“Things have moved very significantly and quite quickly to a timetable that no one was expecting,” one European official said.<\/p>\n
“The US sees this as a moment to strike while the iron is hot. Our question is what are we trying to achieve here?”<\/p>\n
They added: “The European position has long been that Putin needs to show a genuine desire to get around a table and stop the war, and that would involve a ceasefire. But since Friday we have moved on from that. The question now is how we can get out of today without a blow-up. This is a moment of extreme jeopardy.”<\/p>\n
The aim for European leaders, diplomats say, is to shift White House thinking on two issues.<\/p>\n
One, the idea that peace can be achieved simply by Ukraine ceding the Donbas to Russia. And two, that this is not just about the future of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
“This is fundamentally about the security of our continent,” one British diplomat said.<\/p>\n
In other words, any discussion about security guarantees \u2013 as part of a final deal \u2013 would be about ensuring the wider security of Europe and not just Ukraine.<\/p>\n
That means convincing Trump of two things: one, that questions about territory and security guarantees cannot be separated, and two, that security guarantees must be about more than verbal or textual promises.<\/p>\n
US negotiators have talked about giving Ukraine as yet ill-defined Nato-style assurances that the west would come to Kyiv’s aid against future Russian aggression.<\/p>\n
“Nobody is clear what Trump means about a security guarantee,” one official said.<\/p>\n
“He believes that him simply saying to Putin “don’t attack” is enough. That’s not good enough for Ukraine or us.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Things have moved very significantly and quite quickly to a timetable that no one was expecting,” one European…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187],"class_list":{"0":"post-354470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115050511365564695","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}