U.S. Vice President JD Vance is welcomed by Bavarian Premier Markus Soeder as he arrives to attend the international Munich Security Conference (MSC), at Munich Franz Josef Strauss Airport, in Munich, Germany February 13, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis
MUNICH (Reuters) -Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is expected to meet U.S. Vice President JD Vance in Munich on Friday after Donald Trump startled U.S. allies by calling Vladimir Putin and announcing the start of talks to end the war in Ukraine.
Zelenskiy will convene with Vance before the Munich Security Conference, an annual international gathering of political leaders, military officers and diplomats in the German city.
Trump’s move stoked fears among European governments that they may be cut out of a deal to end the war that could end up being too favourable to Russia and undermine their own security.
Trump said on Wednesday he had held a "highly productive phone call" with Russian President Putin and they had agreed to start negotiations immediately. He then briefed Zelenskiy on the call.
Zelenskiy has been publicly cordial about Trump's call with the Russian president but also warned world leaders against "trusting Putin’s claims of readiness to end the war" touched off by Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The Ukrainian leader may face a challenge in convincing Vance to provide strong backing for Kyiv's war effort.
As a senator, Vance expressed blunt scepticism about U.S. support for Ukraine. At the Munich conference last year, he said U.S. strategic priorities lay more in Asia and the Middle East.
Speaking on a podcast in 2022, he said: "I don't really care what happens in Ukraine one way or the other."
But on Thursday, he told the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. could hit Moscow with sanctions and potential military action if Putin did not agree to a peace deal with Ukraine that guarantees Kyiv's long-term independence.
"There are economic tools of leverage, there are of course military tools of leverage" the U.S. could use against Putin, Vance said in an interview with the newspaper.
"There are any number of formulations, of configurations, but we do care about Ukraine having sovereign independence."
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was due to take part in the Munich meeting with Zelenskiy as well.
But it was not immediately clear whether he would be able to make it after his U.S. Air Force plane bound for Munich was forced to return to Washington after experiencing a mechanical problem.
POLICY REVERSAL
Trump’s call with Putin and his upbeat description of the conversation reversed years of U.S. policy under the Biden administration of treating the Russian leader as an international pariah since the invasion of Ukraine.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth compounded the unease among U.S. allies by declaring Ukraine would have to give up on war aims such as a return to its borders before 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, and NATO membership.
Trump said on Thursday that U.S. and Russian officials would also meet in Munich on Friday and Ukraine was invited. But Kyiv said it did not expect to hold talks with Russia in the city.
No Russian officials were invited to the three-day conference, which takes place in a luxury city centre hotel, but that would not prevent a meeting elsewhere in Munich.
The city was in shock on the eve of the conference after a car driven by an Afghan asylum seeker ploughed into a crowd in what the Bavarian state premier said was probably an attack rather than an accident.
The incident came ahead of a national election on February 23 in which security and migration have been major campaign issues.
(Additional reporting by Tom Balmforth in Kyiv; editing by Stephen Coates and Mark Heinrich)
