Why an EU-Russia summit was always going to fail

When Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel unilaterally proposed a European Union summit with Vladimir Putin, they managed to open deep fault lines in the continent over the EU’s Russia policy. Soon afterwards, Macron and Merkel were forced into an embarrassing reversal, largely by the countries of Central Europe, and had to cancel the proposed summit. In the process the two world leaders highlighted that this was not the right time for a summit, that the EU is divided over Russia, and that this kind of initiative plays into Russia’s misunderstanding of the Union.

The suspicion must be that Macron and Merkel wanted to emulate the success of Joseph Biden’s recent meeting with Putin. It certainly did not seem like they had a specific and sensible agenda in mind. In the main, more diplomacy is better than less, but summits are very different beasts. Their real virtue is at the start and at the end of processes, either where some agreement is almost completed and the principals need to hammer out the final compromises, or when there is an absolute impasse, and something has to be done to create some momentum.