But Foreign Secretary David Lammy said last year that there was no “evidence” yet that Putin was serious about seeking to end his war in Ukraine despite it leading to hundreds of thousands of Russian military casualties and hitting the Russian economy.
Russia annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014 and then backed pro-Russian separatists in an armed insurgency against Kyiv’s forces in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine.
Speaking at a meeting of Ukraine’s military allies at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Mr Hegseth delivered the clearest and bluntest public statement so far on the new US administration’s approach to the nearly three-year-old war.
But we must start by recognising that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” Mr Hegseth told the meeting of more than 40 countries allied to Ukraine.
The terms he has set out include that Ukraine must drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw its troops from the entirety of the territory of four eastern Ukrainian provinces claimed and mostly controlled by Russia.
