If bear hugs were army divisions and brave words cash euros, Volodymyr Zelensky would have ended his tour of European capitals this week the best-armed and best-funded leader in the world.<\/p>\n
\nZelensky faces the danger that giving too much to Putin would make Ukraine ungovernable<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u2018We stand with Ukraine,\u2019 vowed Sir Keir Starmer after hosting a summit for Zelensky and top European allies at Downing Street on Monday. \u2018We support you in the conflict and support you in the negotiations to make sure that this is a just and lasting settlement.\u2019 Germany\u2019s chancellor Friedrich Merz declared that \u2018nobody should doubt our support for Ukraine\u2019 and added that \u2018the destiny of this country is the destiny of Europe.\u2019 France\u2019s president Emmanuel Macron promised that Europe has \u2018a lot of cards in our hands.\u2019 Zelensky went from London to Rome yesterday, where his staunch supporter Giorgia Meloni offered more hugs, while Pope Leo gave his blessing.<\/p>\n
No doubt, Ukraine enjoys the sincere support of Europe in its struggle to resist Russia\u2019s invasion. That\u2019s not nothing. But in practice, what has Zelensky\u2019s latest tour to drum up support actually achieved?<\/p>\n
The Pope commands no divisions, as Stalin famously (but probably apocryphally) mused. Meloni recently postponed a government vote on further military funding for Ukraine while peace talks are ongoing. Macron last week refused to disclose details of \u20ac18 billion (\u00a316 billion) of Russian Central Bank Assets held in France on the grounds of banking confidentiality. Merz has been a vocal supporter of a \u2018reparations loan\u2019 to Kyiv backed by frozen Russian assets in Belgium \u2013 but has also insisted that a large chunk of that money be spent on expensive German armaments. Starmer\u2019s plan for putting British boots on the ground in Ukraine as part of a post-war \u2018reassurance force\u2019 are not remotely on anyone\u2019s agenda. As for other European countries not present at the London meeting, Hungary has just done a deal to continue importing Russian gas via Turkey, in defiance of a long-delayed European ban; its foreign minister Peter Szijjarto is in Moscow for talks with his Russian counterpart. Japan, another supposed ally, has also refused to back Europe\u2019s reparations loan.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless some concrete progress has been made on Donald Trump\u2019s much-redacted peace plan, now whittled down from its original 28 points. Europe and Ukraine are closer to a united position \u2013 of which the central point is that Zelensky insists that Ukraine cannot and will not surrender more ground to Putin.<\/p>\n
According to Trump\u2019s outgoing envoy for Ukraine General Keith Kellogg the two main issues standing on \u2018the last ten metres\u2019 to a deal are on territory \u2013 primarily the future of the Donbas \u2013 and on who controls Ukraine\u2019s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe\u2019s largest, currently under Russian occupation. Kellogg is likely over-simplifying, as Putin\u2019s shopping list of demands also include painful reductions in the size of Ukraine\u2019s army, constitutional neutrality, de jure recognition of occupied land as part of Russia, and restrictions on the kind of non-Nato security guarantees offered to Kyiv by its Western allies. But the Kremlin\u2019s insistence on controlling the final 20 per cent of Donetsk region that it has so far failed to conquer is emerging as a deal breaker.<\/p>\n
The White House, eager to get a deal at apparently any cost, is reportedly pushing Zelensky and Europe to accept Putin\u2019s demand for a Ukrainian withdrawal. But as Zelensky knows all too well, such a capitulation would provoke fury among the hard-line nationalists who currently control significant segments of Ukraine\u2019s front-line forces. Even if Zelensky were to order a withdrawal it is entirely possible that these units would refuse to obey him. Radical nationalists, such as the Azov Brigade, have previously threatened Zelensky with death if he does a deal with Russia \u2013 most notoriously back in October 2019 when a referendum was planned on the future status of the rebel Donbas republics. Just as the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 plunged Ireland into a civil war between pro- and anti-treaty forces, Zelensky faces the danger that giving too much to Putin would make Ukraine ungovernable.<\/p>\n
Complying with Trump \u2013 and Putin\u2019s \u2013 plan would also require either the mass evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens from the cities of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Konstantinovka or their abandonment to the well-documented horrors of Russian occupation. Surrendering the remainder of Donbas would also require the abandonment of the so-called \u2018fortress belt\u2019 of trenches and tank traps that Ukraine has built in eastern Donetsk, leaving Kyiv with no natural defences other than the Dnipro river. Indeed the Kremlin\u2019s demand is so humiliating and so nearly impossible to implement that it\u2019s likely that the reason Putin insists on it is to cover his refusal to make peace at all, while pretending to Trump that he is negotiating.<\/p>\n
Zelensky has been betrayed in word by his one-time allies in Washington and betrayed in deed by his European friends, who despite their grandstanding are so far unable to provide him with the money and the weapons Ukraine needs. At the same time Zelensky finds his own credibility at home eroding under a brutal corruption scandal that has implicated some of his closest associates in a $100 million (\u00a375 million) war profiteering scheme. Trump \u2013 who earlier this year described Zelensky as a \u2018dictator\u2019 \u2013 this week called for new elections in Ukraine, further undermining Zelensky\u2019s position.<\/p>\n
Zelensky finds himself in an impossible dilemma. Complying with the US peace plan to abandon Donbas will lead to a political and military crisis in Kyiv. That leaves him with little choice but to defy both Trump and Putin. But even if Zelensky\u2019s allies in Europe somehow come up with more cash to fund Kyiv\u2019s ongoing war effort, there\u2019s a catastrophic shortage of young Ukrainians willing to fight. As Senator John Kerry told a Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the Vietnam war in April 1971, \u2018nobody wants to be the last man to die for a mistake.\u2019 Prosecutors have opened a staggering 235,000 criminal cases for desertion from the Ukrainian army since the beginning of the war \u2013 including 176,000 absent without leave since November 2024. That means that more soldiers are on the run from the Ukrainian army than currently serve in the armies of Britain, France and Germany combined. At the same time, Russian forces achieved a grim landmark in their relentless missile and drone war against Ukraine\u2019s electrical grid infrastructure last week by entirely blacking out the provincial capital of Sumy for a whole day. Even Kyiv could soon face 16-hour rolling blackouts, authorities have warned.<\/p>\n
In this dire strait, Zelensky needs all the friends he can get. Crucially, however, he needs not just their friendship but their practical help with money and arms. But supporting Ukraine is not enough. The most crucial front of the endgame of the war is the battle to convince Putin that the cost of continuing the war outweighs that of continuing it. Slowly ramping up sanctions may be squeezing Russia\u2019s war economy, but are still very far from crushing it. So in the absence of any realistic compellence strategy, all Europe has to offer Zelensky is kind words and bear hugs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If bear hugs were army divisions and brave words cash euros, Volodymyr Zelensky would have ended his tour…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187],"class_list":{"0":"post-623616","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\/115693765514443598","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623616","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=623616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}