Europe is betraying Ukraine by pretending it can still win

There’s an unsettling sense of deja vu about recent reports on the U.S.-sponsored talks to reach a Ukraine-Russia peace deal. U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, sat down with Vladimir Putin in Moscow for almost five hours last week, after which the Americans emerged with some happy talk but little by way of real progress. The pair then spoke with a senior Ukrainian delegation in Miami over the weekend—again leaving with some talk of progress, even if none of the issues were any closer to being resolved.

In the meantime, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has been appealing to Europe as a counter-weight to Trump, hoping that strong European pushback will compel Washington to further modify the U.S.-backed plan. Zelensky’s latest meeting with the leaders of the UK, Germany and France was full of the usual bonhomie and promises of unity. He left London emphasising the degree to which European leaders were rock-solid behind Ukraine. By the time the Ukrainian president was on his way to another series of meetings with senior EU officials, territorial compromises were again dismissed by Zelensky out of hand. “Under our laws, under international law—and under moral law—we have no right to give anything away,” he said. “That is what we are fighting for.”

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining Trump’s latest angry intervention. In an interview with Politico, he denounced Europe as “decaying”, its leaders as “weak”, and repeated his past criticism of Ukraine for not holding elections. If there’s one consistency of Trump’s first 11 months on the Ukraine file—and let’s be honest, there aren’t many—it’s his propensity to lash out whenever he believes one party or the other is stonewalling his peace initiative. Look no further than Zelensky’s infamous appearance in the Oval Office in February. Trump already appears to be getting irritated by Zelensky again, blaming him over the weekend for not reading the U.S. plan.

The upshot is that, despite all the wheeling and dealing, the positions of the main protagonists haven’t really changed. Russian president Vladimir Putin will still countenance nothing short of Ukraine’s defeat in the east, and the Russian strongman has taken to stating that Kyiv can either succumb to Russian territorial demands the easy way or the hard way. Zelensky is equally determined to retain Ukraine’s current positions and reject territorial concessions. In the middle is Trump, who has fluctuated between heightening the pressure on Zelensky and increasing economic sanctions on Russia.