Decades of Western missteps came to a head in the Oval Office last week, as a tense but cordial meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US President Donald Trump and his top officials devolved into an ugly fight for the world to see.
The consequences, which are still becoming clear, have left Ukraine and its European partners confronting a worst-case scenario they have long feared. Trump has frozen military aid to Ukraine, showing little interest in providing any security assurances.
Ukrainian officials have said they can hold out against Russian assaults even without their top military supporter. It is uncertain if the pause includes US logistical and intelligence support and, as is often the case, it is difficult to assess if Trump’s order marks a lasting policy shift, a fleeting impulse or a negotiating gambit.
Neither Ukraine, Europe nor NATO received much attention in Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress in Washington on Tuesday. He seemed pleased with Zelenskyy’s reiteration of his country’s desire to find a way to end the war that Russia started.
However the details now unfold, Europe faces its gravest security challenge since the Cold War — and an ironic one: The US has long pushed its European allies to take on more responsibility for their own security, and many of them have expressed a desire to do so. That moment is more obviously present than ever, but what a rebalanced transatlantic security arrangement looks like remains murky.
A summit on Sunday in London made sweeping promises, including fresh financial support for arms and a “coalition of the willing” to police a post-war arrangement, led by British troops and air cover. Yet those pledges came with the acknowledgement that, without the US, they would be hard to fulfil.
“Any kind of European troops in Ukraine only have a deterrent effect if they are backed up by a US backstop,” Roland Freudenstein, the Brussels office director of the Free Russia Foundation, a non-profit that supports democracy efforts in Russia, told The Parliament.
Military aid is more than raw firepower, but also support such as logistics and intelligence, which “Europe lacks at the moment,” he added.
A lack of hard power makes European soft power less convincing, which Ukraine knows painfully well. Europe has a poor track record in brokering peace or filling the role of security guarantor. While Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, took umbrage with what they perceived as Zelenskyy’s lack of gratitude for US support, much of the Ukrainian president’s beef was directed at Europe.
Memories of Minsk
Years before Trump would be demanding more of Europe, Europe tried to do more — and failed. In 2014-2015, the US played no direct role in negotiations to end Russia’s initial and more limited incursion into Ukraine, which annexed the Crimean Peninsula and backed separatists in its eastern Donbas region.
Called the Normandy Format, Germany and France brought Ukraine and Russia to agree to the Minsk I and II agreements. They called for a ceasefire, demilitarisation, and prisoner exchange and humanitarian aid.
These were the “multilateral conversations” Zelenskyy was referring to at the White House, as he expressed concerns that a new deal without meaningful security guarantees would be just as ineffective. Zelenskyy was not president at the time of the initial negotiations, but joined follow-up talks in 2019.
“I signed with him, Macron and Merkel — we signed ceasefire,” he told Trump and Vance, referring to the French president and former German chancellor. “All of them told me that [Russian President Vladimir Putin] will never go.”
Only when he did “go” — that is, break the deal and attack Ukraine again — did major European and other Western partners start to take the fate of the former Soviet republic seriously, seeing it tied to their own. Significant support for Ukraine’s defence began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
“The Minsk agreements were neither efficient, nor fair, nor durable,” Kristian Ätland, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, told The Parliament. “The terms of the negotiated agreements became increasingly favourable to Russia’s interests.”
They also lacked enforcement mechanisms and “were full of ambiguous language,” he added.
Aside from some sanctions against Russia, there was little to assure Ukraine’s security. France and Germany, and the EU more broadly, failed to provide sufficient military or economic pressure to dissuade further Russian aggression.
Merkel acknowledged that the “Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time,” but that time was not used to shore up Ukraine’s defences in a way that would have changed the Kremlin’s calculus.
US President Barack Obama limited American assistance to non-lethal aid; Trump provided some anti-tank weapons.
Historical, political and economic considerations also divided the European Union. Countries like Hungary and Slovakia opposed standing up to Russia. Germany dragged its feet, benefitting from direct imports of affordable Russian gas and feeling beholden to Moscow’s claim to liberating Germany from Nazism in World War II.
Countries once under Soviet influence, such as Poland and the Baltic states, raised alarm bells, but they were largely ignored.
Avoiding Minsk III
The Minsk I and II terms were “imposed on Ukraine at the barrel of a gun, when Russian and separatist forces were making territorial gains and pushing Ukrainian forces on the defensive,” Ätland said.
That may sound familiar to those following recent battlefield developments. While Ukraine has, at considerable cost, held out against a numerically superior force, it has not enjoyed decisive strategic gains since earlier in the war.
Trump, meanwhile, has shown his preference to end the war without explicitly saying whether he is interested in Ukraine’s security and territorial integrity. While he has said that he is on nobody’s side but America’s, Russian officials view his position as largely in alignment with theirs.
“Trump's approach toward Zelenskyy was in the best of worlds transactional and the worst of worlds a return to forms of imperialism,” Olivia Lazard, a fellow at Carnegie Europe, told The Parliament.
With US support for Ukraine now suspended, European leaders face tough odds of avoiding a Minsk-style agreement with similar results.
Through the end of last year, Europe has allocated more aid, including military support, to Ukraine than the US — about €132 billion, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. On Sunday, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a deal to get Ukraine 5,000 air defence missiles, but both US and European partners have struggled with procurement and meeting delivery targets.
The difficulty in arming Ukraine pales in comparison to what would be needed to re-arm European states in an era of unreliable US security guarantees. They have been able to help Ukraine keep Russia at bay on the cheap, with most spending less than 1% of GDP on aid. Their own militaries are looking at increases of as much as 5%.
Ahead of Thursday’s summit of EU leaders in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed loosening the bloc’s strict debt rules and making available up to €800 billion for members to beef up their armed forces. Germany, the bloc’s largest member and also one of its most fiscally conservative ones, may be ready to invest hundreds of billions of euros in its defence and infrastructure.
“A war cabinet is starting to crystallise,” Sven Biscop, the director of the Egmont Royal Institute for Foreign Affairs in Brussels, told The Parliament. “A number of key players, like France and the UK, can take action with a mandate from the other European countries.”
That could prove elusive. Hungary and Slovakia, whose governments are friendlier with Trump and Putin, oppose measures that contradict US policy. A draft of conclusions for the Council meeting repeats long-held platitudes: an end to the war through a comprehensive, just and lasting peace. The EU should help Ukraine get “in the strongest possible position” to conclude peace and stand by Ukraine forever — at any cost.
That echoes the “as long as it takes” position that pro-Ukrainian leaders in Europe and the US have repeated since 2022, without clearly defining what that means. Maximalist positions run contrary to a negotiated settlement that will, by definition, agree to at least some terms in Russia’s favour.
“It’s unclear what the West’s interest in Ukraine is other than moral righteousness, which cannot be sustained,” Nicolai Petro, a senior Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, a Canadian-based foreign policy think tank, told The Parliament. “The actual negotiating process has to begin with the recognition that you will have to compromise.”
However the current iteration of West-Russia tensions evolves, it will likely feel much different than how the Cold War ended — not with the satisfying bang of Soviet implosion, but the whimper of unpleasant concessions that may look like anything but victory.
“It all boils down to the question,” Petro said. “What’s Russia's role in Europe?”
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