European leaders scramble to shield Ukraine in high-stakes Trump talks – but did they?

It was dubbed the “Great European Charm Offensive”.

Hours before Volodymyr Zelenskyy headed to Washington for a Monday meeting with Donald Trump, announcements came pouring in from across Europe, making it clear that the president of Ukraine would not be going alone.

Instead, seven European heavyweights – a “dream team” of leaders representing Europe’s economic and military heft and who had a proven rapport with the US president – hastily cleared their schedules to join Zelenskyy in Washington. The result was a meeting set to become among the “oddest in modern diplomacy”, Simon McDonald, former permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote in the Guardian.

Their scramble hinted at just how much was at stake. Days earlier, Trump had met with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, rolling out the red carpet for a man wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes. The US president had gone into the summit insisting he wanted “some form of a ceasefire”; he came out of it backing pro-Russian positions. As Trump publicly dropped plans for an immediate ceasefire and insisted it was now up to Zelenskyy to “get it done,” the mood in Moscow was jubilant.

At its most simple, the united European front was aimed at avoiding a repeat of Trump’s February ambush of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. But the “rare and sweeping show of diplomatic force” was also about protecting Ukraine and Europe from any widening aggression from Moscow, said Luke Harding, the Guardian’s senior international correspondent, as the leaders of Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Finland landed in Washington alongside their EU and Nato counterparts.

The talks offered up a showcase of the lessons learned during Trump’s erratic time in power. Flattery flowed fast and freely, with European leaders showering compliments on Trump and gently papering over potential sticking points as much as possible. Six months after Zelenskyy’s extraordinary dressing down in the Oval Office, the Ukrainian president peppered his opening remarks with eight thank you’s, most of them directed at Trump, as he sported what one European diplomat described as “almost a suit” in a style that Reuters coined as “combat formal”.

Matthias Matthijs, a senior fellow for Europe at the Council of Foreign Relations, likened it to the meandering trajectory that EU trade relations have taken under Trump: “There are always high expectations, and then the Europeans’ expectations are dashed by the Americans – usually by Trump’s social media posts or some interview he gives,” he said following Monday’s meeting. “Then when they meet again, having avoided the worst outcomes, they come to some sort of agreement. It’s better than they feared, but it’s always worse than the status quo. But as the saying goes, the Europeans live to fight another day.”

Fabrizio Tassinari pointed to the broader picture of how Trump had inadvertently become “the greatest unifier of Europe since the end of the cold war”. Writing in the Guardian, the executive director of the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Florence, added: “For those like myself who have followed the chimera that is European foreign and security policy for years, it was almost an epiphany to witness these seven leaders, each speaking for two minutes, repeating the exact same message.”

Days after the unprecedented flurry of diplomacy, questions continue to swirl over what – if anything – might come out of it. On Monday, Trump and several European leaders, said Putin had agreed to face-to-face talks with Zelenskyy in the coming weeks.

Moscow, however, has yet to confirm that any such meeting – which would be the first since Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago – is being planned, with a Kremlin aide saying only that Putin and Trump discussed the idea of “raising the level of representatives” in the Ukraine talks.

Trump had also indicated a willingness to be part of security guarantees for Kyiv if there was a deal to end fighting. But the exact nature of those guarantees remains to be seen, with Trump later ruling out the possibility of the US putting troops on the ground in Ukraine and instead floating that Washington could provide air support.

Concerns also continue to linger over what exactly Trump proposed in Alaska and what, if anything, Putin agreed to during the near three-hour meeting. As Pjotr Sauer, a Guardian Russian affairs reporter, noted, some fear Trump may have overstated the outcome and misjudged Moscow’s willingness to compromise.

Others, such as Yuriy Boyechko, CEO of charity Hope for Ukraine, suggested Trump is deliberately setting out an exit path for Washington by entertaining Putin’s demands that Ukraine withdraws from Donetsk and Luhansk, even as Zelenskyy sets a firm red line against ceding land beyond the present occupation or legitimising Moscow’s control.

Putin had offered a “peace deal” that Ukraine would be forced to reject, knowing Trump would then blame Zelenskyy and end US support for Kyiv, he told the Guardian on Monday.

After a week dominated by talks and punctuated by Russian bombs continuing to rain down on Ukraine, Boyechko hoped that the jarring contrast would force European leaders to realise that it would take more than just charm offensives to protect the region. “Ukraine and its European allies must recognise the urgent need to develop their own strategy to defend Ukraine and secure peace in Europe – because it is increasingly likely that Trump will walk away from the peace negotiations.”

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