Note: This article was updated on 5 March 2025.
Europe is at a rare, real, crossroads. President Donald Trump has suspended aid to Ukraine and doubled down on his attacks on Volodymyr Zelensky; the Americans think, at least, they have dirt on the Ukrainian president and they are in a profoundly angry, menacing mood. For the time being, they sound much more Moscow than Kyiv.
After intense private pressure on Zelensky, he changed direction and gave the kind of fool-hearted thank you Trump had asked for. He said: “None of us wants an endless war… We remember the moment when things changed when President Trump provided Ukraine with Javelins.
“Our meeting in Washington, at the White House on Friday [28 February], did not go the way it was supposed to. It is regrettable that it happened this way. It is time to make things right.”
After a lengthy conversation with Zelensky on 2 March, I came away with a clear impression that he was nothing like ready for a ceasefire or an end to the war. So this statement is a full-scale reverse ferret.
Necessarily so. How would European support for Ukraine, without American involvement, translate into a plausible peace deal? Why would Vladimir Putin deal with, in his view, a rag-tag collection of under-armed monkeys, rather than the organ-grinder in Washington?
When I spoke to President Zelensky about the humiliating ambush in the Oval Office there was certainly no apparent regret. The tired-looking leader pointed out that he had travelled 12 hours by train and 11 hours by aircraft because Trump had asked him to come; it had been an honour and all he wanted was an understanding that “we are worthy of equal dialogue”.
Would he return to rebuild the relationship? There was no direct answer, only this, wistfully: “I’d really like President Trump to hear things from me personally and for me to hear things personally from President Trump… It would be much easier if we had more time and a direct dialogue with the president.”
Whether or not this happens depends wholly on the US president’s mood. Some in London believe Trump’s determination to have Ukrainian elections came after a call with Putin in which the Russian president declared his readiness for peace but said that Zelensky, personally, was the problem. From the Kremlin’s point of view any peace deal must involve a pro-Moscow, or at least neutral, new Ukrainian leader. Unlike the Europeans, Trump seems to agree.
The warmth between Trump and Putin is the single most unsettling, world-reshaping fact of all. In one sense, it scarcely matters whether this relationship, which would have horrified Ronald Reagan, comes from a private deal or pressure; or from Trump’s vision of a pre-modern world which ought to be ruled by a club of great-man autocrats; or simply from a more mundane irritation at European “freeloading”. Europe has spent a great deal of mental energy trying to understand Donald Trump. As a consequence of the last couple of weeks, European leaders will, however distasteful they may find it, have to spend just as much time trying to understand Vladimir Putin. And, in the case of both Trump and Putin, try to peer into the future to understand what might happen next. In particular, what kind of US president JD Vance may one day make.
Zelensky told me Ukraine was still ready to confirm the all-important minerals deal with the US. Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, has since said that the document was waiting to be signed in the White House East Room before the Trump-Zelensky meeting went wrong. But when it came to Ukrainian territory, Zelensky said, “We are not talking about concessions of any kind… We will never recognise Russian occupation.”
Above all, he was fiercely against a ceasefire. In a long and passionate description of the aftermath of the first Minsk agreement in 2014, Zelensky said Russian snipers at the border line of contact had violated that ceasefire 25 times, using Ukrainian civilians, including children, as target practice. Eventually, Ukrainian troops had responded. This time, with a much longer line of contact, it wouldn’t be snipers but drones and artillery. Without security guarantees, “the Russians will shoot us, we will shoot back, and Russia will win from this”. A ceasefire in these circumstances would be “a trap”. In terms of security guarantees, Zelensky was realistic about the limits of European military heft – at the very least there would need to be American air and intelligence support.
So might he hold elections and step down? Zelensky gave a rare grin. Holding elections wouldn’t be enough. “You also need to not let me run,” he said. “This will be a bit more difficult.” In the end, “you will have to negotiate with me”. I came away hugely impressed by Zelensky’s stamina and self-control but pessimistic about the possibility of him negotiating peace. His subsequent statement suggests there now could be some hope.
When asked on 2 March to explain how he thought Russia could be brought to the negotiating table, he insisted that stronger Western sanctions would bring Russia to her knees. Given Trump’s enthusiasm for doing commercial deals with Moscow, including oil and gas deals, this seems entirely forlorn.
Where does this leave Britain and our non-American Nato allies? The new “coalition of the willing” and readiness of European leaders to “do the heavy lifting”, which emerged from Keir Starmer’s Lancaster House summit at the beginning of March, sounds impressive but means little if there is no peace deal to police.
Even if, somehow, a truce or ceasefire is imposed, without US backing, European guarantees look weak and, frankly, dangerous. Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has called the idea unacceptable, and Putin’s junior dictator-ally Alexander Lukashenko says “Russia will never agree to this… Russia is categorically against any peacekeeping forces from European states.”
Starmer has done extremely well in his delicate diplomatic dance. But he has no intention of drawing Britain into a shooting war with Russia, or doing anything which could spread the conflict. No western European countries are anything like ready for full-scale military confrontation. So, yes, we have to rearm, and strengthen European alliances, and do that fast.
In its early stages the European Union included a defence entity. But this collapsed, not least because of British hostility to the European political authority that would have overseen it. Thus the Franco-British Dunkirk treaty of 1947 was soon overtaken by Nato, Gaullism and Britain’s unhealthy obsession with the “special relationship”.
The consequence was that “Europe” evolved, in lurches, into a grand, soft, shopkeepers’ pseudo-state ruled by lawyers and bureaucrats, with no hard power of its own. The rhetoric was noble, internationalist and vaguely end-of-history. But the truth was that under the American umbrella it became a giant consumerist jelly, a playground for getting and spending, heedless of the outside world. In the history of civilisation, there has been no parallel.
That fantasy is over. We are running around clucking like panicked chickens. But the only answer is to hunker down, rebuild our armed forces at pace – Germany under Friedrich Merz has the industrial power and capital to lead – and think differently about Europe’s place in a changed world. But even with a dramatic lurch to higher defence spending, as Britain is embarking on, that cannot be done quickly – certainly not in walking away.
Only some kind of European reset – I almost think revolution – can answer the need of the moment. Meanwhile, we must buy time. America is, at best, uncertain. We are unready. So, let’s put aside bravado and re-cast the words of Churchill, whose bust is again in the Oval Office: “You ask, what is our policy? I will say: it is to buy time, by sea, land and air, to buy time, with all our patience and with all the luck that God can give us.”
[See also: Can Starmer make Labour the security party?]
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This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out