By Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen, Tom Little and Gwladys Fouche
NUUK, Jan 14 (Reuters) - The Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers will meet with U.S. Vice President JD Vance at the White House on Wednesday following weeks of threats by President Donald Trump to take control of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark.
Trump has said the strategically located and mineral-rich island was vital to U.S. security and the United States must own it to prevent Russia or China occupying it.
Greenland and Denmark
say the island is not for sale, threats of force are reckless and security concerns should be resolved among allies. Prominent EU countries have backed Denmark.
AVOIDING 'ZELENSKIY MOMENT' AT WHITE HOUSE
When Denmark's Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and his Greenlandic counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, meet Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at around 1530 GMT, their aim will be to de-escalate the crisis and find a diplomatic path to satisfy U.S. demands for more control, analysts said.
"The end goal is to find some form of accommodation, or make a deal that would satisfy that need, or at least calm down the rhetoric sufficiently from Donald Trump," Andreas Osthagen, research director for Arctic and ocean politics at the Oslo-based Fridtjof Nansen Institute, told Reuters.
Noa Redington, an analyst and former political adviser to previous Danish premier Helle Thorning-Schmidt, said concerns were high in Denmark and Greenland that Motzfeldt and Rasmussen could be treated in the same way as Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy, when he suffered a public humiliation in a meeting with Trump - and Vance - at the White House in February 2025.
"This is the most important meeting in modern Greenland's history," he told Reuters.
CHOOSING TO STAND UNITED WITH DENMARK
Greenlandic leaders appear to be shifting their approach in how they are handling the diplomatic crisis.
Until recently, they were stressing Greenland's right to self-determination. But on Tuesday, their public statements put more emphasis on Greenland's unity with Denmark.
"We face a geopolitical crisis, and if we have to choose between the U.S. and Denmark here and now, then we choose Denmark," Nielsen said alongside her Danish counterpart Mette Frederiksen in Copenhagen on Tuesday. "We stand united in the Kingdom of Denmark."
Motzfeldt had a similar message.
"We choose the Greenland we know today – as part of the Kingdom of Denmark," she said in a statement released by the Danish ambassador to the U.S. late on Tuesday.
'A BIG PROBLEM FOR HIM'
But that message appeared to be falling on deaf ears in Washington.
Trump, when asked by reporters late on Tuesday, dismissed Nielsen's statement that Greenland preferred to remain part of Denmark.
"That's their problem. I disagree with them. I don't know who he is. Don't know anything about him, but that's going to be a big problem for him," Trump said.
White House officials have been discussing various plans to bring Greenland under U.S. control, including potential use of the U.S. military and lump-sum payments to Greenlanders to convince them to secede.
Denmark's prime minister has said the hardest part in the dispute over Greenland's future may lie ahead.
"This is not just about Greenland or the kingdom, it's about the fact that you can't change borders by force, that you can't buy another people, and that small countries should not have to fear bigger countries," Frederiksen said on Tuesday.
Denmark and Greenland had originally sought a meeting with Rubio, hoping to have a discussion among top diplomats on resolving the crisis between the two NATO allies.
But Denmark's Rasmussen said Vance had also wanted to participate and that the vice president would host the meeting himself, at the White House.
(Reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen in Nuuk, Tom Little and Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen, Terje Solsvik and Gwladys Fouche in Oslo; Editing by Alex Richardson)
