may, to come back to the IMF program, IMF program currently is complementary to that, because what we do, you know, building up the macro financial stability, this is important for any investors who will come to the country. You don’t want that the country will be devaluated, you have inflation, because this is you—if you put a special investments in the foreign currency, you want to preserve the value of your investments. And what you will have—because in Ukraine you are creating local currency, in hryvnia, not foreign currency. So you need to convert money. And therefore you want this to be preserved.

Second thing is the IMF program currently is also about the right policies, right fiscal policy, so you don’t avoid that the budget will be in a bad shape, but also governance reforms which are under the program, which should also protect the investors. I think rule of law, you know, the courts, the anticorruption, all of these issues, I think, are very, actually, important elements of the potential economic treaty, you know, in the future. So I think—I see it positive. But devil is in details.

CREBO-REDIKER: I have a question right here, sir.

Q: Hi. Matt Merighi, Evolution Space.

I wanted to circle back to the mil-tech valley piece of this, because I do think that is a really dynamic part of the Ukrainian economy that’s developed as a result of the current circumstances. But a lot of that is still being fueled by public money, which is obviously being driven by the exigencies of survival for Ukraine. So the question is, in a future scenario where there is peace what does the future of that mil-tech valley and military spending in Ukraine look like? Is it going to crater and go down by a substantial margin? Do you think that current needs will continue to be sustained? Is the plan to become a defense material exporter? But what is the future of that asset that’s currently just being used for the battlefield conditions right now?

RASHKOVAN: If I may I slightly disagree with you, because what the government—it’s not public money now, per se. The government makes an order. So the government is saying, we are buying this. And, like, ten years ago it was majority in Ukraine, it was the government—you know, public holding which was producing the military and defense industry objects. So what happened now is actually a big portion of deregulation. So there is a lot of the private companies which are producing drones, but not only drones. And there is a lot of investments coming also from foreign investors, that is venture funds which are investing to Ukraine in defense sector. And also Ukrainian businesses are investing and producing there.

And we really made it scale up. And when I spoke—I’m not a military expert, just to be—you know, to be very accurate in saying. That what I what I heard from an expert is, when I speak about drones but not only drones, your—our—you know, the defense technologies, they are not only battle tested but they’re also battle innovated. So you have these—I mean, the loop from the changes—the loop of innovation is so short. You know, I spoke with some guys who were producing drones to say we made a drone which brings, like, X kilos for fifteen kilometers. And in two weeks, we managed to bring it 3X to three times bigger territory, distance. And because this is what they do, both with soft, and you, Heidi, mentioned, you know, the tech forces in Ukraine, tech expertise and that.

But this is ongoing because there is an order for that. When I speak of those guys who are producing now, I say, A, invest now. I understand it’s very difficult. Invest now to documentation because a lot of these things are done on the fields. Second is, invest in the IP rights. You know, if you see there is innovation, you know, try to register this. And if this is—this happens, so you—and invest in the still corporate governance, you know, in the in the companies that look tomorrow to be bankable as projects. Because I’m sure, speaking about the European security, no matter what the deal in Ukraine we saw what happened in the last days in Germany, we saw what happens in general now in today, whether you have summit. There will be a big demand for military, you know, technologies. And Ukraine now, being battle tested and better innovated, is a good potential supplier for that, if managing corporate governance, IP rights, and also documentation. And from technology perspective, believe me, they are not bad, you know, considering that we are fighting with such a powerful system.

JARESKO: I’ll just add two things. Again, I’m not a military expert either. But I think we’ve seen that the field of war has changed forever. And it’s only moving forward in terms of use of technology and away from the big tanks and the big armored personnel carriers. You know, I was told recently that, you know, a tank lasts less than ten minutes on the field because of drones. And when we think about drones I also think it’s important to note—I mean, government buying is public money—that’s going to continue even if there’s a ceasefire, folks, because you’re not going to stop innovating and stop producing. We have a neighbor next door that for 600 years or more has been trying to, you know, commit genocide. So we’re going to have to keep producing.

But also I think drones are something that—I don’t know if we even think about this in the United States—but they are a very inexpensive way to control the streets. And so we have to worry, I think, globally about how these things are used by gangs, how these things might be used by terrorists. I mean, they’re small and they’re easy to find. So I think everyone will have an interest in this technology. And I think Ukraine will have an export market. And as Vlad said, it’s important to note that almost all of it right now in Ukraine is produced by the private sector. It may be purchased by the government, but it’s not the state-owned arms company that’s manufacturing the competitive drones.

RASHKOVAN: Yeah, and if I may, just the important here comes that these—when you speak about the modern, you know, defense—and definitely we are not on the way of Patriots or HIMARS, OK? We are not there, you know? But when you speak about drones, for example, this is not about only technical, you know thing. It’s a combination of AI. It’s a combination of the computer vision. It’s a combination of the connectivity. It’s also important—and Heidi already mentioned about—or, Natalie was saying about the skills. We trained, you know, thousands of people who are operators of drones, who are managing them. We trained them how to make them managing number of drones, the army of drones. So it’s a combination of all the things. And this happened in such a leapfrog way that this is, I think, very remarkable. And everybody looks at this now in the world.

CREBO-REDIKER: There already are—I mean, the Danes have been pouring, you know, their funds into Ukrainian drone manufacturing, which is, like, it started as artisanal a couple of years ago and it’s just ramped up, produced four million drones out of Ukraine, 96 percent of all of the production has been from Ukraine. You’ve got the Turks investing in, actually, manufacturing facilities in Ukraine right now. I think you’re going to see a lot of increase of the investment in that sector because it is unique and cutting edge—literally the cutting edge that we have in the world right now. People also forget that during the Soviet days 13 percent of the Soviet production of the most advanced missiles and tanks, military warfare capability, came out of Ukraine. So there’s a longstanding expertise in that defense manufacturing sector beyond drones.

JARESKO: There’s also an important thing, you know, when people say that Ukraine is not recruiting young people to the military, I want you don’t understand that the young people are definitely involved in all of this mil-tech. It wouldn’t have happened without them. So they’re fighting, they’re just fighting with a different set of tools.

RASHKOVAN: And I should be very frank, just to finish on that, I would love still to build cities. But if some of these cities are tech valleys and mil-tech valleys, it’s not bad. (Laughter.)

CREBO-REDIKER: I think we had a question from online. If that is Carrie?

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Toby Gati.

CREBO-REDIKER: Hi, Toby.

OPERATOR: Ms. Gati, please unmute now prompt.

Q: Unmute, yes. Toby Gati. Worked in the NSC and in the State Department in the Clinton administration.

My question is the connection between the military and the security situation. America’s misguided policy is now that there could be no Ukrainian attacks into Russia, but Russia attacks continue today, even literally today, into Ukraine. So doesn’t there have to be a priority to end those attacks, because otherwise what you’re really doing is making it more difficult to rebuild, and making everything you rebuild a potential target of the Russians, of an attack? So my question is, you know, what is the connection between reconstruction and the future conduct of the war, which will go on for a while? And also, none of you have mentioned the fate of the nuclear power plants, which is a separate issue but one I think that is potentially, I want to say explosive, but in every sense of the word. So thank you very much. And your panel is a really good one. Thank you.

CREBO-REDIKER: Thank you. Toby. Vlad.

RASHKOVAN: Thank you. I was the one who organized the first, you know, Forum for Reconstruction. It was May 2022, you know, and we did it in the last year, bringing together, like, forty people, mostly, you know, Europeans and Americans, you know, to think what to do. And one of the questions which was there, should we plan reconstruction after the war finishes? So it means the end of the war is a prerequisite for the—for reconstruction, or not? Natalie mentioned already that the reality in Ukraine showed absolutely not, because reconstruction is ongoing. And World Bank evaluates that as well. So without that reconstruction, none of the foreign leaders would be able to come to Ukraine, you know, because the roads would be not done, the bridges will be destroyed, you know, and the railroad would not work, et cetera. So this is—the reconstruction is ongoing. There is a lot of done on the building the bomb shelters, the protection for the energy objects. This has been done, you know, in the last—in last years.

But even if you take this out, if we would plan to build some—to have some big investments today, even speaking about the economic deal, you know, economic treaty, as General Kellogg said, you need to have the exploration, you need to understand, you need to send the geological services. If you plan building cities, from the moment when you have this idea to maybe the moment when you put the first brick in the city will take probably two years, you know, even for the—it will be the on the very optimistic way, because you need to put a lot of people together, you need to find funding, you need to design plans—you know, what it can be, designing business model, you know, finding construction companies. You know, I mean, this is—I mean, and later you will build this maybe for years.

So therefore, the end of the war is definitely not the prerequisite for reconstruction. You know, you need—we should have done this before. And moreover, if the war—I maybe should say that if the war finishes soon, we are not ready for reconstruction, for the full-scale reconstruction, because there is still no vision. And we need to do it now. You know, we need to work on this and, therefore, to make it happen. What I say, you know, going back to the Marshall Plan, I say, what we need to avoid, we need to avoid the 1948 moment, you know, because the Marshall Plan was designed in 1944 but started working in 1948. And which means, like, three years after the end of the Second World War. And we don’t have these privilege to wait three years after the end of the war because we have several millions of people outside of the country and we have, you know, millions of people internally displaced.

And these people—many of these already for years in Europe, the majority of them are kids, you know. And if kids already study languages, they have new friends, they are the families—by the way, already a lot of the divorced families, and the people going there with finding new families in Europe. We will lose these. And this is one of the biggest losses, not, you know, only reconstruction loss for Ukraine. The human capital, you know, which we can lose as millions of people, this is the biggest loss for Ukraine. Therefore, we need to think. We need to show the opportunity to people. We need to show some sort of the vision for the future which people could use as an anchor, you know, why they need to come back to Ukraine.

Not only because, you know there it’s their legacy, or the nostalgia, et cetera. Not only because it’s their home but because they want to be there, they want to participate in this revival. And they think it will be next big thing in Europe because, speaking about 500 billion (dollars), even more, for reconstruction, these will be big projects. There will be a lot of the demand for labor force, which, as Natalie now said, we are missing already, you know, and we need to have that in Ukraine. So this is—we need to plan now.

JARESKO: I’ll just quickly say, Toby, that I was trying to make the same point you were making when I—when I began. The destruction is going to come faster and much harder going forward if we’re not able to have in Ukraine the air defense capacity to protect our cities. And so, look, if—you know, it doesn’t require a genius or a military expert to understand that, you know, there’s a limited number of Patriot interceptors. You know, there’s a limited number of things. And if we’re not able to protect our cities, the other side is going to bomb them. I mean, I think yesterday and the day before are examples of that. So, you know, it makes reconstruction that much more expensive. But at the same time, you know, it also makes air defense probably the number one—the number one demand on the side of Ukraine, because of that, because it’s civilian lives, because it’s civilian infrastructure.

And, you know, Ukraine can manufacture a lot of its own weapons, and Europe can provide weapons, but air defense is critical to not allowing for the destruction of a nuclear power plant, as you just said. Yes, to answer that part of the question, they have control—illegal and temporary—control of Zaporizhzhia, the largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Not unlike the illegally occupied territory, they don’t have a right to it and it’s extraordinarily dangerous. They’ve been using it to store military equipment, to have military teams in there. So I think, you know, we definitely should be negotiating to get that nuclear power plant back. I do think Ukraine has done a reasonably good job in expanding its ability to provide electricity to its population without it, meaning increasing the amount of electricity that can be imported from Europe, now a project to expand nuclear power capacities at the existing facilities, and more. But I think there’s a huge danger to the world in allowing that to remain illegally occupied and controlled.

RASHKOVAN: If I may, just two words here. We had a—it’s not a joke, but we had a saying that the best instrument of monetary policy is a good air defense system. (Laughter.) You know, because actually this helps you, you know, to keep the economy better, it’s for sure. And on nuclear front, even for economic deal, you know, I think the Zaporizhzhia was generating six gigawatt of electricity before. You know, if you want to have a cheap electricity in Europe, also for many different, you know, datacenters, which you may need, or even for the production you—this is—definitely should be on Ukrainian territory and controlled by Ukraine.

CREBO-REDIKER: One question right here, sir.

Q: Hi. Thanks very much. James Siebens. I’m with the Stimson Center.

I wanted to ask about how much cooperation Ukraine has had from European partners in locating its displaced citizens who are now living abroad and potentially making sure that everybody is filing their taxes on time, that sort of thing. We have a foreseeable need for tax revenue for reconstruction in Ukraine, some of which will be answered, I think, by some of the displaced population. So also thinking through repatriation. Beside creating the kind of pull factors that you’re talking about, how much cooperation has the Ukraine government had from other European governments?

RASHKOVAN: In October 2022 I was speaking in the conference in in Poland, in Warsaw. And after the conference, you know, somebody came to me, said, Vlad, don’t—I mean, don’t be afraid. Your people here can feel themselves at home. I said, thank you very much. I would like them to feel themselves more as good guests. (Laughter.) You know, let’s be very frank. The Ukrainian people who moved to Europe is—majority is young women, you know, in the working age, intelligent, educated, and kids. It’s not—and the kids are not only on the birth age but, you know, school age. You know, school age, as you know, the majority of investments you need to do in the first few years, but later is becoming a human capital. So I think there will be a competition for these people in future.

But so far, what we see is a good cooperation. So we’re thankful to the European governments, and not only European. Also to U.S., to Canada, to other countries, you know, who helped to host Ukrainians, who provided them the temporary statuses, provided access to education, access to health. You know, I was in Kyiv two weeks ago and I met with the minister of unity. We have created the Ministry of National Unity, which actually the task is to incentivize—to find the economic incentives and social incentives, to bring people home, and also to think what needs to be done. For sure, security is one of them, but also the housing, what Natalie was saying, because this is the major element, but also jobs. This is about the economic deals and economic developments. And what IMF is doing also to bring the economic growth to the country.

So these are important things. But the minister was coming just from the visits in Poland and Germany, where they also built some special hubs, you know, for Ukrainians, where they provide, you know, the consular services, the job opportunities, you know, the notaries, et cetera. So just to become hubs, together with Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But so far, we see the—you know, the big support there throughout Europe,

JARESKO: I have not seen any country put in place a repatriation scheme, with the exception of maybe what we’re reading in the papers today that the Ukrainians may be losing their refugee status in the United States. Otherwise, I have seen some of the European countries start to reduce the amount of time over which Ukrainian citizens can receive social support. But the fact of the matter is, Ukrainians are more than happy and more than willing to work. In some countries, Poland, for example, it’s been very helpful to their economy, in fact. So I haven’t seen a repatriation policy in any of the European countries, although, you know, some of them, I think, would happily have Ukrainians get off the social rolls. But I don’t know that that’s the same as repatriating.

RASHKOVAN: We had one conference in the Central Bank of Ukraine. And there was speaking the deputy governor of central bank of Poland, Narodowy Bank Polski. And she was saying thank you for Ukrainian workers, because it helped, you know, to reduce the pressure for the prices in Poland. It also bring—because the demand for price was—for salaries was lower. And unfortunately—and this is, I should say, unfortunately—when you analyze where the people are employed, usually the women are employed at two levels lower of their professional level. Therefore, I mean, because this is working need. But I also saw a lot of even my friends who are in Europe who came to the—you know, to the much lower positions, and they already made a new career in Europe, you know, developing there. But again, we, we need to create the opportunities for them to come back. And I’m sure we will.

CREBO-REDIKER: We have time for another question here. Ma’am, please.

Q: I’m Alexandra Starr with International Crisis Group.

Thank you for the panel. I was wondering if you could comment on the anti-collaboration law, which was passed shortly after the invasion. There have been a critique that people who might be able to contribute to reconstruction are sort of cast—or unfairly stigmatized under the law. And there have been some talks about potentially revising it. So I’d like to get your perspective on that.

JARESKO: The anti-what law? Did you say—

RASHKOVAN: I should be very frank, I don’t know. I mean—

Q: Anti-collaboration.

JARESKO: Anti-collaboration, OK. You know, I don’t know the specific law, but I have to say that every day Ukraine is arresting people for treason. And that fifth column, or whatever you wish to call it, throughout Ukraine is very strong because of the background. And you have to err on the side of safety right now for the country. So I—you know, I don’t know what the law says, but I would say, you know, loose lips sink ships was a U.S. policy. And I think Ukrainians have to be, and will continue to be, extraordinarily careful that a fifth column is not strengthened in any way.

CREBO-REDIKER: Right here.

Q: Thanks. Doug Rediker of Brookings and International Capital Strategies.

In the context of the broader need for capital and manpower for development and reconstruction, what do you see as China’s potential role in any scenario emerging after the war, whatever the various options are for how the war ends? Do you see China playing no role, some role? And also China’s development banks and other IFIs that are sort of at China’s initiative, as opposed to the established Bretton Woods institutions.

CREBO-REDIKER: And we heard in the earlier panel before Russia’s second invasion China was the largest investor.

JARESKO: It was the largest importer of Ukrainian goods. It wasn’t the largest investor.

CREBO-REDIKER: OK.

JARESKO: I didn’t want to correct that person, but it wasn’t the largest investor.

CREBO-REDIKER: That’s an important decision.

JARESKO: It is. They were buying a lot of agricultural grains.

My answer is that China was on the wrong side and we should not allow them to invest going forward. They’ve contributed to this war. They’ve been on the aggressor side. They’re part of that foursome. And I don’t think we should be inviting North Korea or China in. That said, you know, you’re going to—we’re going to need to have access to capital. And we know that China’s practices in the world have been to lend money with little to no preconditions. And they also offer labor, which—if labor is an issue. So you’re going to see them certainly trying. But I—but I—again, I would hope that the allies would stand up, broadly speaking, to invest rather than China.

RASHKOVAN: I would more vote for a combination or collaboration of the economic treaty, you know, with U.S., IMF program for the postwar reconstruction, Russian assets, you know, to be paid, and the development bank which would, together with a(n) ECA-type organization, would do that. And I think we will manage without others.

CREBO-REDIKER: Thank you. I think that brings us exactly to 1:00. And it’s a CFR tradition to try and end on time, which I think we’ve had a great conversation today. I want to thank Natalie and Vlad for their insights. I think it’s been a very, very rich conversation. And we all—we all learned from your experience. So thank you so much for joining. Thanks for joining us today at CFR for this long day on Ukraine. But I think it’s certainly top of mind for a lot of us here. So thank you for joining us today.

JARESKO: And we want you to know we all wore suits so that you know we respect you. (Laughter, applause.) And we thank you.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.