Europe Races to Craft Plan to Save Zelenskiy and US Support

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(Bloomberg) — UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other European leaders used a security summit in London to demonstrate broad support for Ukraine. Behind the scenes, though, they were scrambling to get Volodymyr Zelenskiy back to the table with US President Donald Trump.

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From Starmer to his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni and French President Emmanuel Macron, leaders spent the weekend in a diplomatic whirlwind as they tried to fix last week’s disastrous clash at the White House. They also fast-tracked efforts to improve their own defense capabilities in the wake of the falling out and Trump’s direct outreach to Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine.

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Their hope is that the campaign, which coalesced on Sunday inside the gilded Victorian halls of Lancaster House, would persuade Trump to stay engaged with Europe and Ukraine before his peace talks with Putin advance further. Macron told Le Figaro newspaper after the gathering that some nations wanted a one-month truce in Ukraine so negotiations on peacekeeping deployments can play out. A British official said there hasn’t been any agreement on a timeline for a ceasefire.

The UK and France were seeking to build what Starmer called a “coalition of the willing” to participate in peacekeeping forces and help reassure Kyiv about the durability of any peace. The two longtime US allies aim to take the “Europe-plus” grouping, including non-EU states potentially including Canada, to Trump in coming days to get his buy-in, according to European officials familiar with the plan.

“From my discussions over recent days, we’ve agreed that the UK, France and others will work with Ukraine on a plan to stop the fighting,” Starmer told reporters after the summit. “Then, we’ll discuss that plan with the United States.”

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Zelenskiy described the summit as a “strong start” and said he already sees “theoretical possibility” of a foreign contingent. Still, he said it was too early to elaborate on “first steps” taken on Sunday.

The plan is underpinned by a belief that some in the Trump administration weren’t ready to abandon discussions with Ukraine despite the messy blow-up with Zelenskiy on Friday. The US president appeared to hold fewer hard-line views than some in his administration, according to a European official familiar with the talks, who noted some aides have been insisting that Zelenskiy resign as part of any deal.

Macron, Meloni and Starmer where among European leaders who spoke with both Trump and Zelenskiy over the weekend, as they tried to get the two men back to the table. They believe there’s still a narrow path to reviving the minerals deal that the presidents had planned to sign, giving the US leader a vested interest in deterring further Russian aggression against Ukraine.

“The challenge on top of everything else for European leaders today and for Keir Starmer is to demonstrate publicly that Zelenskiy is ready for peace if Europe is involved,” former UK ambassador to NATO Adam Thomson told Sky News on Sunday. They then must “make that package attractive enough for Donald Trump to want to reinvest at least as a mediator, even if he’s not going to be on the Ukrainian or European side,” Thomson said. 

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Mending ties between Trump and Zelenskiy won’t be easy. While European allies have rushed to express support for the war-torn country’s leader, the US has made clear it wants a public apology.

“There’s going to have to be a rebuilding of any kind of interest in good faith negotiations before President Trump is going to be willing to re-engage in any of this,” Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Fox News Sunday.

The struggle to rehabilitate the Ukrainian president was only part of the challenge posed to Europe by Trump. Leaders from the continent are also facing renewed pressure to build a more convincing security structure, both to protect Ukraine and to prepare for a possible American pullback from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other longstanding commitments on the continent. 

The need for speed was why Macron was working with Starmer and others outside the consensus-driven European Union to assemble a group of countries to staff a potential peacekeeping force in Ukraine. The proposal was to offer a one-month truce while negotiations on troop deployments and security guarantees proceed, Macron said in his interview with le Figaro. Troops would come after, he said. 

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“We must learn from the past,” European Council President Antonio Costa said in London. “We need these strong security guarantees.”

The sheer talk of putting boots on the ground in Ukraine brought rebuke from Moscow, where Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out at the idea of European forces in Ukraine in an interview published on his ministry’s website. 

The broader European Council will meet on Thursday to discuss a €20 billion ($21 billion) military package for Ukraine and steps to boost defense spending, including a potential loosening of fiscal rules. In his interview with Le Figaro, Macron suggested that some were preparing to go further, arguing that European nations should collectively spend €200 billion more on defense. They should also set a target for expenditures equal to 3% to 3.5% of economic output, he said.

Another discussion point will be whether a common special envoy to represent the bloc in possible talks to end the conflict should be named, an option supported by many member states. But the meeting will also lay bare the divisions within the 27-member bloc, with opposition coming mainly from Hungary and Slovakia that have sided with Trump on his approach on Ukraine.

“We urgently need to rearm Europe,” European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen told reporters in London, adding that Europe needs to see a “surge” in defense spending. Europeans must turn Ukraine “into a steel porcupine that is indigestible for potential invaders,” she said.

—With assistance from Nancy Cook, Jorge Valero, Donato Paolo Mancini, Konrad Krasuski and Aliaksandr Kudrytski.

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