Trump’s tough “America First” diplomacy on the Ukraine War is exposing European leaders for failing to act — and they’re now scrambling to come up with a plan to support Ukraine and broker a deal to end the brutal three-year conflict on their continent.
Two rough proposals have emerged ahead of a crucial meeting of Europe’s leaders this Thursday — though they’re both short on details and support in the bloc.
UK prime minister Keir Starmer outlined a “coalition of the willing” that would see British troops and others keeping the peace. France has suggested a one-month “partial truce” that would still allow fighting to continue on the bloody frontlines of the war.
Both plans would likely require the support of the US military in order to be in any way enforceable.
“If the US were to withdraw, the biggest challenge would be the time it’ll take for Europe to get its defense production going, which will likely take one or two years to accomplish,” Kateryna Stephaneko, the Russian Deputy Team Lead and Analyst from the Institute for the Study of War, told The Post.
“There is a need for Europe to unite to tackle this challenge since — it’s important to note — Russia does not want to negotiate. Moscow has made it clear that it is not willing to make any concession,” Stephaneko said.
European leaders are now rushing to act as an emergency intermediary to health the rift between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump after last Friday’s fiery Oval Office showdown.
ON THE DEFENSE
Under a proposal floated by France, a short-term truce would test whether Russia is actually committed to a cease-fire.
“Such a truce on air, sea and energy infrastructure would allow us to determine whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is acting in good faith when he commits to a truce. And that’s when real peace negotiations could start,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said on Monday.
However, European diplomats — including in the UK— quickly distanced themselves from the proposal.
“It’s clear Macron pumped things up on this and went overboard,” a Western official told the Financial Times.
Meanwhile, Britain’s “coalition of the willing” — which Starmer loosely outlined during an emergency summit in London last weekend — raises questions about the actual military capacity Europe has to play a role in keeping any deal secure.
The most certain way to enforce any peace deal would be to put European troops on the ground in Ukraine who are prepared to shoot at Russian soldiers, many experts say.
But Britain’s troop numbers are at record lows, with approximately 70,000 full-time trained British Army personnel today, compared to 100,000 in 2000.
Its capacity to manufacture equipment at the level required for a modern combat operation in Europe is also greatly reduced, with only 160 of its flagship Challenger 2 tank fleet still fully operational.
At the same time, Starmer has rejected calls to increase defense spending beyond 2.5% of GDP, still far below the 5% target proposed for all NATO countries by President Trump.
The British Army’s situation is as bleak as it was in June 1940, when Operation Dynamo saw the British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk, defense expert Francis Tusa wrote in The Independent.
And Britain is one of the big spenders in Europe — the UK’s $69 billion 2024 military budget is the second largest in NATO, behind only the US.
Still, Europe is holding out hope that the US will swoop back in and find a solution to the Ukraine war that will be amenable to Europe.
Britain’s ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, said relations between Zelensky and Trump need a “very radical reset,”
“The reset has to consist of the United States and Ukraine getting back on the same page, President Zelensky giving his unequivocal backing to the initiative that President Trump is taking to end the war and to bring a just and lasting peace to Ukraine,” Britain’s Ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, said on Sunday in an interview with ABC News.
Any peace deal with the US is likely to come down to the US having “skin in the game,” in the form of a major mineral deal in Ukraine, insiders say, although Europe remains divided.
“Europe is not a monolith. There are a lot of different parties involved, all of whom have different ideas about the war and Russia,” Stephaneko told The Post.
One European diplomat told Politico that Zelensky desperately needs to find a way to create a relationship with Trump and sign the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal, which was supposed to have been finalized last week.
The diplomat said the current situation “involves U.K. and France stepping up to lead,” but that “the logic is also that the minerals deal will give the U.S. a commercial stake and business interests physically on the ground so provides a degree of protection.”
However, Zelensky on Monday again rejected any such deal that comes without guarantees of his country’s security as he stated that the conflict with Russia had started back in 2014 under similar circumstances.
“The absence of security guarantees for Ukraine 11 years ago allowed Russia to start with the occupation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. Later, the absence of security guarantees allows Russia to launch a full-scale invasion, and now, due to the lack of clear security guarantees, Russia continues to fuel this war,” Zelensky wrote on X.
ENERGY COSTS
The muddled reaction of Europe to the fallout from Friday’s Trump-Zelensky showdown comes as it was revealed the EU has spent more money on oil and natural gas from Russia than it has on financial aid to Ukraine.
European Union member states bought almost $23 billion of Russian oil and gas last year, according to estimates from the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which released a report marking the third anniversary of Putin’s troops invading Ukraine.
That is more than $3 billion higher than the $19.6 billion allocated by the EU for Ukraine in assistance in 2024, according to data from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
The apparent disparity between Europe’s tough talk on Russia and its actions was called out by Trump on Monday.
“Europe has spent more money buying Russian oil and gas than they have spent on defending Ukraine — BY FAR,” the president wrote on his Truth Social.
At the same time, some countries in Eastern Europe have threatened to block any planned aid to Ukraine this Thursday if the country doesn’t resume the movement of Russian natural gas through its territory.
Slovakia’s pro-Putin Prime Minister Robert Fico threatened to block the European Union summit on Thursday to approve financial and military aid to Ukraine, if Europe’s leaders do not support his demand for the EU to call on Kyiv to resume letting Russian natural gas transit through its territory, Slovak publication Česke Novyny reported.
Hungary, too, has vowed to oppose any additional aid to Ukraine.
“Russia itself has built a significant information network across Europe, going after countries like Hungary and Slovakia to influence them and mislead them about Russia’s demands,” Stephaneko told The Post.
Other nations formerly trapped behind the Iron Curtain have called on the US to make good on what it sees as commitments made to the former Soviet Bloc after the end of the Cold War.
Lech Walesa, Poland’s former leader who led the uprisings against the country’s communist regime, wrote that the US must “fulfill the guarantees it provided together with Great Britain in the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, which explicitly stated the obligation to defend the inviolability of Ukraine’s borders in exchange for its surrender of its nuclear weapons resources,” in a Facebook post.
“These guarantees are unconditional: there is not a word there about treating such aid as economic exchange,” he added, in a rejection of US calls for a mineral deal.
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