As transatlantic leaders departed the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Europe was left with a palpable sense that Washington no longer had the continent’s best interests at heart. While European leaders had been steeling themselves for the prospect that America might not be part of the solution, they left Munich wondering whether it had, in fact, become part of the problem.
That indignant consensus, however, masked deep misgivings about whether, in the absence of American support, Europe could find a solution to the continent’s most urgent questions, led by Ukraine.
From a European perspective, the long-awaited start of talks on peace in Ukraine could not have gotten off to a worse start. It was bad enough, in their view, that Donald Trump spoke to his adversary, Vladimir Putin, before talking with his allies, and that he dangled sanctions relief and normalization even in the absence of a restoration of Ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty. That sense only deepened as US and Russian negotiators emerged from February 18 talks in Riyadh with warm words and a pledge to restore full diplomatic relations.
By taking Ukraine’s NATO trajectory to membership off the table and then putting it back on, by threatening sanctions on Russia and then offering to roll them back, and by rushing towards a summit with a wanted war criminal, Washington’s improvisational approach to negotiations seemed oblivious to the carefully crafted diplomatic bulwarks that had helped Ukraine fight Russia to a stalemate.
With Ukraine as with so much else, Trump’s approach is one of haste, evidently aiming to catch his opponents off guard and create realities on the ground before they can mobilize a response. While much remains unknowable, the White House evidently hopes that ending the war in Ukraine will help clear the decks, so that it can have a freer hand as it pursues other parts of its global agenda, including reshaping America’s trading relations and pivoting to a deeper focus on China.
As American officials made clear in Munich, the US is willing to help make the peace but unwilling to make it work on the ground.
While Putin will not move rapidly towards a genuine deal — indeed, the structure of his regime and his economy preclude him from pursuing real peace, as does the fact that he has written chunks of Ukrainian territory into Russia’s constitution — he likely sees an advantage in the pace set by Trump. If Moscow can enable Trump to maintain the momentum, Putin is likely betting that he can get a deal with only weak deterrence against renewed aggression, while marginalizing a discombobulated Europe.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s task, then, when he met Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Riyadh, was in setting the parameters for an eventual outcome, before the launch of full-scale negotiations, at which Rubio has promised Europe and Ukraine a seat at the table.
While clinging to the remnants of transatlantic solidarity, European leaders are irate both at Washington’s self-assured bungling of the early phases of negotiations, and at US preparedness to negotiate with Putin over the heads of Ukraine and Europe. That anger has already begun to unstick sclerotic policy processes.
Even before Rubio and Lavrov boarded their planes for Riyadh, French President Emmanuel Macron convened key European leaders, including Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz, Donald Tusk, Ursula van der Leyen, and Mark Rutte, for emergency talks aimed at retaking the initiative.
For the moment, however, the European response remains bogged down in short-term considerations, including the conditions for sending an eventual peacekeeping force into Ukraine, and mechanisms for financing increased defense spending. If that remains the focus, Europe will be left to pick up the pieces of a shattered security order.
If, however, Europe can turn its indignation into decisive action, matching and indeed overtaking the American pace, there is an opportunity to mount a genuine defense of Ukraine and the continent as a whole.
Moving quickly, however, does not mean succumbing to short-termism. Europe’s security can only be achieved by working with Ukraine to lay the foundation for its long-term sovereignty and integrity, as well as its European integration, while preventing Moscow and, if necessary, Washington from sowing the seeds of further insecurity.
The decisions made will shape the lives of generations of European citizens, and while it is imperative that those decisions are made now, their costs and benefits should be weighed in terms of years and decades, not the days and weeks afforded to American and Russian negotiators.
This long-term view must be grounded in a sober understanding of the nature of the threat. Russia is durably committed to the absolute domination of the post-Soviet space, a commitment developed over decades of history and deeply engrained across the country’s political establishment. In this regard, Moscow’s greatest threat is not NATO, whose borders have always been Russia’s most stable and peaceful, but the European Union and its huge integrated market and liberal democratic values, whose magnetic pull on post-Soviet societies from Ukraine and Georgia to Moldova and even Belarus has systematically undermined Russian attempts at dominion. Indeed, that is why Russia went to war in Ukraine in 2014: to stop Europe in its tracks.
Prime Minister Starmer’s February 17 commitment to put British troops on the ground in Ukraine — a commitment tentatively echoed by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, with more reportedly to come — is thus the first step towards ensuring that neither 2014 nor 2022 are ever repeated. It could also be a powerful hedge against the likelihood that America will abandon the field if, as Starmer demanded, it comes with US security guarantees.
The creation of a European contingent in Ukraine, however, should be pursued not merely as a means to outflank the unfortunate confluence of Russian and American interests, but as a down payment on a more secure European future. European forces stationed in Ukraine would be critical to creating lasting Ukrainian security and facilitating the country’s accession to the EU and, eventually, NATO. The desire eventually to bring those troops home will similarly incentivize European governments to invest directly and heavily in Ukraine’s own defensive capacity.
Europe’s commitment to containing Russia’s aggressive instincts must be equally durable. Only a deep, foundational obligation to Ukraine can ensure that Ukraine and Europe itself are adequately defended against further or renewed aggression. Only the success of Ukraine’s recovery, reconstruction, and European integration can bear witness to the ultimate futility of Moscow’s intentions. And only a Europe that believes in its own deterrent capacity can put the fear of consequence in Putin.
Sam Greene is Director of the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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