Key Ukraine-US talks are set to continue in Berlin today after five hours of negotiations on Sunday, with a group of European leaders later joining the Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to show their solidarity with Kyiv.
Once the talks with the US are concluded, the mini-summit will bring together Britain’s Keir Starmer, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, Finland’s Alexander Stubb, Norway’s Jonas Gahr Støre, the Netherlands’s Dick Schoof, Poland’s Donald Tusk, Sweden’s Ulf Kristersson, as well as top EU and Nato officials.
Europe’s Trump whisperer and his occasional golf partner, Finland’s Stubb, told journalists on Sunday that “we’re probably closer to a peace agreement than we have been at any time during these four years.”
US envoy Steve Witkoff also said that “a lot of progress was made” during the Sunday talks.
But some key questions still remain and are believed to do with Ukrainian territorial concessions in the contested east, and crucial security guarantees to avoid a third aggression from Russia. Moscow has been publicly dismissive of any calls put forward by Ukraine’s European partners so far.
Today’s talks with the US and the mini-summit in Berlin – set to be attended by seven European leaders, and top figures in the EU and Nato – come just days before the key European Council summit in Brussels later this weekend, which will decide on the proposal of using frozen Russian funds to fund Ukraine through a reparations loan.
Over the weekend, new Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš has joined the growing group of countries critical of the proposal, led by Belgium and supported by Italy. “We will not take guarantees for anything nor put any money in,” he said on Saturday.
It looks like a decisive week for the EU and its ability to influence the end of the Ukraine war – first with Germany working together with Ukraine to put the European arguments to the US, and then by a show of European unity in support of Kyiv, and second with the much-anticipated decision on the reparations loan.
Whether they will succeed in making progress on either of the two things remains to be seen.
But US president Donald Trump, who only last week branded EU leaders as weak and indecisive, will be certainly looking at their actions to see if they want to challenge his thinking about them.
I will bring you all the key updates throughout the day.
It’s Monday, 15 December 2025, it’s Jakub Krupa here, and this is Europe Live.
Good morning.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
