US President Donald Trump on Wednesday met with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the NATO summit at The Hague.
The discussion, which lasted almost an hour, is the first face-to-face conversation between the two since April this year, when they both had attended a funeral ceremony for the late Pope Francis at the Vatican's St. Peter’s Basilica.
“We discussed how to achieve a ceasefire and a real peace,” Zelenskyy explained, in an X post after the discussion.
The primary agenda at this NATO summit at the Netherlands is a new defence investment pledge, expected to counter Russia's enormous military spending, which poses a direct threat to the European Union.
This comes in addition to its acts of sabotage and formidable cyber warfare that is “already a direct threat” to the EU, the bloc's foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas had said, in a plenary session prior to the summit.
In a press conference following the summit, Trump—who agreed today to abide by the NATO's Article 5 about solidarity in the event of external threats against the bloc—called the increase in defence spending a “big win for Europe and, actually, for Western civilization”.
Increasing defence spending across the (NATO) board, relative to GDP, is something Trump has sought since 2017, as he felt that the US had been unfairly shouldering most of the spending burden.
“Europe stepping up to take more responsibility for security will help prevent future disasters like the horrible situation with Russia and Ukraine ... And hopefully we’re going to get that solved,” he told reporters at the post-summit press conference.
