Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday pulled back some of the peace deal concessions he demanded of Ukraine a day earlier, including no NATO membership for the embattled country or a return to its pre-war borders.
“Everything is on the table” when it comes to negotiations to end the Ukraine war, Hegseth said during a press conference wrapping up two days of NATO meetings in Brussels.
He made no mention of any conditions on Thursday, hours after President Donald Trump and Russian Vladimir Putin spoke by phone about a potential peace deal. Hegseth’s initial comments and the phone call infuriated European allies, who took it as a sign the United States was sidelining Ukraine.
Hegseth said definitively on Wednesday that the U.S. would not accept NATO membership for Ukraine or provide peacekeeping troops, and warned the country would not return to its pre-2014 borders. He also said NATO peacekeeping troops in Ukraine would not be covered by Article 5, a bedrock principle of the alliance that declares any attack on one nation is an attack on all.
In a press conference 24 hours later, Hegseth declined to publicly back those views. “In his conversations with Vladimir Putin and [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, what he decides to allow or not allow, is at the purview of President Trump,” he said.
Hegseth bristled at questions concerning the possibility that the U.S. was giving away leverage to Putin.
“I’m not going to stand at this podium and declare what President Trump will do or won’t do, what will be in or what will be out, what concessions will be made or what concessions are not made,” he said.
The Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Wednesday turn of events caused a firestorm of criticism from European allies attending the NATO defense ministers meeting, who one by one made a rare public show of disunity.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, rejected the idea that Trump and Putin would lead negotiations over Ukraine.
“It is clear that any deal behind our backs will not work,” she told journalists at the meeting. “You need the Europeans, you need the Ukrainians. Why are we giving [Russia] everything they want even before the negotiations have started?”
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius accused the Trump administration of making “public concessions to Putin before negotiations have even begun.”
Lithuanian Defense Minister Dovilė Šakalienė told reporters that leaving the negotiations to Trump and Putin alone would be a “deadly trap.”
Instead, she said, Europeans must “embrace our own economic, financial, and military capacity. And we will be the ones who will be deciding what will happen in Europe and in Ukraine.”
Zelenskyy, in a Thursday post on X, reiterated the importance of multi-country support. He said he had just spoken with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and held that “no negotiations with Putin can begin without a united position from Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S.”