On Ukraine war, Euro leaders begin to make concessions — to reality

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky huddled with European leaders yesterday in advance of Donald Trump’s highly touted meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska. The call, which Trump joined as well, was viewed as Europe and Ukraine’s final chance to influence the American president’s thinking ahead of the U.S.-Russia summit in Anchorage.

With Ukraine’s position on the battlefield progressively worsening and Trump renewing his push for a ceasefire, European leaders have begun to make concessions to reality. Most strikingly, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said yesterday that the frontline should be the starting point for territorial negotiations, echoing NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s recent comment that there may be a need for de facto recognition of Russian occupation of Ukrainian land.

Moreover, in response to Putin’s proposal last week to agree to a ceasefire in exchange for Ukraine’s withdrawal from the rest of Donetsk region, Europe and Ukraine have insisted that any land swaps must be reciprocal. While European leaders remain firm that the norm of territorial integrity must be upheld in principle, these moves clearly embody a shift from the more uncompromising stance they embraced through the first three years of the war.

That said, some aspects of Europe’s stance remain delusional.

Prior to their meeting with Trump yesterday, Ukraine and its European partners agreed on a series of principles for negotiations with Russia. Among these remains the long outdated notion that Russia cannot have a veto over Ukraine’s NATO accession, even though the Trump administration has already ruled this prospect out. Even Trump’s much more transatlantically friendly predecessor Joe Biden was not prepared to take any tangible steps to make Ukrainian membership in NATO a reality.

In an increasingly multipolar world — one in which the United States has limited resources to respond to multiple contingencies across several theatres — Washington cannot afford to take on an additional ironclad security commitment to a country where, unlike in Western Europe, its vital interests are not at stake. Europeans advocating that the defense of Ukraine should ultimately fall on America’s shoulders is not only morally suspect but strategically unwise, as it telegraphs that Europe remains a vassal vulnerable to American shakedowns such as the recent capitulation to Trump on trade.

Even worse, Europeans risk squandering an opportunity to focus their heft on negotiating more realistic security guarantees for Ukraine. These could include pushing for Kyiv’s right to retain a peacetime military large enough to defend itself and deter Moscow, negotiating legal commitments to maintain stockpiles of specific weapons that would be automatically released to Ukraine in case Russia invades again, and pushing Moscow to accept a regulated European military presence on Ukrainian soil that is limited to activities such as training and maintenance of weapons systems.

Europe cannot claim to be a “geopolitical actor” if, on top-table matters of war and peace, it continues to fixate on presenting principles to its superpower patron rather than negotiate difficult security issues with its neighbors and adversaries. Insisting on Kyiv’s right to join NATO as a matter of principle reflects an “end of history” mentality — one that privileges lecturing over genuine diplomacy. And doing so while simultaneously claiming the mantle of “geopolitical actorness” has, ironically, only served to damage the European Union’s reputation as a sincere and consistent normative actor.

European leaders’ concessions to reality when it comes to borders mean little when one considers that the war in Ukraine is not primarily about territory. Rather, its origins lay in Russia’s perception that it has been denied a meaningful say over the contours of Europe’s post-Cold War security order, including the geopolitical alignment of states on its border.

Failure to reckon with this issue ensures that the wider European space will remain fractured, fostering a continued sense of insecurity for both Russia and the rest of Europe. The resulting increase in military budgets, coming at the expense of social spending, will in turn fuel the ongoing rise of populism across Europe. With the far right already in power or leading in the polls in the four largest European economies, this is not a prospect that liberal-minded Europeans should welcome.

Russia’s growing shift toward illiberalism at home and assertiveness abroad in the leadup to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine convinced many Europeans that Russia was “leaving” Europe. Such views confuse the European Union with Europe writ large. The fact that the return of war to the heart of the European continent has strengthened those forces that question the value of the European project shows precisely that Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of a “common European home” remains on the historical agenda.

European leaders are naturally seeking security guarantees for Ukraine in exchange for any territory that Kyiv agrees to give up, especially since such guarantees will underwrite the stability necessary for Ukraine’s reconstruction and E.U. accession processes to move forward. At the same time, although the road ahead remains filled with obstacles, in the weeks following the Alaska meeting Putin and Trump may prove able to agree on a broad vision for conflict resolution and ceasefire implementation that Zelensky can also be persuaded to accept, since what Kyiv risks losing outright on the battlefield it may be able to concede in exchange for something at the negotiating table.

If a sense of forward momentum does emerge from the Anchorage summit, European leaders would be foolish to retain their hardline normative posture on what the continent’s security order should look like. To do so would not only sideline them in any negotiations over that order’s future, but also damage their reputation in the eyes of the world by making it seem as though they remain the only party opposed to peace after more than three years of costly war.

Because its resources must be carefully husbanded in a multipolar world, Washington needs to craft a more pragmatic relationship with Russia, while simultaneously encouraging the rest of Europe to become a more autonomous and responsible pillar of the continental security order. The former task depends on a settlement of the war in Ukraine.