Michael Bociurkiw is a global affairs analyst and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
What a difference “a big, beautiful ocean” makes for Volodymyr Zelensky.
On Friday, the Ukrainian President left his tense, televised Oval Office clash with U.S. President Donald Trump, who last month boasted about the ocean insulating America from the invasion of Ukraine, and received a hero’s welcome from British, European and Canadian leaders in London this weekend.
But his stopover didn’t really bring anything concrete to reassure Ukrainians of quieter skies ahead. And the situation is poised to worsen – significantly – as Europe scrambles to fill the security void created by Washington’s retreat from defending the continent and its dizzying rapprochement with Moscow. With no solid red lines enforced by the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin will push on.
At Sunday’s summit, leaders arrived, talked and left – offering little in terms of firm commitments to stop Russia’s assault, beyond British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge of a £2.26-billion defence loan and access to 5,000 air defence missiles. For her part, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen issued strong words: Ukraine must become a “steel porcupine, indigestible to invaders.” Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron proposed a one-month truce covering Ukraine’s skies, the Black Sea and key infrastructure, as a litmus test of Mr. Putin acting in good faith.
Unfortunately for Mr. Macron and Ms. von der Leyen, the Russian bear remains hungry, and fear of Mr. Putin continues to paralyze Ukraine’s allies – the same fear that has fuelled a slow, piecemeal approach to aiding Kyiv for the past three years.
If Mr. Putin sees no U.S. deterrent, the consequences for Ukraine could be catastrophic. The Russians may push for the big prize – completing the land bridge from the mainland through Mykolaiv and Odesa to Moldova, or even beyond to Transnistria. That wouldn’t just leave Ukraine landlocked; it would also severely weaken European security.
Russian forces continue to consume Ukrainian territory, whether through grinding frontline advances or relentless missile and drone strikes. Following the conclusion of the London summit, Russian drones struck a high-rise apartment in Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, injuring eight. Earlier in the weekend, a Swiss-owned, Panamanian-flagged container ship in Odesa port took a direct hit from a Russian ballistic missile. That attack highlights the vulnerability of foreign assets and personnel in Ukraine, all of which remain within reach of Russian drones and rockets. Would American contractors – whom the transactional Mr. Trump has suggested – willingly work in Ukraine or Russian-occupied territories to extract his prized rare earth elements? In the meantime, the attack will likely scare away foreign shipowners and insurers, just when the Ukrainians were on their way to restarting the container operation for the first time since the full-scale invasion was launched.
The Odesa attack should have been a wake-up call for Trump administration officials. Many of them spent the weekend mocking Mr. Zelensky and calling for his resignation instead.
Despite committing to NATO’s Article 5, the Trump administration appears to be drifting further from any expectation of providing a military backstop for Europe’s ambitious plans to aid Ukraine. Its normalization of ties with Moscow has gone so far that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov remarked that Washington’s “rapidly changing” foreign policy now “largely coincides with our vision.”
Following a six-hour technical meeting between Russian and U.S. teams last week, the Kremlin appointed a new envoy to Washington, Alexander Darchiev, signalling a deepening thaw. More astonishingly, Washington extended another concession: suspending offensive cyber operations against Russia.
For the Kremlin, which has offered almost nothing in terms of concessions while receiving plenty in return, this detente must seem like 10 Christmases at once. What could come next is alarming. Washington could act on Elon Musk’s previous threat to disable Starlink in Ukraine, despite the secure communications system’s importance to the Ukrainian military. The U.S. might also halt intelligence-sharing with Kyiv, or even disable its Patriot missile defence systems.
One European wild card remains, however: King Charles III. A known supporter of Ukraine, he too met Mr. Zelensky on Sunday, and is also set to host Mr. Trump for an “unprecedented” state visit at a yet-undetermined date. The monarch’s influence could nudge Mr. Trump away from this dangerous path – though that could also just be wishful thinking.
Mr. Trump met his top national security aides on Monday to discuss Ukraine policy, with an address to a joint session of Congress planned for Tuesday. So it will be another high-stakes week ahead, with decisions from this unpredictable, volatile U.S. President threatening to set off a chain of events that forces Europe, and especially Ukraine, to face the Russian bear alone.