The biggest story in Europe in the coming days will be Ukraine. After months of cajoling, pandering, and flattering, Europeans sense they’ve convinced Donald Trump to muck in on protecting Ukraine from further Russian attacks after the war.
Debate over the post-war security guarantees Europe might extend to Ukraine has intensified in recent weeks, fuelled in part by this month’s US-Russia summit in Alaska, which stirred tentative hope for a peace deal.
Now, as defence and foreign ministers descend on Copenhagen for the next few days, and parallel moves are made by the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" – states led by France and Britain to offer security assistance of some kind to Ukraine – the Europeans will try to flesh out just how those guarantees should work in practice.
A peacekeeping force has been floated, but its shape remains opaque. Trump, for his part, has signalled willingness to help, but he won’t send troops.
It’s a moment of truth for countries around the bloc to stump up, as they push to get President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the strongest possible negotiating position for future peace talks with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
Italian PM Giorgia Meloni has been touting a new European security architecture inspired by NATO’s mutual defence clause, but there’s little understanding of how that would work. The general parameters would likely mean beefing up Ukraine’s army and getting an American backstop for a "reassurance force," composed mainly of European soldiers stationed far from a frozen frontline.
Military chiefs will meet today to keep hashing out a draft framework of the guarantees. Then, national security advisors should finalise it within days, before leaders make the final call.
Less than half of the 30-strong Coalition of the Willing are open to sending troops, reports my colleague Charles Cohen in this must-read piece on who’s offering what. Others have suggested different kinds of support: watching the skies, sending ships, providing operational guidance, easing logistics, training staff, and even opening their military bases to troops.
The sad truth is that, regardless of how many details emerge from the European side in the days ahead, the end of the war or even a truce remains stubbornly out of reach. Without that, finessing the security guarantees is, at best, an academic exercise.
Russia is playing for time and has already cast European and American security guarantees as a non-starter. A trilateral summit between Putin, Zelenskyy and Trump is still a distant prospect. While the precise contours of US involvement are unknown, EU officials don’t see Russia taking any steps to end the war.
Donbas remains the core linchpin. For Putin, control of Donetsk and Luhansk is essential, both to sell the war as a victory at home and to strategically hold Kyiv vulnerable. For Zelenskyy, surrendering the region is politically and militarily untenable, it is where many Ukrainians trace the war’s origins. Losing it would devastate morale and weaken its defences.
Ursula von der Leyen, leading a more diplomatic kind of reassurance force, will head to seven eastern EU countries starting Friday, including Finland and Romania, in a trip focused on boosting Europe’s defence capacities. |
_20250828040245.jpg)
