Feb. 13, 2025 (EIRNS)—At the Feb. 12 Ukraine Contact Group meeting in Brussels, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced a new U.S. policy for Ukraine. He declared that there will be no NATO membership for Ukraine; any peacekeeping troops deployed there will not be under the umbrella of NATO or its Article 5; and the United States will not send troops to Ukraine. Further, returning Ukrainian territory it has lost since 2014 is “unrealistic,” Hegseth said. Panic immediately set in throughout NATO’s most hard-core faction, in Europe and in the U.S., among those who had hoped President Trump would maintain at least some degree of confrontation with Russia.
