Why Europe Cannot Accept Being Sidelined in the Ukraine Peace Process

More than a year ago, in a piece published here, I argued that a peace process which excluded Europe risked producing exactly the kind of settlement Europe would later have to live with, and pay for, alone. That warning about exclusion has only grown more urgent since. The specific fear I raised then — a deal imposed on Ukraine under pressure — has receded for now: Kyiv has entered a more assertive phase, and even Washington appears to have recognised it has less leverage over Zelensky than it once assumed. But the deeper problem I warned about has not gone away. Europe is still not in the room. A peace negotiated without Europe’s active participation is not just diplomatically flawed — it is strategically dangerous. If Washington and Moscow decide Europe’s fate without it, the continent will bear the consequences alone.

A Familiar Pattern, A New Danger

The war in Ukraine has evolved into a war of attrition. Neither side can achieve a decisive military victory. Even so, the picture briefly looked different in June and July, when Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign against Russian refineries produced real fuel shortages in some regions inside Russia, and Russian military advances on the front visibly slowed. The effect proved temporary: within weeks the strikes had shifted from refineries to logistics hubs, and the underlying stalemate reasserted itself.

This is not a matter of protocol. The war in Ukraine has evolved into a war of attrition. Neither side can achieve a decisive military victory. Even so, the picture briefly looked different in June and July, when Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign against Russian refineries produced real fuel shortages in some regions inside Russia, and Russian military advances on the front visibly slowed. The effect proved temporary: within weeks the strikes had shifted from refineries to logistics hubs, and the underlying stalemate reasserted itself.

What happens next will not be decided on the battlefield; it will be decided at the negotiating table — a table Europe still has no permanent seat at.

It was in February 2025 that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov first agreed to establish negotiating teams to work toward ending the conflict. Talks were held in Saudi Arabia, and both Kyiv and Brussels were deliberately sidelined from that meeting, which laid the groundwork for future negotiations. Since then, the pattern has deepened. Rounds of talks have been held in Abu Dhabi and Geneva; a framework has steadily taken shape that structurally excludes European participation.

Europe has not been passive. It has protested, convened emergency summits, formed a “coalition of the willing,” and significantly increased its financial and military support for Ukraine. But protesting exclusion is not the same as being at the table.

One must admit that Europe’s exclusion is not only Washington’s doing. Part of it is a product of indecisiveness and the clumsy machinery of EU decision-making. More than a year into calls for a European seat at the table, the EU still has not decided who would occupy it, or who will be able to speak for the bloc as a whole. If Europe wants Washington and Moscow to accept it as a principal, it must first determine exactly who sits in that chair. Unity of purpose without unity of representation is not enough.

US Diplomacy Has Not Delivered

Even before entering the Oval Office for the second time, President Trump promised to achieve a rapid ceasefire — a promise built on the assumption that a deal could be reached quickly if Washington negotiated directly with Moscow, without the complications of a wider table. That assumption has been tested and found wanting. Direct Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul in May 2025 lasted less than two hours and produced no breakthrough. Three months later, Washington raised the stakes on that same bilateral logic — and Europe’s absence from it became impossible to ignore.

The clearest illustration of Europe’s exclusion came in August 2025, when Trump and Putin met in Alaska — the first bilateral summit between a US and Russian president since the war began, held without Ukraine or a single European leader in the room. The meeting produced no signed agreement, but it produced a lingering dispute over what was actually discussed. Kremlin officials have since invoked the “spirit of Anchorage” to claim that Washington informally accepted Russian control over the whole of Donbas along with a freeze on the current line of contact. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has flatly denied this, stating that no formal or informal agreement on Ukraine was reached at the summit.

Europe was not present to hear what was said, and so has no standing to confirm or deny either version. That is precisely the vulnerability this piece warns against: exclusion from the room where the terms are set, not just from the table where they are signed.

Three further rounds of talks — in the UAE and Switzerland in early 2026 — likewise produced no agreement. The reason is not hard to find. Russia has engaged just enough to satisfy Washington while using the talks to seek sanctions relief, fracture Western cohesion, and buy time to rebuild militarily and economically. It has also convinced Washington that ceding Ukrainian territory is the only path to peace — a position that serves Russian maximalist goals, not a lasting settlement.

The bilateral channel, in short, has not brought peace closer. It has given Moscow a platform to legitimise its demands while keeping Europe, the party with the greatest long-term stake, at arm’s length.

The War Is on European Soil. The Peace Must Be Europe’s Business.

There is a fundamental logic that the current diplomatic architecture violates: this war is being fought on the European continent; its consequences, in refugees, energy disruption, economic strain, and security destabilisation, are paid primarily by European states, and any post-war order will define European security for decades to come.

Europe has effectively replaced the United States as Ukraine’s main donor. EU military aid rose by 67 per cent in 2025, and the EU approved a €90 billion loan to Ukraine for budgetary and military support in 2026–27. Europe is paying the bill. It should have a decisive voice in determining the terms of settlement.

The argument that this is primarily a US-Russia matter, a superpower negotiation over a regional conflict, is not only analytically wrong but also historically dangerous. It echoes the logic of Munich and Yalta: appeasement and partition, both times at the expense of those who had no seat at the table.

The European Council has stated its principles clearly: respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, no border changes by force, credible long-term security guarantees. These are the right principles — but principles declared from outside the negotiating room carry far less weight than positions defended from within it. Ukraine has said as much directly. President Zelensky called Europe’s absence from the table a “big mistake” in Munich in February 2026, and returned to the point three months later in Yerevan, calling on Europe to develop a single, common voice and secure a formal place in any talks. If Ukraine, the country paying the highest price for this war, is asking for this, the EU has both the mandate and the obligation to insist on it.

There are signs Europe is beginning to answer that call. At the June 2026 G7 summit, the UK, France, and Germany pressed Trump directly for a shared framework: an immediate ceasefire along the current front line as the starting point for talks, paired with binding multinational security guarantees for Ukraine — an attempt to shape the terms of negotiation before the next round begins, rather than react to it afterwards. It is a modest step, and its success will depend on whether Washington treats it as a real foundation for talks or as one more input to be absorbed and set aside. But it is a step in the direction this piece calls for: Europe acting as an author of the process, shaping terms before they are set rather than reacting to them afterwards.

A Bad Deal Leaves Europe Exposed

The stakes of getting this wrong extend beyond Ukraine. Dutch military intelligence has assessed that Russia could build up sufficient combat power to pose a regional challenge to NATO within a year of hostilities ending in Ukraine, with the goal not of defeating the alliance militarily, but of dividing it through limited territorial provocations, if necessary, under the threat of nuclear weapons use.

European security experts rate a ceasefire on Russia’s terms as one of the highest-likelihood, highest-impact risks facing the EU in 2026. The concern is not simply territorial loss; it is the strategic precedent set: a settlement that locks in gains achieved through force, rewards aggression, and leaves Ukraine structurally vulnerable would signal that Europe cannot shape its own security environment. Deterrence would erode, and the EU would inherit a permanently unstable frontier.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has stated plainly that Russia is seeking long-term confrontation and that the era of conveniently letting the United States carry the burden of European security is over. That is precisely the point. If the US is stepping back from its traditional role as Europe’s security guarantor, while simultaneously negotiating a settlement that shapes European security, then Europe must assert itself as a principal in shaping the settlement, with a formal role in the room, not a voice from outside it.

What Europe Must Demand

Europe has already shown what this kind of resolve looks like. On 23 July 2026, the EU adopted its 21^st sanctions package against Russia — the largest single batch of designations since the invasion began, freezing the oil price cap and closing loopholes in energy, crypto, and shadow-fleet networks that Moscow had been exploiting. It is a demonstration that when Europe moves as one, it can act with real economic weight. The lesson should not be lost on Brussels: the same unity that produced this package is precisely what is missing from the negotiating table. If Europe can impose costs on Russia collectively, it can also demand a seat collectively.

But resolve on the economic front must not become a substitute for resolve on the political one. The EU’s response cannot be limited to financial support and coalition-building on the margins. Europe must insist on direct, formal participation in all stages of the peace process. This must be a non-negotiable condition, not deferred to a later, undefined round as a courtesy — the way Secretary of State Rubio suggested in February 2025, when he said Europe and Ukraine would join the “real negotiations” eventually, after the initial US-Russia talks had already set the terms. European security cannot be decided without Europeans.

Concretely, this means: no legitimisation of territorial annexations achieved through force; robust and legally binding security guarantees for Ukraine, with EU accession recognised as a core component of those guarantees; maintenance of sanctions until Russia demonstrates genuine compliance with international law; and European co-authorship of any post-war security architecture, not mere endorsement of terms set elsewhere.

A peace that is negotiated between Washington and Moscow, ratified by Kyiv under pressure, and then handed to Europe as a done deal is not a European peace. It is an imposed settlement whose fragility Europe will spend the next decade managing and whose consequences, if Russia’s pattern holds, it may eventually be forced to confront militarily.

The architects of Europe’s future security must be Europeans. That is not a demand for prestige. It is a condition for durability.