MOSCOW, August 11. /TASS/. Any future Ukraine peace deal must center around the idea that Kiev will not join NATO, American political commentator and radio host Steve Gill told TASS commenting on the upcoming talks between Russian and US Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
"President Trump and the West had previously agreed that they would oppose further NATO expansion into countries like Ukraine. That issue is clearly a red line for Russia and should be item one of any agreement to resolve the Ukrainian conflict," Gill, who served as a director of intergovernmental affairs for the US trade representative in the Executive Office of the President under both the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, said.
In his opinion, the regions that voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia should be recognized by the international community.
"That would include Crimea and the Russian speaking and identifying areas in Mariupol, Donetsk, Luhansk, etc. The hardest remaining territorial issue is Odessa, in my view, and that seems to be receiving little attention in the negotiations at this point," the expert noted.
"I don’t believe that these rather common-sense items are agreeable to the Zelensky regime so I am not particularly confident that a peaceful resolution will be achieved in the short term," he said.
Last week, Trump said that he expects to meet with Putin in Alaska on August 15. Later Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov confirmed plans for these talks. According to him, the leaders will focus on discussing options for achieving a long-term peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian crisis. The Kremlin expects the next meeting between Putin and Trump to take place on Russian territory, Ushakov said.
Ukraine and NATO
In April 2008, at the Bucharest summit, NATO countries included a written promise to accept Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance (without specifying a time frame) in the final declaration. Equally vague was the wording of the Vilnius summit in July 2023. In 2024, at the Washington summit, the alliance decided that Ukraine is "on an irreversible path" to NATO. This wording was repeated in their speeches for almost six months by the previous NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and his successor Mark Rutte. After Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 and received clarification on the new US course, Rutte announced that NATO had never made specific promises about Ukraine's admission. In March, he confirmed that the issue was no longer on the agenda. Vladimir Zelensky said that Kiev's accession to NATO was unlikely due to the positions of Hungary, Germany and the US.