“The summer of our discontent”: a Ukrainian peace disappears over the horizon

In Shakespeare’s play, “Richard III”, winter is the season of discontent and this image has been used many times to characterise periods of turmoil and political breakdown; as for example during the famous “winter of discontent” of workers’ strikes, undug graves and rubbish piling up in the streets in the United Kingdom in 1978. But as Europe looks back on events in Ukraine over the past months we have experienced a “summer of our discontent “ as hopes for a ceasefire and of a more durable peace in the three-year war have been briefly raised and rapidly shattered.

US President Donald Trump’s boast that he could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours was never something that any analyst worth his or her salt took seriously. But nonetheless Trump’s enduring close relationship to Russian President, Vladimir Putin, coupled to the enormous diplomatic and military power of the United States, did create hopes that Trump’s involvement in Ukraine peace talks might achieve the breakthrough that had eluded his predecessor, Joe Biden, and European supporters of Ukraine. Of course it was a hope mixed with fear as Trump, in his haste to cut a deal and declare victory, might agree to a ceasefire or peace largely on Putin’s terms and leaving Ukraine (and conceivably NATO as well) exposed to further Russian aggression. Yet given Putin’s intransigence in sticking to Russia’s maximalist war objectives, American power and leverage appeared to be the only viable option to push Moscow back and achieve a peace that at least did not make Ukraine lose even more territory to Russia, and that would preserve the country as an independent state anchored to the West. So, despite the risks that American option had to be tried.

But the experience of the summer just passed has demonstrated that although Trump is able to pressure and cajole America’s closest friends and allies (using the weapon of tariffs or interference in their domestic politics), he is far less effective in deterring and constraining America’s adversaries and enemies. The much-touted summit in Alaska between Trump and Putin produced nothing for Ukraine and its supporters but much for Putin. The red carpet was literally rolled out for him as he was welcomed on American soil, definitively ending the diplomatic quarantine that the West had attempted to maintain on him following Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Putin was not required to make any concessions as a price for his invitation to Anchorage. His only diplomatic gift to Trump was his agreement with the US President’s oft-repeated (and completely unbelievable) assertion that Moscow would never have invaded Ukraine if Trump had been in office. Empty flattery was Putin’s easy alternative to real engagement. The meeting was a useful prelude to Putin’s visit to China for the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation just a few days later and to Chinese President Xi’s military parade in Beijing. Here, he was able to sign new energy deals with China, huddle with the leaders of North Korea and Iran and portray himself as the co-leader with Xi of a new bloc of emerging economies in opposition to the US and Europe. In Alaska, Putin did not soften any of his war objectives in Ukraine, insisting again that it was all the fault of NATO for wanting to enlarge further east and not allow Moscow its ‘legitimate’ zone of security (or sphere of influence and control) in its neighbourhood. Moreover, he persuaded Trump to give up his demand for an immediate ceasefire before any peace talks and push instead for an overall peace settlement. The problem here is that whereas a ceasefire can come into effect within days and last indefinitely, sorting through all the complex issues in a Ukraine-Russia peace deal, let alone agreeing on modalities for implementation, would drag on for months or even years. In the meantime, Russia would keep on fighting, hoping to seize more Ukrainian territory and further strengthen its position at the negotiating table. Moscow has demonstrated in the past that it is expert in the art of pretending to negotiate while pushing its line of control forward – as in its ‘borderisation’ strategy in Georgia. If agreements are tentatively reached, it blames the other side for not implementing concessions first. Continued Russian air attacks against Ukraine, and a mounting civilian death toll, would also produce outrage and lead Kyiv to suspend peace talks from time to time, giving Moscow even more scope to pursue the war. So peace talks without a prior ceasefire are meaningless. At the same time, there was no talk of further US sanctions against Russia, particularly hitting its oil exports and financial holdings, which Trump had suggested he was willing to impose prior to meeting Putin in Alaska. Instead, there was talk in the background about future oil and gas exploitation deals between Washington and Moscow and creating better conditions for US corporate investment in Russian companies and projects. Trump fell back on his well-known line that he is becoming frustrated with Putin and that his patience with the Russian leader and his obfuscations is wearing thin. But the process of losing patience can stretch over a very long period where the White House is concerned. Uncharacteristically, Trump said almost nothing at the post-Alaska press conference, leaving it to Putin to try the face-saving tactic of suggesting that he might agree to a trilateral US/Russia/Ukraine summit in the future, but in Moscow, clearly a non-starter for President Zelensky of Ukraine. Putin then immediately rubbed salt into the wounds by launching almost daily massive drone and missile strikes against Ukraine, exceeding the record of 800 drones fired in a single salvo, attacking the Council of Ministers building of the Ukrainian government for the first time, striking US-owned businesses in western Ukraine and landing drones just next door to the EU offices in central Kyiv. The Kyiv office of the British Council was also targeted. The message of ‘I will talk to you but don’t expect me to listen to what you are saying’ could not have been clearer.

Yet ahead of the Alaska summit the State Department did at least make more of an effort to cooperate with the UK-France-led coalition of the willing, which is planning a future reassurance force to be sent to Ukraine. It was also more transparent about Trump’s calls with Putin and US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff’s visits to the Kremlin. Both sides began systematically debriefing the other on their meetings and diplomatic outreach. Although not directly participating in the talks about talks for a peace deal, the Europeans had a sense that they were no longer being shut out and were gaining some leverage over the US administration, particularly when it came to sticks and not just carrots vis-à-vis Moscow. After the failure of the Alaska summit, the major European supporters of Ukraine, including the European Commission President and the NATO Secretary General, sensed an opportunity to steer Trump onto a more pro-Zelensky course, getting the US President to push again for a ceasefire first and to coordinate EU and UK sanctions on Russia as they had done successfully during the Biden administration. In a hastily arranged visit to the White House they pushed also for more US military assistance to Kyiv and for any US/Russia/Ukraine summit to be held on European soil rather than in Türkiye or the Gulf, which is what the US seemed to have in mind. The Europeans proposed Geneva, the venue of much successful US-Soviet Cold War diplomacy. Above all, the European delegation gained a major commitment from the US to support the planned European Reassurance Force by offering air surveillance, air defence, intelligence and space communications and observation assets. This was not quite the hard US ‘backstop’ of a US reserve force to deter Russia and intervene in a crisis situation that Europeans had been hoping for. But at least it was an overdue recognition that the US has a responsibility too for the long-term security of Ukraine and hopefully enough of a commitment to encourage some of the European fence sitters to contribute ground troops, air and naval assets to the Reassurance Force.

Yet as so often during the war in Ukraine the pendulum never stays in one place for more than a few days. Barely were the European leaders back on this side of the Atlantic when Putin intensified his military operations in Donetsk, with Russian commanders claiming that they were advancing more quickly and capturing more Ukrainian villages (if not major towns) than at any time since the start of their invasion in 2022. They also went forward beyond the Donbas into Dnipro province and tried in the north to capture Sumy. The Russian aerial onslaught against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in advance of winter as well as on shipping infrastructure in the port of Odessa was stepped up. Ukrainian civilian casualties jumped rapidly from a handful during the nighttime air strikes to several dozen, including women and children. According to Zelensky, since the beginning of September Russia has dropped over 3000 drones and 2500 aerial bombs on Ukraine. As if to underscore his impunity, Putin launched 19 drones from Belarus 200km into Poland. The unarmed drones may not have been armed or inflicted any significant damage; but the large number of drones could not be the result of an accident or individual drones veering off course due to malfunction or Ukrainian jamming. It was clearly a deliberate provocation designed to test NATO’s military reactiveness as well as intra-alliance unity in coming up with a firm and unified political-military response. For the first time since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO forces (essentially Polish, Dutch and Italian) were engaged to shoot down three of the Russian drones rather than simply track their movements. Another Russian drone landed in Romania. Days later Russia and Belarus kicked off their Zapad exercise close to the Polish-Belarus border with hypersonic missiles like the Oreshnik being fired and simulations for the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Unlike in years gone by, there was no attempt by Moscow to play down Zapad as a counter-terrorism exercise of a purely defensive nature not linked to cross-border warfare operations. Putin was clearly out to demonstrate that despite the massive Russian military deployment in Ukraine (around 600,000 Russian troops), he still has enough military forces and equipment in reserve to intimidate NATO, especially at a time when several European governments are worried about the risks of sending even modest forces to Ukraine in the face of Russian opposition and threats to directly target them. On 19 September, three Russian MIG31 jets violated Estonian airspace for 12 minutes, forcing the Estonian government to request emergency Article 4 consultations in NATO, like its Polish counterpart in the wake of the drone incursions a week earlier. All in all, these were hardly the actions of a Russian leader who was steering his country towards an accommodation with Ukraine and the West via more modest war objectives, let alone ready to accept any non-cosmetic ceasefire. Russian spokespersons underlined that the conditions for a Putin-Zelensky summit were far from being met and pushed back firmly against speculation that had emerged from the Alaska summit that Putin might be prepared to accept a limited European Reassurance Force as an observer mission in Ukraine. Moscow at a maximum was prepared to continue the low-level technical talks in Istanbul, which have yielded little beyond agreements on prisoner exchanges. In sum, Moscow sees a Ukraine piece as surrender and diktat rather than negotiation.

The hope of the Europeans had been that Trump would be ready in consequence to impose tougher US sanctions on Russia. The EU is preparing its 19th package of sanctions and sent its Special Envoy for Sanctions Policy, David O’Sullivan, to discuss a joint approach with Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary. The plan was to align Brussels and Washington on further incremental steps that the EU had on its sanctions agenda: more Russian banks, companies and oligarchs to be added to the list, reducing the trading price for Russian oil carried in internationally registered tankers, further measures against the Russian ‘shadow fleet’, putting more sanctions on entities in India and China trading in Russian oil deliveries, for instance local refineries and storage facilities (an Indian refinery, owned by Russia, Nayara, was targeted in the 18th EU package), and finally taking more money out of Moscow’s frozen Central Bank assets by agreeing to riskier investment strategies in lieu of outright expropriation. Yet instead of going along with these proposals, the US is now demanding that Europe stops all trade in fossil fuels with Russia before Washington will move ahead with new sanctions of its own. The irony here is that two of Trump’s principal allies in the EU, Hungary and Slovakia, are the two most dependent on Russian oil and gas and determined to protect this source of supply. The EU has done a great deal to wean itself off Russian hydrocarbons since 2022, but it still imports 18% of its gas and 3% of its oil from Putin’s home country. In an olive branch to the US, the EU is now proposing in its 19th Russia sanctions package to totally ban Russian LNG imports by the end of 2026. Trump makes a fair point that Europe should stop all energy imports from Russia, which only stock up Moscow’s war chest. No doubt he would like more US oil and LNG to fill the gap. But doing this will take time, further delaying the moment when Putin feels any real economic pressure. This is even more the case with the additional US demand that the EU impose 50%+ tariffs on India and China, the main buyers of Russian oil. The US has already doubled its tariff on India to 50% in this regard. Yet it will clearly be difficult for an EU seeking to diversify its trading relations in the wake of the US tariffs on the EU to forgo a trade deal with a major emerging economy such as India or further complicate its already fraught relations with China over dumping, electric vehicles and direct foreign investment rules. The EU will be even more reluctant as the US continues also to import many precious metals and raw materials from Russia (including fertiliser and industrial goods totalling $3 bn in 2024) as the Indian Foreign Ministry pointed out when Trump announced his additional tariff on New Delhi. It is also not clear exactly which extra Russia sanctions are favoured by the US Treasury and Trump has been in no hurry to take advantage of the 500% sanctions authority that a rare bipartisan consensus in the US Congress is willing to grant him. The perfect is always the enemy of the good and, by making maximalist demands as a precondition of imposing sanctions, Trump is giving Putin an extra breathing space to wind up his military offensive in Ukraine. The Pentagon played its part as well. It suspended arms deliveries to Ukraine without notifying the White House, which after a first suspension following Zelensky’s disastrous visit to Washington in February had agreed to resume them. And it then imposed a restriction on Ukraine from using US-supplied long-range artillery and missiles against Russian military bases and enemy targets. As this was the one area where the Ukrainian army was having real successes in taking the war to Russia and severely reducing its storage depots and refining capacity, the Pentagon decision was little short of incomprehensible. In recent days, a Ukrainian special forces operation against the Volgograd oil refinery has put it totally out of action. Taken together, the conclusion has to be that Washington is not so much vacillating between Moscow and Kyiv but is simply unable to come up with a coherent Ukraine strategy, let alone stick to it. As was clear from Trump’s press conference at Chequers at the close of his state visit to the UK, he feels badly “let down” by Putin but is reluctant to draw the consequences and has few ideas how to move the quest for peace forward, despite boasting of his prowess in ending seven other international conflicts. Optimists will say that Trump (and American conservatives more generally) is being gradually driven towards the European stance on Ukraine by Putin’s intransigence and the realities of geopolitics. But we must wait to see if this is really the case, or how much valuable time to assist Ukraine might be wasted in the somewhat two steps forward, one step back process. Following Trump’s meeting with Zelensky at the UN General Assembly in New York, many European leaders and supporters of Ukraine are hailing Trump’s tweet on his Truth Social platform that he now believes that Russia is a “paper tiger” and that Ukraine can liberate all of its occupied territory. But he said also that it is up to Europe and not the US to help Kyiv to achieve this goal and proposed no new US actions, which is being read as a further US disengagement from the Ukrainian conflict.

So, after a summer of multiple summits and back to back meetings of European foreign and defence ministers and military chiefs in groups such as the Coalition of the Willing, the Ukraine Defence Contact Group (formerly known as the Ramstein Group), the E5, the enlarged Weimar Group, the Joint Expeditionary Force and the Nordic and Baltic framework that have produced little, where do we go from here? How to turn a summer of discontent into a winter of real content, if not contentment?

First is to use the coming weeks before the onset of winter and the slowdown in military operations to shore up Ukrainian defences along the new lines of contact. Although Russia has advanced along multiple fronts, its gains have been slow and costly and the Ukrainian army has succeeded in pushing the Russian army back in places. The Russians have failed to take Sumy or other key objectives such as Pokrovsk, Novopavlivka and Zaporizhzhia, and Kyiv also says that it has encircled Russian units outside Pokrovsk. Control over the important rail junction at Kupiansk is still disputed. The NATO-run PURL (Priority Ukraine Requirements List) arrangement to channel US weapons purchased by European allies to Ukraine has begun to function. European allies have contributed $2bn to this scheme thus far and four equipment and weapons packages have been delivered, including missiles for HIMARS and Patriot launchers. Zelensky says that he expects $3.5bn in PURL funding to be available by October.

If the flow of missiles and ammunition can be maintained into the winter, Ukraine should be able to stabilise the front and build fortified lines using its current strongholds around Pokrovsk and Kupiansk to hold back a Russian spring offensive next year. Kyiv will also have a breathing space to train and bring in fresh troops and recalibrate its counter drone and anti-missile defences. Efforts in the EU need to be stepped up to get around a Hungarian block on the disbursement of €6.6bn currently in the European Peace Facility. European supporters of Ukraine also need to lobby the US administration hard to allow Kyiv to use long range US missiles such as Tomahawk cruise missiles, ERAM and JASSM against critical infrastructure in Russia, which supports the Russian army in Ukraine. Americans and many Europeans have frequently worried about the risk of escalation if they facilitate strikes in Russia itself. But the Russian drone incursions into Poland, Romania and the Baltic states as well as its many airspace violations and jamming of GPS navigation signals demonstrate that Russia is prepared to escalate even when the West shows restraint.

The next priority is to ramp up Ukraine’s domestic armaments production. Zelensky has reported that 50% of the weapons that his forces are using in the frontline are manufactured in Ukraine and that Ukrainian companies are now producing 60% of the country’s overall military requirements. The Ukrainian Flamingo drone can fly 3000km deep into Russia and the country has pulled ahead of NATO in the development of interceptor drones. That means that Ukraine’s international partners should focus on the things that Kyiv cannot produce itself, like the 10 new Patriot anti-missile batteries that Zelensky has called for. Russia now uses glide bombs with 3000lb warheads, six times heavier than when these weapons were first launched against Ukraine. The Shaheed drones have been reconfigured to carry heavier payloads and Moscow used an Iskander ballistic missile to strike government buildings in Kyiv. As Russia tries again to dismantle Ukraine’s energy infrastructure ahead of winter and to attack rail and transport nodes in the east to hamper Kyiv’s reinforcement capacity, more effective and multilayered air defence has to be the priority for European purchases of US equipment and its own accelerated industrial production at home. Moreover, Ukraine should be fully integrated into the EU’s €150bn SAFE (Security Action for Europe) investment fund so that it can participate in its multinational procurement programmes and achieve economies of scale. Denmark has led the way by investing its financial contributions to Ukraine directly in joint industrial ventures and the UK, Germany and the US have followed suit by setting up joint ventures in Ukraine. Of course, Russia will not be indifferent to more war production happening inside Ukraine itself and will target more drone and missile attacks on defence companies and supply networks. European governments will therefore need to help Ukrainian companies to set up on their territory and integrate Ukraine’s defence needs into their own procurement plans (particularly for ammunition, artillery and armoured vehicles) going forward. But this is not a one-way street. Following the Russian drone incursion into Poland, Zelensky has offered Ukraine’s counter-drone technology (particularly in jamming and interceptor drones) to NATO and Polish companies have approached their Ukrainian counterparts for collaboration.

A third area for immediate action is for NATO to improve its own air and missile defence along its eastern borders. NATO early warning radar systems and aircraft succeeded in identifying the Russian drone incursion quickly and in shooting down three of the drones. Yet, as the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, General Alexus Grynkewich, subsequently acknowledged, the incursion also exposed gaps in the alliance’s integrated air and missile defence system. Eleven years after Putin’s annexation of Crimea it seems astonishing that NATO still only has only a small rotational air presence in the Baltic states, involved in air policing rather than classic air defence, and no comprehensive air defence and counter-drone multilayered system. Poland was fortunate in that the Netherlands happened to have sent a detachment of its F35 jets on a three-month deployment to Poland just before the drone incursion occurred and they could play an important role in the air defence operations. In the wake of the incursion, France has sent three Rafale jets to Poland and the UK troops and a number of Typhoon jets. On the other hand, due apparently to pressure from the populist Minister, Matteo Salvini, Italy has declined to send its own jets (although it currently has some F35 jets in Estonia). NATO now needs to look at a permanent set of arrangements similar to the national allied airbases in Germany and Italy during the Cold War. Putin’s move in sending drones into Poland was astute in that it will inevitably make many allies, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, more hesitant when it comes to sending their air defence systems to Ukraine. NATO will be drawn into a ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’ dilemma. Is there more security and military effectiveness in transferring more air defence assets to Ukraine to enable it to shoot down Russian missiles and drones that may be headed towards NATO, or to wait for them to cross the border and try to shoot them down oneself? Yet the Russian incursion could persuade allies to integrate their air defence systems (radar, sensors and interceptors) with those of Ukraine to have a single operational area. NATO could establish a 100km air interdiction zone along its border with Ukraine and state that it will intercept any projectile that flies into that space from Russia or Belarus given the proximity to its own borders and population centres.

The summer witnessed multiple meetings of the Coalition of the Willing, the group that has been assembled by the UK and France, to establish a Reassurance Force for Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire or peace settlement, and that now includes 31 countries. Members of the coalition have also been frequent visitors to Kyiv to consult with the Ukrainian foreign and defence ministries and military commanders. Yet the talks have been slow and the countries prepared to put boots on the ground very small (essentially only the UK, France and Estonia). Most offers of participation thus far have involved naval assets in the Black Sea or air and logistics support. The US offer to contribute is welcome but it is over the horizon and vague and far from the ‘backstop’ of an emergency rapid response that the UK and France were hoping for. There have even been suggestions from inside the Pentagon that the US would ask Europe to reimburse the US for any assets and services contributed to the Reassurance Force. Meanwhile, the first iteration of the forthcoming new US National Defence Strategy is not calculated to reassure the European NATO allies themselves. It puts the priority on the US homeland and neighbourhood with the military being primarily engaged in combatting illegal migration, keeping order on the streets of US cities and stopping the boats of drug traffickers off the coast of Venezuela. Russia has predictably capitalised on these hesitations by issuing dire warnings that European troops from NATO member states deployed to Ukraine will be treated as hostile forces and targeted. Moscow has made clear that its idea of security guarantees for Ukraine is a return to vague paper commitments governed by the UN Security Council, making Moscow and China co-guarantors with a veto, and therefore easily violated. A return in short to the disastrous precedent of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 with its absence of concrete commitments or an implementation plan. But Europeans are also in a double bind or ‘Catch 22’ when it comes to the Reassurance Force. To be effective and deter Russia, it will need to be much more than a token force and be militarily substantial and capable. This will mean either generating fresh troops from the NATO force structure or reducing the size and capability of the current NATO multinational brigades and battalions in Eastern Europe in order to send troops to Ukraine. Another case of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’, which might produce strong opposition from Poland, Romania and the Baltic states, increasingly exposed to Russia provocations. The UK leading the effort but with a small and under-resourced army could be particularly overstretched. The second bind is that President Zelensky needs clarity and commitments now on the European Reassurance Force in order to be able to negotiate with Putin (and Trump) from a stronger position, a ‘card’ at least after Trump told him at the White House last February that he held ‘no cards’ in upcoming talks with Moscow. But many European governments are hedging their bets and clearly unwilling to make firm troop or other military commitments to the Reassurance Force before they see the shape of a ceasefire or peace agreement and decide how robust and lasting (and therefore safe for their forces in Ukraine) it is likely to be. The UK and France have set up a planning headquarters rotating between Paris and London but clearly there is much more work to do here to find a way through the binds of conflicting priorities outlined above.

The lesson of this summer of our discontent is clear. Putin is not interested in compromise or peace negotiations as he has tied his legacy as Russia’s leader to bringing Ukraine fully back into the Russian Mir. Yet he is happy to pretend that he may be interested as a useful delaying tactic, as long as he can play Trump along, muddy the waters and promise just enough to persuade the US President to postpone or backtrack on any action he might be considering. That tactic has worked well for Putin thus far so expect him to continue with it. Given Putin’s entrapment in his own worldview of Russian greatness and his massive, almost irreversible investment of resources in a Russian victory in Ukraine thus far, it will not be easy to inject a dose of reality and rationality into his bubble. So, there is no alternative but to fight on for the foreseeable future. Because Putin has not won, Ukraine has not lost. The problem is that Trump and many US conservatives do not recognise this. Their constant refrain is that because Russia is big and Ukraine is smaller, Russia has to be the winner. Even if Moscow has not been able to achieve this in 3 years of all-out war. Yet this viewpoint is profoundly ahistorical. Massive military superiority did not enable the US to defeat the North Vietnamese nor the Taliban. It took a coalition of the world’s three largest military powers and four years of horrendous fighting to bring Nazi Germany to heel. The mood of Spenglerian pessimism in Washington about Ukraine’s war prospects is diverting attention away from the country’s real strengths and ability to fight back. It is also preventing Washington from developing a collective joint strategy with Europe to save Ukraine as an independent state linked to the West and the vital front line of defence for NATO vis-à-vis Russia in the future. Helping Ukraine to decimate the Russian army is NATO’s best insurance policy as it will greatly slow down Russia’s ability to reconstitute its army and directly threaten NATO itself once the Ukraine conflict is over. The art of strategy has always been to delay a fight with a likely adversary until you are ready to fight. In the period leading up to the Second World War this imperative led European leaders to resort to drastic measures. Stalin made in 1939 a cynical deal with Nazi Germany to divide Poland in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. UK prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, with more naivety than cynicism, settled with Hitler in Munich the fate of Czechoslovakia in 1938. The deal conceded the Sudetenland to Germany but it bought the UK a precious year to develop its radar and build more Spitfires and Hurricanes to save the UK from a Nazi invasion in the Battle of Britain in 1940. Yet the crucial difference this time round is that we do not have to cede territory to buy time. A non-EU and non-NATO country is doing the fighting, taking the casualties and suffering the national destruction to keep the aggressor at bay. So, strategic sense demands that we help Ukraine to resist as long and as best as possible. What has been lacking in Washington and many European capitals thus far is any understanding of the fact that Ukraine will determine the future of the West and our ability to live in peace and security for decades to come. Again, and to go back to the 1930s analogy, many thought at the time that Hitler’s goals were limited, and principally to unite German speakers in a single Reich at the expense of Eastern European Slavs in Poland and Czechoslovakia. They realised ultimately that his ambitions were much more ideological and expansive. Similarly, Putin’s goals in Ukraine are not simply to ‘protect’ the ethnic Russians in the Donbas or Crimea. If that were the case, Putin could have stopped the war months ago or even stayed with the occupation of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk after 2014. The fact that the Russian leader has not been satisfied with these limited gains but has continued the war with the aim of dominating all of Ukraine and rolling back NATO’s forces to the pre-enlargement line at the German border in 1990 tells us a lot about his true strategic objective: to eviscerate NATO as a credible defence alliance, undermine the EU as a political union and weaken the transatlantic security partnership by driving the US back into its own hemisphere. Putin’s provocations are designed to undermine European trust in the US by inducing Trump to show once more his lack of resolve and his unwillingness to take action (what does “I don’t love it. I don’t like that when it happens. Could be big trouble” actually mean in practice?). And conversely, they are designed to show Trump that the Europeans are still overly dependent on the US for their defence having too long underfunded their own security. So lose-lose on both fronts.

Yet if our summer of discontent over Ukraine, with all its flip-flops, wishful thinking and half-baked initiatives, is nonetheless to have a silver lining it will be in finally persuading both Washington and the key European capitals that there is no cheap, quick and easy exit from the Ukrainian imbroglio. Whether we want to hear the message or not, Europe’s future security means much more help to Ukraine, ensuring that Russia suffers a military defeat in Ukraine that it will take years to recover from, a long term European commitment to a sovereign and independent Ukraine and the rearmament of Europe to preserve the integrity of every inch of EU territory. This will be a long haul. But it will also be easier when we know that there really is no alternative.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.