The top foreign policy official for the European Union had a blunt assessment on Friday of the Trump administration’s apparent willingness to give Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, much of what he wants in Ukraine, even before negotiations to end the three-year war begin.
“It’s appeasement,” the official, Kaja Kallas, declared at the Munich Security Conference. “It has never worked.”
Ms. Kallas, a former prime minister of Estonia, was hardly the only European diplomat uttering the word “appeasement,” with all its historical resonance, though she was one of the few willing to do so on the record.
It was an almost-universal description of the Trump administration’s disorganized and often publicly contradictory approach to the questions seizing the continent: What kind of peace deal does President Trump have in mind? And will it be done with Mr. Putin over the heads of both the Ukrainians and the Europeans, whom Mr. Trump apparently expects to bear the burden of Ukraine’s future security?
After days of speeches and private meetings in Munich, many officials said they were more confused than before they had arrived. Statements made by the U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, in his first effort at international diplomacy ran counter to statements made by Vice President JD Vance, also on his first international venture since his inauguration.
And European officials said they had tried, unsuccessfully, to extract from Mr. Trump’s national security team any plan for making sure that Mr. Putin did not simply use a cease-fire to rebuild his decimated military and, in a few years, return to take the rest of Ukraine.
They also said they were astounded that Mr. Trump, who revels in his negotiating skills in the real estate business, was willing to give up so much leverage before entering negotiations over the fate of 233,000 square miles of some of Europe’s most valuable farmland and a hotbed of technological innovation.
Hundreds of participants in the conference jammed into a hotel hall on Friday afternoon to hear Mr. Vance, expecting him to take these issues up in a long-awaited address. But to the astonishment of the policymakers and defense and intelligence officials who had crowded in, he mentioned Ukraine once, only in passing, while lecturing European leaders for suppressing the speech of right-wing, MAGA-like political movements in their country.
He offered no road map for negotiations or even any strategic vision of what Europe should look like after the most devastating war on the continent in 80 years. Nor did he promise that Europe or Kyiv would be central to the negotiations about Ukraine’s borders and its survival as an independent state.
Later in the day, at the end of a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine just before boarding Air Force Two to return to Washington, Mr. Vance offered just a little bit more, the vaguest of objectives for the coming talks with Russia.
“We want the war to come to a close, we want the killing to stop, but we want to achieve a durable, lasting peace, not the kind of peace that is going to have Eastern Europe in conflict just a couple of years down the road,” he said.
The last phrase was critical, because many European leaders here said they fear that Mr. Trump wanted a deal so badly — and perhaps the Nobel Peace Prize he has said he deserves — that he would agree to terms that would leave Ukraine out in the cold and allow Russia to rebuild its devastated forces and attack Ukraine anew — and perhaps, later, Moldova, too, and even to test NATO in the Baltic nations.
But Mr. Vance deflected all questions about whether Russia would be able to retain land that it had illegally invaded or how to reach an agreement if Mr. Zelensky was not yet prepared to meet with Mr. Putin, who has maintained that Ukraine is not even a real country.
“I want to preserve the optionality here for the negotiators,” Mr. Vance said.
He said nothing about a timeline for negotiations or whether he had reviewed with Mr. Zelensky, as expected, a Ukrainian plan for giving the United States access to some of the country’s rare-earth minerals. That has been one of Mr. Trump’s demands for continued support.
Mr. Vance may have said so little because Mr. Hegseth, the defense secretary, seemed to have given away so much, then backtracked, and then, on Friday, blamed the news media for misinterpreting him.
On Wednesday, Mr. Hegseth said that Ukrainians needed to understand that they were going to lose a large part of their country to Russia as part of any settlement. He added that if a deal was struck, no American troops would take part in a peacekeeping force in Ukrainian territory. It would be up the Europeans to police any cease-fire or formal armistice — with a special, non-NATO force. That status would assure that if it were attacked, the United States would not be drawn into a war to defend its NATO allies.
When his comments were derided across Europe and denounced by Mr. Zelensky, he declared that he had given away nothing and that only Mr. Trump had the power to decide what would and would not be surrendered. He never talked about what Russia might have to give up in a negotiation — if anything.
Last week, one NATO foreign minister said, allies were told that all options for Ukraine were on the table and that the White House was open to discussions. Now, matters are less clear, especially after Mr. Trump’s phone conversation with Mr. Putin earlier this week.
The problem, the minister said, is that the normal machinery of foreign-policy construction has been deliberately broken, with various officials appealing to Mr. Trump from different points of view. Allies do not have a clear picture of how the decisions are made, the minister said, a change from the past 20 years.
And if there is no machine, allies cannot plan and have a strategy, said the minister, who insisted on anonymity because of diplomatic practice and the sensitivity of the issue.
Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said Mr. Trump’s call with Mr. Putin, breaking his isolation, was a surprise to allies. “This is not how others do foreign policy, but this is now the reality,” she told German public radio.
There is also a growing consensus that Europe should make a strong counteroffer to Mr. Trump, especially on support for Ukraine.
“Ukraine has agency, and it is resisting aggression,” said Radoslaw Sikorski, the foreign minister of Poland. “It has allies that will support it come what may. So it must be included in any negotiation that concerns it.”
Foreign ministers and officials from several European countries — including Britain, France and Germany — met in Paris on Wednesday night and issued a statement pledging further support for Ukraine.
“We are looking forward to discussing the way ahead together with our American allies,” it said. “Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations. Ukraine should be provided with strong security guarantees.”
