Zelenskyy: Europe cannot guarantee Ukraine’s security without America

Exclusive: In extended interview with the Guardian, Ukraine’s president says he will offer US firms lucrative reconstruction contracts to try to get Trump onside. If Donald Trump withdraws US support for Ukraine, Europe alone will be unable to fill the gap, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned, on the eve of what could be his most consequential diplomatic trip since Russia’s full-scale invasion three years ago.

“There are voices which say that Europe could offer security guarantees without the Americans, and I always say no,” said the Ukrainian president during an hour-long interview with the Guardian at the presidential administration in Kyiv. “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees,” he added. Trump has said he wants to end the war in Ukraine, but sceptics fear that a US-brokered deal could involve forcing Ukraine to capitulate to Vladimir Putin’s maximalist demands. Zelenskyy said he was ready to negotiate, but wanted Ukraine to do so from a “position of strength”, and said he would offer American companies lucrative reconstruction contracts and investment concessions to try to get Trump onside.

“Those who are helping us to save Ukraine will [have the chance to] renovate it, with their businesses together with Ukrainian businesses. All these things we are ready to speak about in detail,” he said. Zelenskyy will travel to the Munich Security Conference later this week, where he expects to meet the US vice-president, JD Vance, one of the most hostile towards Ukraine among Trump’s inner circle. At last year’s conference, Vance, then a senator, refused to meet Zelenskyy, and he has previously said he does not “really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other”.

Zelenskyy also plans to meet other members of Trump’s team as well as influential senators in Munich, but there is “not yet a date” to meet Trump himself, he said, although his team is working to fix one. Trump said over the weekend that he would “probably” meet Zelenskyy this week, and it is possible that the Ukrainian president could fly to Washington from Munich. “We are hoping that our teams will fix a date and a plan of meetings in the US; as soon as it is agreed, we are ready, I am ready,” he said.

Zelenskyy switched between Ukrainian and English to make his points during the interview, conducted on Monday afternoon in a lavishly decorated room inside the heavily fortified administration building in central Kyiv. During the first phase of the full-scale invasion, his communication skills and passionate pleas were credited with forcing reluctant western leaders to back Ukraine with weapons and financial support. Now, in Trump, Zelenskyy faces a new challenge, with a major sceptic on continuing support for Kyiv becoming the leader of the country’s biggest ally.

In a Fox News interview aired late on Monday, Trump said the US had spent hundreds of billions of dollars on Ukraine in recent years. “They may make a deal, they may not make a deal, they may be Russian some day, they may not be Russian some day, but we’re gonna have all this money in there and I said I want it back,” said Trump. It means that along with Zelenskyy’s oft-heard messages about the geopolitical and moral risks of allowing Russia to prevail in Ukraine, he has added some new ones, tailor-made for the US president. Most notable is the idea that the US will get priority access to Ukraine’s “rare earths”, a prospect that has piqued Trump’s interest enough for him to mention it several times in recent media appearances.

Zelenskyy said he pitched this idea to Trump back in September, when the pair met in New York, and he intends to return with “a more detailed plan” about opportunities for US companies both in the reconstruction of postwar Ukraine and in the extraction of Ukrainian natural resources. Ukraine has the biggest uranium and titanium reserves in Europe, said Zelenskyy, and it was “not in the interests of the United States” for these reserves to be in Russian hands and potentially shared with North Korea, China or Iran.

But there was a financial incentive, too, he said: “We are talking not only about security, but also about money … Valuable natural resources where we can offer our partners possibilities that didn’t exist before to invest in them … For us it will create jobs, for American companies it will create profits.”. Zelenskyy said it was crucial for Ukraine’s security that US military support continued, giving the example of US-made Patriot air defence systems. “Only Patriot can defend us against all kinds of missiles, only Patriots. There are other [European] systems … but they cannot provide full protection … So even from this small example you can see that without America, security guarantees cannot be complete,” he said.

The first weeks of Trump’s presidency have given Ukrainians plenty to worry about. There was the global freeze on USAid projects, which in Ukraine torpedoed hundreds of organisations working on everything from army veterans to schools and bomb shelters. Then, there was Trump’s admission in an interview with the New York Post over the weekend that he had already spoken to Putin by telephone in an attempt to begin negotiations. When asked how many times, he said only: “I’d better not say.”.