Until when will Europe continue to gape before Putin

In August of last year, US President Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet in Alaska for his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. It seemed that a peace agreement for Ukraine might emerge from there, brokered... without Ukraine and without Europe! After this bilateral summit, Trump summoned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House, who half a year earlier had been cornered and berated on the same stage. And immediately after, the main European leaders flocked there, alarmed because they saw themselves on the margins of the negotiations. That image looked like the vassalage of the Old Continent to the Trumpian United States. But it was not that they were paying him homage: the reality is that a Trump-Putin agreement outside of Kyiv and European capitals was halted.

Since then, however, not only has there been no progress in attempts at peace talks, but US military support for Ukraine has clearly been dwindling, to the point that Washington broke the trade boycott on Moscow this October with the purchase of Russian diesel, something that had not happened in the last three years. As for the European countries, they have continued to provide military and logistical support to Zelensky, but, as the Ukrainian leader has complained, this support has served only, and with difficulty, to resist, in no case to attempt to win.

Now, the alleged resumption of talks cannot forget these precedents. If a negotiation is to take place, Europe must be there with a single, clear, and strong voice. As the head of EU diplomacy, Kaja Kallas, has said, one cannot let Putin, who is the aggressor, set the conditions. But Kallas does not currently have the backing of the Twenty-seven. It will also not be easy for the Russian leader, skilled at playing with Trump's weaknesses, to accept a European interlocutor from whom, right from the start, he demands nothing less than a return to the past, that is, to an Eastern Europe outside the protection of NATO.

The volatility of a Trump willing to sacrifice Europe's security and make concessions to Putin does not help at all. It weakens the Europeans before Moscow. The more unstable the White House appears, the more urgent and necessary the entry into play of a truly united and solid Europe in the face of expansionist Russia becomes. And all this is happening in the face of evident Ukrainian exhaustion in human lives and in economic and military resistance. There is also Russian exhaustion. But, of course, Russia has more resources, among other things because it has a silenced and terrified society.

So, the question is: to what extent are Brussels and the main European chancelleries prepared to assert themselves? Or, in other words, to what extent is it understood that in Ukraine we are gambling with the future of Europe's well-being and democracy? Rhetorically and on paper, they are clear about it. In practice, as Zelensky has seen and experienced, not so much. Undoubtedly, Trump's erratic game has not helped and will not help, while Putin seems willing to prolong the conflict as long as necessary and at any cost, spreading hybrid warfare along the way, an effective path to provoke social and political instability, and to favor the access to power of European far-right parties.