WASHINGTON — Finnish President Alexander Stubb has proved pivotal in the efforts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, taking on new importance after he bonded with President Donald Trump over their mutual love of golf.
Minutes after emerging from a four-hour meeting with Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and several other European leaders at the White House on Monday, Stubb described the results to NBC News.
“What we have agreed on is to work on European and American security guarantees, essentially, which will be secure from the European perspective, coordinated with the Americans,” Stubb said. “It’s us who decide what kind of security guarantees we put up for Ukraine, not the Russians.”
He responded sharply to Russia’s immediate rejection of the idea that those security guarantees would potentially include a NATO presence.
“Russia doesn’t decide on that,” Stubb said. “It’s as simple as that.”
Stubb, whose country joined NATO in 2023 in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the year before, said the leaders agreed Monday that security guarantees for Ukraine were among their top priorities, along with a bilateral meeting between Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, followed by a trilateral meeting including Zelenskyy, Putin and Trump.
For Stubb, Russia’s war in Ukraine is personal. Both his father and grandfather were born in cities that were ceded to Russia following Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s 1939 invasion of Finland and that remain part of Russia today. That history informs his commitment to Ukraine. Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Finland, which shares more than 800 miles of border with Russia, had remained steadfastly neutral for decades, including during the Cold War.
Stubb described his country as a regional “security provider,” pointing to its mandatory military service, large reserve forces and arsenal of weapons. “We have over 60 F-18s. We just bought 64 F-35s. We have long-range missiles, air, land and sea, and we have the largest artillery in Europe, together with Poland,” he said.
Finland and other European countries represented at the White House on Monday — Britain, France, Germany and Italy, as well as the heads of the European Commission and NATO — are part of a group known as the Coalition of the Willing, which also met virtually on Tuesday. Stubb said they have been working on how to help secure Ukraine for some time, and decided at the White House meeting to order their militaries and civil servants to come up with a plan as soon as next week.
A location for a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy has not yet been determined, but Stubb suggested Switzerland as a possibility. “Geneva could work actually,” he said. “I think that would be neutral territory for it.”
Stubb said the goal is for the meeting to happen as soon as possible, hopefully “within the next two weeks.”
Switzerland’s foreign minister, Ignazio Cassis, said Tuesday morning that the country would grant Putin immunity to enter the country for such a meeting, despite an arrest warrant for him for war crimes by the International Criminal Court of Justice. Putin would be at risk of arrest in most other countries in Europe, among a total of 125 nations that observe the ICC’s jurisdiction. The U.S. does not.
18 holes and diplomacy
Stubb gained Trump’s ear over a round of golf in West Palm Beach, Florida, in March, when they competed together in a member-guest tournament at one of Trump’s courses and Trump gifted Stubb a new set of clubs to replace the set Stubb had brought with him.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump asked Stubb over lunch if he could trust Putin, and Stubb told him “you cannot.” Hours later, the Journal noted, Trump publicly criticized Putin for the first time over his refusal to agree to a cease-fire with Ukraine.
The Journal also reported on informal calls and texts between the two leaders since then, including Trump sometimes consulting Stubb before speaking with Putin. Zelenskyy has also publicly thanked Stubb for helping him build a connection with Trump in the aftermath of Trump and Zelenskyy’s infamously heated Oval Office meeting in February.
Stubb also seems to have sensed how to communicate to Trump the extent of Putin’s prospective land grab of Ukraine’s territory.
“For an American audience,” he told NBC News, “the best way to explain it is that if you take the relative land mass of what Russia wants right now from Ukraine, it would be a little bit like you giving up Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, even Virginia, and then bumping into Maryland.”
