Archived link: https://archive.is/9ju2g

European leaders should be prepared to send military forces to Ukraine to underpin any peace deal engineered by Donald Trump between Kyiv and Moscow, Estonia’s foreign minister has said.

Margus Tsahkna told the Financial Times that the best security guarantee for Ukraine was Nato membership, as requested by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But if the US was opposed to inviting Kyiv to join the military alliance, Europe would have to step in with troop deployments once the fighting was over to deter further Russian aggression.

“If we are talking about real security guarantees, it means that there will be a just peace. Then we are talking about Nato membership,” said Tsahkna. “But without the US it is impossible. And then we are talking about any form [of guarantee] in the meaning of boots on the ground.”

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Tsahkna said he did not believe Trump would abandon Nato because it was not in America’s political or economic interests to leave Europe at the mercy of an imperialist Russia. But the Europeans would have to show they were willing to invest more in their own defence.

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With Ukraine now seen as Nato’s first line of defence, it was Europe’s security architecture that could be reshaped in the coming months and not just Ukraine’s fate, he said.

“We just cannot wait on whatever the US decides.”