NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has said he and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky intend to get drunk on a Swiss mountaintop once Russia’s war against Ukraine is over.
Rutte made the comment during a special edition of the Dutch talk show Pauw & De Wit, broadcast by public broadcaster NPO on November 5. It was his first appearance on the programme.
Speaking in Dutch, the former prime minister said the pair had an arrangement to sit on a mountain in Switzerland and get completely drunk when the fighting ended. He added that he had told Zelensky he would take care of the red wine.
A subtitled clip of the exchange was widely shared on social media platform X. Switzerland hosted a Ukraine peace summit at the Bürgenstock resort in June 2024.
The light-hearted aside came in an interview largely devoted to the threat Russia posed to Europe and the alliance. Rutte was also questioned about his relationship with US President Donald Trump and the outcome of the US midterm elections.
He was asked for the first time about Trump’s surprise agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin to bring Russian diesel to the US and global markets. According to Dutch commentators who reviewed the interview on NPO Radio 1, Rutte indicated he had plenty of views but would not share them on air.
Trump announced the deal on October 9 after a phone call with Putin, saying Russia would immediately supply more than 300,000 tonnes of diesel. Washington eased sanctions on Russian diesel to allow the trade, as US envoys were meeting Ukrainian officials in Miami to discuss a plan to end the war.
The move angered Kyiv. Zelensky said Russia would repay the gesture with further terror and treachery, describing it as an investment in prolonging the war.
Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten also called for the agreement to be scrapped during a parliamentary debate ahead of the October 15-16 European Council summit. He said the Netherlands would press Washington on the matter at every opportunity.
The deal has struggled to deliver. As of November 7, no Russian diesel had reached the US under the arrangement and at least three tankers had changed course amid buyers’ fears of legal action, Al Jazeera reported.
Rutte, who in May described the gradual withdrawal of US troops from Europe as no surprise, has repeatedly faced criticism for his accommodating approach to Trump.
At the NATO summit in The Hague in 2025, he remarked that “daddy has to sometimes use strong language” after Trump compared Israel and Iran to children fighting in a schoolyard. Rutte later said the word had been misunderstood, though the label has followed him since.
