When Russian ground forces poured into Ukraine nearly three years ago, European leaders were confronted with the fact that Moscow again posed a real threat to the continent’s security.
As the leaders of Europe’s biggest defence powers met in Paris on Monday for crisis talks, another fact was becoming obvious. The security blanket the US has in effect provided over Europe since the end of the second World War can no longer be relied upon.
European Union (EU) officials and diplomats are nervous about US president Donald Trump’s rush to cut a deal with Russia to end the Ukraine war. They fear the terms could jeopardise the future security of Ukraine and, by extension, Europe.
One line of thinking goes that if the US forces Kyiv to accept a bad deal, Russia will spend the years afterwards trying to coerce Ukraine to become a vassal state, similar to Belarus. If that came to pass, Vladimir Putin’s sphere of control would run along most of the EU’s eastern border.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s tone has shifted. He has gone from making appeals for allies to give Ukraine what it needs to win the war, to asking for enough to put Ukraine in a strong position heading into talks.
Trump’s Ukraine-Russia envoy Keith Kellogg indicated Europe would not have a seat at the table in planned settlement negotiations.
More worryingly for Ukraine, the Trump administration has rejected what Kyiv would see as crucial conditions to guarantee its safety from future Russian aggression. Those include its bid to join the western Nato military alliance and the stationing of US troops in Ukraine after a settlement.
The message going out to Kyiv and other EU capitals is that the US intends to retreat from its long-time position as Europe’s most important defence ally.
The leaders of France, Germany, the UK, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Spain and Denmark gathered on Monday for an emergency summit at the Élysée Palace, to talk about what that means for Europe and Ukraine.
UK prime minister Keir Starmer has said his country is “ready and willing” to put troops on the ground in Ukraine, to help make sure any peace lasts. French president Emmanuel Macron has previously said much the same.
The ability of a European peacekeeping force to make Putin balk at some future confrontation would depend on how credible a deterrence the Russian leader feels EU states and others pose, without the backing of the US. That might necessitate a large build-up of military forces, but the political will to fund such an expansion has been lacking in most EU states.
Sweeping US trade tariffs threatened last week by Trump would hurt Europe economically, but a peace deal that hobbled Ukraine and emboldened Russia could pose a much more existential threat.
