President Volodymyr Zelensky’s enthusiastic reception of Washington’s desire to invite European partners into prospective Russia-Ukraine peace talks possesses all the tragic optimism of a man thanking the magistrate for reading him the riot act. One can hardly blame Kyiv for seizing upon any sign of Western multilateralism, yet the diplomatic choreography currently unfolding between the Potomac, the Seine, and the Spree deserves a far more jaundiced eye than the consensus commentariat is presently inclined to offer.
The prevailing view among the polite classes in Brussels is that transatlantic unity is being renewed, and that Europe, having bankrolled the humanitarian fallout of Vladimir Putin’s revanchism, is at last being granted its rightful voice. This is sheer fantasy. Washington does not invite Europe into delicate negotiations out of sudden respect for the strategic genius of the European External Action Service; it invites Europe when it wishes to distribute the blame for an approaching, unpalatable compromise. The Americans, with their attention wandering predictably toward the Pacific and their electorate weary of the ledger, are simply showing Europe to the coat check.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military continues to demonstrate a tactical ingenuity that vastly outstrips the diplomatic imagination of its sponsors. The striking of a Russian warship in the Gulf of Finland, executed by an explosive drone deep within Moscow’s maritime backyard, was an operational triumph. Yet it was also something more desperate: a sharp, calculated reminder that Kyiv refuses to allow the conflict to be frozen by foreign diplomats over lukewarm mineral water. Striking so close to St. Petersburg is not merely about degrading the Russian navy, which has rarely needed much assistance in degrading itself; it is an attempt to force the hand of an alliance that would vastly prefer a quiet, invisible stalemate.
It is into this combustible reality that European leaders are now being invited to step, carrying briefcases stuffed with good intentions and remarkably little else. What, precisely, does Berlin or Paris propose to bring to a negotiating table opposite Moscow? The German chancellery remains hopelessly ensnared in its own constitutional fiscal neuroses, terrified of its own shadow and even more terrified of its electorate. Paris offers grand, Gaullist flourishes about strategic autonomy, which, if history has taught us anything about French diplomatic rhetoric, will translate into several exceptionally long lunches followed by an admission that the French defense industry cannot produce artillery shells in sufficient volume to deter a moderately aggressive parish council.
The tragic comedy of the European position is that its leaders genuinely believe their presence at the table will restrain American cynicism and Russian brutality. In truth, Moscow respects only the raw currency of materiel and resolve, neither of which Europe possesses in quantities sufficient to alter Vladimir Putin’s calculus. To the Kremlin, European involvement does not represent a formidable front; it represents an opportunity to play twenty-seven separate national interests against one another until the entire enterprise collapses into bureaucratic paralysis.
If Europe were serious about peace, it would have spent the last three years turning its industrial base into an engine of deterrence that would make any Russian advance unthinkable, peace talks or no peace talks. Instead, it chose to outsource its security to a distracted superpower while lecturing the Global South on carbon emissions, a moralizing posture that China has rightly punctured this week by casually declining even to bother hosting the UN’s peripatetic climate jamboree in 2028.
Peace will eventually come to Ukraine, as all wars eventually end, but it will not be authored by European committees murmuring about rules-based international orders. When the terms are finally struck, they will be drawn by the brutal mathematics of the front line and the cold, transactional self-interest of the United States. Europe’s inclusion in the process is not an elevation to the ranks of the peacemakers. It is merely the presentation of the bill.
Rupert Halloway