Calm before storm: EU feels out Ukraine plans before Trump

Pleas for unity are a common refrain at EU summits, often issued by exhausted Brussels officials at 3 a.m. as they desperately try to strike a bargain among the 27 member states.

But this time it was the turn of the Ukrainian President to drive home the message at a gathering of EU leaders on Thursday and a NATO meeting the previous evening. "It's very important that the voice of Europe is a united voice," Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters. "And that it is united with the US," he stressed.

The European Union — which in concert with Western allies has spent more than €100 billion ($103.6 billion) arming and aiding Kyiv ever since Russia launched its full-scale invasion almost three years ago — faces an important test of its resolve.

Get it together, Europe

The return of the notoriously unpredictable Donald Trump to the White House next month is certain to shake up transatlantic relations, particularly when it comes to Western support for Ukraine. Republican Trump is vowing to immediately end the war, though he has not laid out his plan.

Trump has repeatedly indicated he could reduce support for Ukraine and push Zelenskyy toward a peace deal. Figures close to Trump have suggested Ukraine should permanently cede eastern territories already occupied by Russia and give up its ambitions to join NATO. Both prospects are highly unlikely to fly in Kyiv.

Asked his thoughts about Trump taking office, Zelenskyy kept things positive. "Welcome, Donald!" he said. "What can I say?"

"I think that President Trump is a strong man and I want very much to have him on our side," he added. 

Zelenskyy has good reason to tread carefully; Trump has also indicated he might pare back military aid. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy has calculated that without new US aid packages, the West's total military aid next year could drop from a projected €59 billion to €34 billion.

On Thursday, top EU diplomat Kaja Kallas spoke out against pressuring Kyiv into talking to Moscow. "Any push for negotiations too soon will actually be a bad deal for Ukraine," she said. "All the other actors in the world are carefully watching how we act in this case and therefore we really need to be strong."

Question of EU peacekeeping troops remains divisive

Within the EU, leaders have also been puzzling in recent weeks how to provide security guarantees to Ukraine in the future. French President Emmanuel Macron, who was absent from the Brussels meeting due to the crisis in the cyclone-stricken French overseas territory of Mayotte,has reportedly brought up the prospect of sending European troops to Ukraine as peacekeepers once the conflict ends.

But several leaders, including Polish President Donald Tusk, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof, have chastised such talk as premature.

"I think it's completely inappropriate that some are now discussing what should follow as a third and fourth step," Chancellor Scholz said on Thursday.

"We are now thinking about will happen soon. For now, continued support for Ukraine is important here. A clear course that there's no escalation of war, that it does not spill over into war between Russia and NATO," he said.

One dissenting voice was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the EU premier with the warmest relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin. Orban called on Thursday for a ceasefire by Christmas — something Zelenskyy said he was not contemplating.

European support alone won't cut it, Zelenskyy warns

For his part, Zelenskyy made clear he sees NATO membership as the only option to keep Ukraine safe in the long term. Moscow holds a long-standing, vehement opposition to the former Soviet state joining the Western military alliance, its Cold War-era adversary.

"I believe that the European guarantees won't be sufficient for Ukraine," Zelenskyy said after meeting with EU leaders. "It is impossible to discuss this only with European leaders, because for us, the real guarantees in any case — today or in the future — are NATO," he said.

"On the way to NATO, we want security guarantees while we are not in NATO. And we can discuss such guarantees separately with both the US and Europe," Zelensky said, while also voicing cautious support for the idea of seeing eventual European peacekeeping troops in Ukraine.

In a statement more than 1,000 days into the conflict, the EU reconfirmed its "unwavering commitment to providing continued political, financial, economic, humanitarian, military and diplomatic support to Ukraine and its people for as long as it takes and as intensely as needed."

Moment of truth approaches

Analysts have been warning for months that the EU must be prepared to step up its game in the coming months.

"The first victim of Donald Trump's second term as US president is likely to be Ukraine. The only people who can avert that disaster are us Europeans, yet our continent is in disarray," historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote for the European Council of Foreign Relations think tank last month.

"Unless Europe can somehow rise to the challenge, not just Ukraine but the whole continent will be left weak, divided, and angry as we enter a new and dangerous period of European history," Garton Ash warned.

Edited by: John Silk