Europe is losing Ukraine
What has played out since the details of Donald Trump’s 28-point plan to end the war in Ukraine were leaked on 18 November is, in many ways, just a repeat of what we have already been through several times this year. The US president makes a proposal for ending the war on largely Russian terms even though it is unclear whether, despite these concessions, Russia will even accept it. The Europeans are outraged that the US seems aligned with Russia rather than Ukraine, and they try to thwart the proposal. Negotiations collapse and the war goes on.
Each time we go through this cycle, it shows that, despite the extent of the financial and military support that Europeans (that is, European Union member states and the UK) have provided to Ukraine since the beginning of the war in February 2022, Europe is largely irrelevant to the question of how and when it will end. The continent has marginalised itself. Because the Europeans refused to talk directly to the Russians, they can only react to initiatives by the Trump administration – and they have tried to stop every attempt by Trump to negotiate with Vladimir Putin, who they have consistently said does not want peace.
What makes the current cycle subtly different from previous ones – for example, when Trump and Putin met in Alaska in August – is that Europe is now losing Ukraine as well. Even as Europeans struggled to exert any real influence over the negotiations between Russia and the US, or even to understand what was being agreed in the negotiations, they could at least think of themselves as supporting Ukraine. Indeed, since the re-election of Trump threw American support into doubt, they could think of themselves as Ukraine’s only real supporter, though they were unwilling to support the country any further, in financial or military terms, without the backing of the US.
Ukraine is increasingly rejecting Europe’s position that the war should be fought to the last Ukrainian. They recognise they are losing the war, as Russia slowly but inexorably gains territory. And because Trump is unwilling to continue funding the war and the Europeans are unable to fill the gap left by a withdrawal of American support, this situation is not going to change. This means that, however bad the peace deal currently on offer is from a Ukrainian perspective, it is better than what Ukraine will be able to get if it waits and loses yet more territory.
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“Every subsequent deal for Ukraine will only be worse – because we are losing,” Volodymyr Zelensky’s former spokesperson, Iuliia Mendel, wrote in an X post on 22 November. She went on to criticise the Europeans: “My country is bleeding out. Many who reflexively oppose every peace proposal believe they are defending Ukraine. With all respect, that is the clearest proof they have no idea what is actually happening on the front lines and inside the country right now.”
In another post six days later, Mendel criticised the hawkish foreign policy “experts” (the quotation marks are hers) who are vocal in expressing outrage about peace proposals such as Trump’s 28-point plan: “I don’t see a single constructive proposal from them – except, of course, the default one: just keep the war going forever.”
Meanwhile, European leaders just keep repeating the same points. “We still need to get from a situation where Russia pretends to negotiate to a situation where they need to negotiate,” said the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, Kaja Kallas, after a meeting of foreign ministers on 26 November. She said that the EU needed to “stay the course and pick up the pace”, which in practical terms meant yet more sanctions against Russia and more financial and military support for Ukraine. (Apparently, even the US secretary of state Marco Rubio, himself once a neocon and the most pro-European in the Trump’s administration, now refuses to meet with Kallas.)
It is not just that statements like Kallas’s are completely detached from the reality – she said that “the notion that Ukraine is losing is flat out false” – but also that they are increasingly disconnected from what the Ukrainians themselves want.
This divergence is exposing the cynicism behind the idealistic European rhetoric about defending democracy and Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Europeans have continually insisted that their own security depended on Ukraine defeating Russia, or at least not being defeated by Russia. Yet they expect the Ukrainians to do the fighting and dying. “We have lost more people in three years than some European nations have as the whole population,” Mendel said.
Even as Europe has struggled to exert any kind of influence over the negotiations between Moscow and Washington during the past year, it has coordinated closely with Zelensky, whose position in an eventual negotiation the continent claimed it was seeking to strengthen. But, after his long-time chief of staff Andriy Yermak resigned on 28 November following accusations of corruption, Zelensky is now seriously weakened – and Ukrainians are increasingly rejecting European “support”. In short, the Europeans are becoming even more irrelevant than they already were.
[Further reading: Donald Trump is making peace in Ukraine harder]
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