It has been a traumatic week for Europe’s political and military leaders. Last Wednesday, without warning, US President Donald Trump announced that he had spoken to Vladimir Putin by telephone for 90 minutes. During a ‘highly productive call’, he and the Russian leader had ‘agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately’ to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had not been informed of the conversation beforehand, much less involved.
The transactional high-handedness of Trump’s approach, ignoring the injured party in the conflict and making direct and friendly overtures to the aggressor, should not have come as a surprise. But it left European governments, focusing on that day’s meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels and preparing for the weekend’s Munich Security Conference, suddenly feeling bypassed. If Ukraine’s head of state had not been part of the conversation, the Europeans were even further from the centre of the action.
All of these ideas put the cart many miles ahead of the horse
Their collective reaction has been a peculiar one.
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