Opinion
No settlement signed without Europe in the chair
Moscow refused to widen the talks, so our defence must not be settled in a phone call. Back the one seat we have already chosen: ceasefire first, then a settlement Europe endorses only because it was in the room.
The Kremlin sat down with Washington's envoys to discuss the security of our continent, and we were not in the room. President Trump's envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, met Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on 12 November. Putin supported moving towards a settlement and a new system of European security, and Moscow answered Washington's request to widen the talks with a refusal. And, as Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal says, Europe has already chosen its representatives. Do not let our defence be decided in a phone call. Where we stand is this: ceasefire first, then a settlement, then architecture, and one European seat at the table, held by European Council President Antonio Costa and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas.
Yury Ushakov, Putin's aide, says Europeans strain to join the talks while their "practical actions" point to the continuation of the war, and that we must choose peace or its continuation. State Moscow's case at its best: Sergei Lavrov refused an immediate ceasefire without knowing what follows, saying it would be wiser to discuss the architecture first. And the reply is written in that case's own history. We already have a European security architecture, as Kaja Kallas said: the 1975 Helsinki Accords, the 1990 Paris Charter, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. And she said the problem is that Russia is not keeping to any of them. Any paper Moscow signs next, without keeping to the first three, would be the fourth in that series. That is why Michal calls the new talk of architecture a "trap".
Picture what you, starting out now, could be living under. One European voice at the table can win it for you. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy backs our sequence. Ukraine's foreign minister Andrii Sybiha adds the point that matters: protection from Russia, not talks with it about spheres of influence; no second Yalta or Munich. French President Emmanuel Macron has said plainly that Europeans define and decide their own security. And any settlement we endorse must rest on what NATO still states: Russia is the most significant and direct threat to Allied security.
The demand goes to the governments of Europe, and it is a demand, not a plea. Back the seat we have already chosen, in public and as one, and make joining the talks the condition of any European endorsement of an American-Russian settlement. Forgo the flattering national channel, the private guarantee, the bespoke deal for your capital alone. Yes, that bilateral track may finish without us. That is exactly why the condition is our endorsement, not a seat begged for at someone else's door: even a government tempted by its own channel can still refuse to sign its name to any settlement Europe did not sit at. The security bought in these weeks is the one you will live inside. Picture it in five years, in twenty, for the career you are starting now. So decide it well. Governments of the European Union: back the seat, set the condition, and hold it together.