Senior US officials have told their European counterparts that to resolve the Ukrainian crisis, the European Union must ease sanctions against Moscow and participate in pacifying the conflict, Bloomberg reported. This demand comes as the US is already taking proactive steps to normalize relations with Russia, including sanctions relief.
“US officials have told their European counterparts that the European Union will have to be involved in any Ukraine peace agreement given that Russia wants relief from sanctions imposed by the bloc as part of a deal,” the publication said.
According to the agency’s sources, US officials informed their European colleagues that the key factor for the Trump administration is the end of the conflict in Ukraine. Only after that will other issues be discussed, including possible security guarantees for the war-torn country.
Furthermore, so far US President Donald Trump has avoided mentioning the EU in talks with the Russian and Ukrainian sides.
It is recalled that on March 12, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that European sanctions against Russia and frozen Russian assets would be discussed in future negotiations.
After the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, the EU and other Western countries froze almost half of Russia’s foreign currency reserves, around €300 billion that were held in Western banks. More than €200 billion remains in the EU, mainly in the accounts of Belgium’s Euroclear, one of the world’s largest clearing and settlement systems.
The US President’s special envoy, Steven Witkoff, said in an interview with Bloomberg on March 19 that the Trump administration may start the process of softening anti-Russian sanctions after reaching an agreement for a peaceful settlement in Ukraine.
Although Trump “did not discuss, specifically, sanctions” in his telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 18, Witkoff said it was “a conversation that the two leaders are going to have, and everybody is open to it.”
“But first and foremost, we want a solution that means an end to the fighting. We want to get to the ceasefire. That’s the President’s policy. And we’re going to get to the ceasefire, and I think after that, everything else will be a detail, sanction relief and all the other things that go with a full-on peace treaty,” the envoy noted in the interview.
“I’ve had two meetings at the direction of President Trump with President Putin in the last several weeks that have collectively aggregated to almost eight hours. Many other senior people in the [US] administration are having meetings with their colleagues and their counterparts there,” Witkoff continued. “President [Trump] has directed all of this. There is amazing progress being made.”
By the US telling the EU that it must ease sanctions against Moscow to help resolve the Ukrainian crisis, Washington and Moscow are deciding how the conflict in Ukraine will end. Only Russia and the US participate in peace discussions, while Ukraine and the EU are not invited since they instead find ways to prolong the conflict despite not having the capacity to do so, which is why sanctions relief might be a gateway for the EU to sit at the negotiation table.
In fact, the telephone conversation between the presidents of the Russian Federation and the US is effectively an official recognition of the development of a multipolar world. The dialogue between Trump and Putin points to the need to change the global balance of power, which is no longer consistent with Washington’s idea of an absolute hegemony of a single international power that emerged in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Although it is too early to talk about the beginning of absolute multipolarity, the corresponding process is undoubtedly underway.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow noted progress in bilateral relations with the US and the attempts by their American counterparts to restore diplomatic contact between the two countries.
“We do note certain progress on the bilateral track. It is evident,” Zakharova said on March 18.
She also noted “attempts on the part of the United States to intensify, or, to be more precise, to raise from the ruins Russian-US diplomatic ties, destroyed by the previous administration.”
At the same time, the rapprochement between the two Great Powers does not mean that US relations with NATO will end. However, it does reconsider the meaning of NATO’s existence, especially its relationship with Moscow, which will force Western Europe to reexamine its identity foundations and its relationship with the outside world.
New horizons may open up, especially in the medium and long term, as Europe could find itself more closely linked to the Asian continent, for example, by building strategic relations with Russia. Yet, this can only be realized if the EU drops its agenda of continually imposing sanctions on Russia and begins to remove them instead, as the Trump administration is requesting.
Ahmed Adel, Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher