The week Europe realised it stands alone against Russian expansionism
Kaja Kallas, the European Union foreign policy chief, asked her officials this week to dig up the number of times Russia had – in its various guises – invaded other states in the 20th and 21st centuries. The answer that came back was 19 states, on 33 occasions. Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister, was not just indulging in some form of historical mathematics. She was seeking to make a point that lies at the heart of the dispute between the US and Europe over Ukraine’s future, a dispute that has again revealed the chasm across the Atlantic about the true nature of the Russian regime. Kallas reads history books as a leisure activity and – drawing on her own country’s history of Soviet occupation – has long maintained that the Soviet Union fell, but its imperialism never did. “Russia has never truly had to come to terms with its brutal past or bear the consequences of its actions,” she has said, arguing that the nature of the Russian regime means “rewarding aggression will bring more war, not less”: Putin will come back for more. A similar warning was made this week by the German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, who said: “Our intelligence services are telling us urgently: Russia is at least creating the option of a war against Nato by 2029 at the latest.” Putin is recruiting nearly one new division a month, Wadephul said, adding: “Divisions that are undoubtedly also targeting us, at the EU, at Nato.” The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has described Russia “as a constant destabilising power, trying to revise the borders to extend his power”. Putin, he said, is “a predator, an ogre at our gates who constantly needs to eat for his own survival”. In short, “he is a threat to Europeans”. The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, told MPs: “We know that without that deterrence, [Putin] has the ambition to go again, and he will go again – and we must guard against that.” All this is diametrically opposite to the view of US isolationists. Steve Witkoff, the New York property developer currently representing the US on the world stage – but also coaching Russia on how to win over Donald Trump – has admitted he knows little history, telling the Atlantic in May that he had been watching some Netflix documentaries to rectify this. But based on his four visits to Moscow, he largely treats Russia like any other country, and Vladimir Putin like any other world leader. He told Tucker Carlson he was certain that Russia would not want to take further territory in Europe once Putin was given four regions of Ukraine. “I think there’s this sort of notion of: ‘We’ve all got to be like Winston Churchill – the Russians are gonna march across Europe’ – I think that’s preposterous,” he said. Witkoff added: “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it. You know, it’s never just one person, right?” Russia genuinely wants peace, he opines. Trump largely holds the same benign view of Putin. His vice-president, JD Vance, has ridiculed the idea that Putin had expansionist designs. Putin was not Hitler, he explained – setting the bar for acceptability quite low. Putin on Thursday offered to put in writing he would not invade another European country. Depressingly for Europe, that means that no matter how frequently it managed to push the Trump pendulum away from Russia, the pendulum reverts back to a natural position of sympathy for Putin. Every time Europe feels it is on the verge of locking Trump into the belief that Russia is an aggressor that threatens European and, by extension, US security, Trump gives Putin another chance, “another two weeks”, another phone call. Trump’s one fixed belief is that Ukraine cannot win the war, and should cut its losses. But never until the emergence this month of a 28-point US-Russian plan to end the war – and the subsequent revelation that Witkoff had apparently coached Russian officials on how to win Trump round – had European leaders seen precisely how US officials envisioned a new European order in which Russia, in the name of realism, is rewarded and not punished for its unlawful invasion of Ukraine. Once again blind-sided by Trump, European leaders read paragraph after paragraph of the US proposal with a mixture of disbelief and panic. The former French president François Hollande said: “We are living through a moment that is both historic and dramatic. It is historic because this plan not only marks Ukraine’s capitulation, but also Europe’s relegation to the tutelage of a Russian-American condominium. It is dramatic because, for Ukraine, it means the definitive loss of a third of its territory and offers no security guarantees to protect it from further Russian aggression. It is dramatic, too, because this plan is nothing more than Trump adopting Vladimir Putin’s demands, reducing Europe to the role of a besieged bystander”. Josep Borrell, Kallas’s predecessor as head of EU foreign affairs, said: “Trump’s plan to end the war in Ukraine exposes the failure of the EU’s appeasement strategy. Giving in to his demands on military spending, tariffs, digital deregulation, multinational taxation and energy supplies has achieved nothing. With the 28-point plan to end the war in Ukraine, Trump’s United States can no longer be considered an ally of Europe, which is not even consulted on matters affecting its own security. Europe must acknowledge this shift in US policy and respond accordingly.” François Heisbourg, senior adviser for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, compared the plan to the 1940 armistice signed between Nazi Germany and a defeated France. “It is essentially a peace arranged on Russia’s terms,” he said. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser turned critic, was even more scathing. “I’m thinking of all those people over the past year who have been saying: ‘Hey, Trump’s changed his mind, he’s going to support Ukraine.’ I don’t know how many times it will take to prove it. He doesn’t care about Ukraine,” he said. German CDU foreign policy expert Norbert Röttgen described the moment as a turning point “because it means the US is siding with Putin and selling out both Ukraine’s sovereignty and the security of Europe. The previous assumption of a transatlantic alliance and a security guarantee from the US is no longer compatible.” Even if the 28-point plan does not come to pass, Röttgen said that “something fundamental has happened. We no longer live in the world as it was.” But if it was legitimate for European politicians outside government to condemn Trump’s betrayal, it was the responsibility of European leaders to minimise the impact – especially before the arbitrary thanksgiving deadline Trump had set for Ukraine. “Our first job, frankly, was to find out what had been going on,” admits one British diplomat. It was reportedly at a Berlin dinner on 18 November that Starmer, Macron and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, first exchanged notes on the scale of what Witkoff had been cooking up. The European magazine had got wind of a new initiative through a briefing Witkoff gave to Ukraine’s national security adviser, Rustem Umerov, at a weekend meeting in Miami. If so, that was a full month after Witkoff, flush with his ceasefire in Gaza, first rang Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy aide, to advise him that he wanted to repeat the exercise in Ukraine. He advised that the Russian leader should speak to Trump before the US president met the Ukrainian leader at the White House at a meeting scheduled for 17 October. Witkoff’s tipoff helped ensure the 150-minute call between Putin and Trump on 15 October went well enough for the US president to pull back from giving the Ukrainians Tomahawk missiles that they had been expecting. Instead, Trump said he was planning a second summit with Putin – this time in Bucharest. But at this point, US policy on Ukraine was starting to fracture. After a phone call with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, on 21 October, the US secretary of state and acting national security adviser, Marco Rubio, concluded that there was in fact no point in Trump meeting Putin, since Russia had not changed its positions since the inconclusive Alaska summit. The two sides were still too far apart about Ukraine’s sovereignty. On 22 October, US sanctions were imposed on Rosneft Oil and Lukoil, the first on Russia since Trump returned to office. Undaunted, Witkoff met Kirill Dmitriev, a Harvard-educated senior Kremlin adviser, in Miami. Few in the state department knew of these secret contacts, but it was in Florida that the outlines of the 28-point peace plan started to be drafted. Judging by the subsequent phone calls leaked to Bloomberg, Dmitriev sensed Witkoff was amenable to working with a Russian draft that amounted to a compendium of Russian talking points. Nevertheless, Europe is now well-drilled in responding to Trump’s occasional lunges to rehabilitate and reward Putin: first, welcome the fact of Trump’s intervention, before slowly and politely smothering it. So, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, went through the formulaic mark of respect for the US president’s efforts, but could not hide the gravity of what he called “one of the most difficult moments in our history”. “Ukraine could face a very difficult choice: the loss of dignity or the risk of losing a key partner, the United States,” he said in a video address to the nation. Agreeing to the US proposals would mean “a life without freedom, without dignity, without justice”, he said. Three factors helped the European rescue operation. First, the draft was so lopsided and so prescriptive about Europe’s security as to be indefensible. Rather than substitute an alternative, the Europeans chose instead to gut the Witkoff project. Making Trump’s plan the starting point was intended to avoid antagonising the Americans: it acknowledged Trump’s efforts as legitimate. Secondly, the disputes within the US administration could no longer be concealed – principally the feud between Vance and Rubio. This helped the Atlanticist wing in the Senate, already worried about the president’s plunging poll ratings, to rediscover its backbone and voice. That, in turn, led Vance to make some ill-tempered assaults on Congress. “There is an illusion that simply giving more money, more weapons, or imposing more sanctions will bring victory within reach. Peace will not be achieved by failed diplomats or politicians living in a fantasy world. It could be achieved by intelligent people living in the real world,” he said. It left Rubio walking a tightrope, remaining loyal to an unpredictable president but clearly telling US senators that this was not a US plan. Finally, Europe maintained its unity, despite petty rivalries about the roles of France, Germany and Britain. After a succession of meetings at the G20 in Johannesburg, an EU-Africa summit in Luanda, a nine-hour negotiation in Geneva, a further meeting in Abu Dhabi, and finally a video call of the 35-nation “coalition of the willing”, the Europeans held together. Of the original 28 points, only 19 remained by Monday evening, with those that affected European security or the future of Nato removed. Some paragraphs were simply deleted, such as the proposal to readmit Russia into the G7 or to allow the US to seize frozen Russian central bank assets, mostly held in European countries, to fund reconstruction efforts. The idea that the US would also drop all sanctions imposed on Russia was excised, and a ambiguous reference to Eurofighters and Poland disappeared. With its overarching view that Russia under its current leadership would always represent a threat, the key European focus has been to ensure any agreement prevents Russia from further military aggression. “The absolute condition for a good peace is a series of very robust security guarantees, and not guarantees only on paper,” said Macron. Some of those guarantees could be provided by a deployment of the so-called coalition of the willing. Starmer insists that plans are in place covering capability, coordination and command structure, but it is unclear whether the US will provide any additional guarantees. Rubio has agreed to set up a working party to explore how a US guarantee could be more than Trump deciding how he will react if and when Russia invades western Ukraine. Three Ukrainian red lines have been reserved for further talks: conceding key parts of Donbas currently under Ukrainian control, accepting restrictions on its army, and Nato forever barring Ukraine from membership. But regardless of what emerges from this latest fiasco – and the fierce negotiations may only be starting – the damage to the transatlantic alliance piles up. Europe now has to realise it must confront the Russian question alone. Unlike in Alaska, this time the US was lured into signing up to Russia’s plans to remake Europe in Russia’s interests. In so doing, according to French historian Françoise Thom, the US made itself complicit in the dismantlement of international law. Trump could yet block arms and intelligence to force through his peace, but it is equally possible this initiative will fizzle out, as Putin rejects the revised terms next week and the war grinds on, after distracting and weakening Ukrainian morale that is already strained by allegations of corruption. Some figures, such as Kallas, insist that Russia can be brought to breaking point as it runs out of money, especially if Europe finds a lawful way to give Ukraine a reparations loan drawing on frozen Russian central bank assets worth €210bn. But Europe has vowed to get its act together so often. Inertia, not Russia, may have become its own worst enemy.
