STOCKHOLM — The foreign ministers of the Nordic nations as well as Canada today expressed strong, unified support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity amid Russia’s ongoing missile attacks on Ukraine, as well as a willingness to play a part in any future security guarantees for Kyiv.
Their joint statement following their meeting in Nuuksio, Finland, emphasized that peace negotiations must include Ukraine, must reject decisions made without its consent, and must require robust security guarantees for a lasting peace.
“The Nordic countries and Canada are ready to play an active role in combining the efforts of the Coalition of the Willing with those of the United States to ensure the strength and credibility of these security guarantees,” the statement said.
Discussions within such a “coalition of the willing” regarding military security guarantees for Ukraine are ongoing but in early stages, with no specific commitments finalized. The Nordic ministers — diplomats from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland — emphasized that the term “guarantee” also lacks a clear definition.
“We are in principle, of course, ready to participate,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said at the press briefing.
Likewise Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said, “We are willing to contribute, but I will come back to how when the details are being defined.” The statements that have been made by President Donald Trump during the recent days “have been very positive, but we have a lot to work out,” she added.
On Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social that security guarantees were discussed during a meeting he held with European leaders and that touched specifically on “which Guarantees would be provided by the various European Countries, with a coordination with the United States of America.”
He added, “Everyone is very happy about the possibility of PEACE for Russia/Ukraine. At the conclusion of the meetings, I called [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin, and began the arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and [Ukrainian] President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy.”
Speaking today, Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said the security guarantees wouldn’t be designed to stop the current conflict but to keep it from restarting or to prevent future conflicts. That could include, he said, military planning or exercises short of the deployment of European troops.
Post-conflict security “can happen both with troops inside Ukraine or without troops inside Ukraine.” Many NATO countries have very firm security guarantees to protect them “without necessarily having troops physically present,” he said.
Iceland, lacking an army, emphasized other contributions like infrastructure. “Of course Iceland will participate in what’s necessary, but we have no army, if you are thinking of boots on the ground,” Iceland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Thorgerdur Katrín Gunnarsdóttir said.
Canada highlighted its long-term commitment, having provided $22 billion in humanitarian and military aid and trained over 44,000 Ukrainian troops, but did not commit to specific troop deployments, focusing instead on the broader framework of guarantees.
Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anaita Anad stressed that the idea of a security guarantee, “is not new this week, we have been discussing the importance of stable security guarantees at least since the Vilnius (NATO) summit in 2023,” she said.
The Nordic and Canadian statement comes as world leaders attempt to divine Trump’s current stance on Ukraine following his summit with Putin in Alaska over the weekend followed by the White House meeting with Zelenskyy and other European leaders.
As for Trump’s reference to security guarantees, Tony Lawrence, head of the defence policy and strategy programme at the International Centre for Defence and Security, an Estonian think tank, told Breaking Defense in an emailed Q&A that “it’s hard to guess what’s in Trump’s mind.”
“There’s a wide range of possibilities, from some form of political support … to boots on the ground alongside Europeans,” he added. “Given Trump’s former aversion to security guarantees (indeed, he stressed in Washington that this problem should still fall mostly to the Europeans) it seems more likely that he would look for something at the lower end of the spectrum.” (Trump said in a TV interview today that the US would not commit its own troops to be boots on the ground in Ukraine.)
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Author: Jonas Olsson and Tim Martin
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