Without the US, the blocs Ukraine strategy will fall apart

Ian and Pascal Lottaz discuss the panic and the state of denial within European capitals following President Trump’s radical shift in US policy towards the war in Ukraine.

Donald Trump wants peace, now. Volodymyr Zelensky and his European supporters want victory, later. This is what the very public disagreement in the Oval Office on Friday was all about. Peace through victory — essentially the Second World War model — is the lens through which virtually all European leaders, and most commentators view the Russia-Ukraine conflict. America sees it differently.

I think Trump is sincere in wanting to broker a peace deal with Russia, but I do not think he has grasped the fact that Russia has no desire to end the war with Ukraine until it is defeated, along with NATO, or the United States accepts the conditions President Putin presented last June. Europe is a different matter entirely. The European Union bureaucrats and the leaders of France, Germany and the UK want to keep the war going.

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The international system during the Cold War was organised under extremely zero-sum conditions. There were two centres of power with two incompatible ideologies that relied on continued tensions between two rival military alliances to preserve bloc discipline and security dependence among allies. Without other centres of power or an ideological middle ground, the loss for one was a gain for the other. Yet, faced with the possibility of nuclear war, there were also incentives to reduce the rivalry and overcome the zero-sum bloc politics.

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‘Well, let me begin by saying that its resurrection would suggest that Europe at some time or another has been dead, but whilst she has undoubtedly been in a critical condition at times throughout the centuries, I would hesitate to say that she has ever been ‘dead’.

The European Union’s attitude to the Russian-Ukrainian war is a key priority area of the Community’s foreign policy. The intensity of the fighting is constantly increasing and, in addition to the warring parties, the burdens on Europe placed by the sanctions are also increasing. Despite this, the intention of bringing those affected to the negotiating table is not pronounced in Brussels’ efforts. However, based on the results of the research conducted by Századvég, Europeans would expect their leaders to work towards a peace agreement as soon as possible and a quick end to the war.

A solution to Russia’s war in Ukraine doesn’t need to come from Russia or Ukraine. But it needs to come from somewhere