Western capitals are braced for a potentially decisive week for European security, as the US and Russia begin talks to end the war in Ukraine and European leaders hold an emergency meeting to respond to the fast-moving negotiations taking place without them.
Europe’s most powerful leaders will gather in Paris on Monday for crisis talks on Ukraine and the future of European defence, sparked by Donald Trump’s decision to open peace talks with Russia. Those talks will formally begin in Saudi Arabia this week when Trump’s top diplomat Marco Rubio sits down with Russia’s Sergei Lavrov.
The Rubio-Lavrov meeting aims to lay the groundwork for Trump to meet Vladimir Putin, less than a week after the US leader shocked European capitals by agreeing with his Russian counterpart to start peace talks.
It will underscore the Europeans’ lack of input into negotiations that could ultimately reshape the continent’s security architecture.
“This is the beginning of the beginning. Things are definitely moving,” Alexander Stubb, Finland’s president, told the Financial Times. “Are Europe’s tectonic plates shifting?”
Referring to the date of Russia’s full-scale invasion, he added: “I think the world order started to shift on the 24th of February 2022, and we are now seeing the direction in which it might be going.”
Leaders including UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the heads of EU institutions and Nato will huddle in Paris on Monday at the invitation of President Emmanuel Macron.
Joined by the heads of government of Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, they will discuss concrete plans aiming to safeguard European defence regardless of future US engagement, said officials briefed on the preparations, along with how best to support Ukraine and strengthen their negotiating position.
Starmer said it was a “once-in-a-generation moment for our national security where we engage with the reality of the world today”.
“It’s insane how fast this is moving,” said a western official briefed on the talks. “All [Europe] must do is give Ukraine as much as possible so that it can better say ‘no’ to things rammed down its throat [by the US and Russia].”
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said Trump’s decision to open talks was a “powerful signal that we will try to solve problems through dialogue and talk about peace rather than war,” in comments broadcast by state TV on Sunday.
Ukraine was not invited to the US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia, and found out about them through the media, said a person close to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But its diplomats will travel there independently after visiting the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.
“Of course we understand that Americans have their own issues with Russians, it’s not our business — about the bilateral relations . . . but it is needed to have Ukraine and Europe if talks [are] about Ukraine and Europe,” the person said.
The European leaders’ main focus in Paris will be a possible deployment of European troops to Ukraine that would be stationed behind, not on, a future ceasefire line, as a “reassurance force”, said three officials. Alternatives might emerge before the meeting, one of the officials said, while Germany in particular had been cautious about the idea of peacekeeping forces.
There is uncertainty over what role the US would play in potentially guaranteeing the security of any Nato forces in Ukraine. Trump’s team has ruled out deploying American troops there, but European officials say the US has not excluded the possibility of providing external support to any deployment by Nato allies.
Many European governments are also uneasy about responding to a US request this week for specific details about weaponry, money and peacekeeping troops that they would be prepared to send to post-conflict Ukraine, according to multiple officials.
“The general feeling is that this is a good exercise in terms of thinking about what each can offer, but that the response to the US should be collective,” said one of the officials.
Stubb said: “I hope that whatever comes out of Paris is something which is appealing to the Americans so we can have more skin in the game.”
European leaders and diplomats spent much of their time at the weekend’s Munich Security Conference trying to parse the roles of the various members of Trump’s negotiating team, and how they might ultimately shape the president’s approach.
One senior European official said there was “95 per cent agreement” with Keith Kellogg, the 80-year-old retired general appointed as Trump’s Ukraine envoy, who has described Russia as “the enemy”.
But the official cautioned that the views of Kellogg, who was not named as a member of Trump’s four-man negotiating team, did not necessarily chime with those of Rubio, for example, “who might not see it the same way”.
In a meeting of G7 foreign ministers at Munich, Rubio was much less forthcoming with his views on Ukraine, said three people briefed on the discussions. Two said he noted that the talks with Lavrov would focus on logistics and planning for a Putin-Trump meeting.
Rubio told CBS on Sunday that Putin’s call with Trump had gone well but that “the next few weeks and days will determine whether it’s serious or not . . . there’s a lot of work to be done”.
Peskov said on Sunday that “with the previous administration [under Joe Biden] there was no dialogue, just war without end”. Trump’s stance “should be more impressive for any right-minded person or state”, he said, but Russia would “defend its interests so as not to be seduced by any false promises”.
Additional reporting by Felicia Schwartz in Munich, Leila Abboud in Paris, Lucy Fisher in London, Christopher Miller in Kyiv and James Politi in Washington