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29 January 2025

Will Europe abandon Ukraine?

With Donald Trump’s return to the White House, support from Kyiv’s EU allies appears more precarious than ever.

By Hans Kundnani

In the three years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, European leaders – including successive British prime ministers – have talked themselves into an impossible situation. They insisted repeatedly that their security was inseparable from the defence of Ukraine. But now, with Donald Trump back in the White House and promising to bring the war to an end, their rhetoric is catching up with them as they come under pressure to deploy European troops to Ukraine.

Even before Trump was re-elected, the goal of defeating Russia had receded into the distance. Hawkish Western foreign policy analysts continued to demand that their governments send more weapons to Ukraine, including long-range missiles that could target Russian territory. But instead of fantasising about a complete victory, they now argued that Ukraine needed such weapons to put itself in a stronger position in negotiations with Russia.

The question was what kinds of security guarantees the West could give to Ukraine ahead of those negotiations to ensure that Russia would not attack again – or at least to minimise that possibility. Kyiv’s loudest boosters in Europe and the US had long argued that Ukraine must be brought into Nato. This was unlikely to have happened even if Trump had lost the election, but his victory killed off the possibility completely.

The discussion has since shifted to what other kinds of security guarantees could be given to Ukraine aside from membership of Nato and the protection of Article 5. There has been much talk about deploying troops to Ukraine after the fighting ends. But since Trump is hardly going to send US soldiers, any such troops would have to be European.

Trump confirmed this at the meeting he had with Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelensky, when they were all in Paris for the reopening of Notre-Dame cathedral at the beginning of December. It was Macron who had brought up the idea of deploying European troops in Ukraine in February 2024. He seems to have hoped that doing so would increase the pressure on Russia: what he called “strategic ambiguity”. But he also seems to have thought that it would demonstrate European “strategic autonomy”. “This is a European war,” he said at the time.

Since then, these hypothetical European troops in Ukraine have often been referred to as “peacekeepers”. The term conjures up an image of lightly armed soldiers in blue helmets operating under a mandate from the United Nations. In reality, though, any European troops deployed to Ukraine would be more like the British and American soldiers in West Germany during the Cold War. As Samuel Charap, an American analyst at the Rand think tank, puts it, such a “tripwire force” – something very different from peacekeepers – would be “deployed to deter potential aggression by demonstrating the commitment of the states that sent them”. In other words, they would be there as part of a strategy of deterrence. The implicit threat would be that, if Russia were to kill any of them, there would be a massive response from the West.

The problem, of course, is that America’s commitment to protecting its allies is exactly what is in question with the re-election of Trump. It is far from clear whether the US would respond at all if any of these European troops were killed – and Europeans are in no position to threaten much of a response themselves without the US. Whichever coalition of European states deployed troops to Ukraine could soon find itself at war with Russia, and without the support of the US. What’s more, if Russia were to attack troops from Nato countries and the US failed to respond under the alliance’s Article 5 agreement – whereby an attack on one member is an attack on all – it would also mean the end of Nato itself. In an attempt to defend Ukraine, European states would be endangering their own security.

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Charap has also argued that Russia is unlikely to agree to the presence of European troops in Ukraine as part of a peace deal, because “keeping Nato forces and infrastructure out of Ukraine has been a key Russian objective for decades”. If they insist on the idea of troops in Ukraine as part of a peace deal, Europeans would be incentivising Russia to keep fighting. On the other hand, Putin might see the deployment of European troops in Ukraine as an opportunity to destroy Nato.

In the meantime, the idea of troops is also dividing Europeans. At a World Economic Forum panel in Davos on 24 January, the former German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger argued that a multinational peacekeeping force including Chinese troops would be better than a European one. The British historian Niall Ferguson slammed Ischinger’s idea as the worst he had heard at Davos in ten years and suggested it was evidence of German skittishness. But this is too easy. After all, Poland – one of the most hawkish countries in Europe – was one of the first to make clear it would not deploy troops to Ukraine, as it needed to prioritise its own security.

As the realities and risks of sending troops to Ukraine become clearer, other European leaders will probably also back away from it. In the new reality created by the re-election of Trump, many will have to accept that, without US support, there is little to be done. In the end, they may do exactly what they have spent the past three years promising that they would never do – that is, abandon Ukraine to its fate.

[See also: The sound of Auschwitz]

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This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War