European leaders meeting in Paris on Monday for emergency talks called for higher spending to ramp up the continent’s defence capabilities but remained split on the idea of deploying peacekeepers to Ukraine.
after United States President Donald Trump arranged bilateral peace talks with Russia, excluding European allies and Ukraine from negotiations to end the war that are scheduled to begin in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
European officials have been left stunned by the Trump administration’s moves on Ukraine, Russia and European defence in recent days, and must now confront the reality of a future with less US protection.
US security commitment needed for peace deal, says UK
The US decision to go it alone with Russia has sparked a realisation among European nations that they will have to do more to ensure Ukraine’s security.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who ahead of the meeting said he was willing to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine, on Monday evening local time said there must be a US security commitment for European countries to put boots on the ground.
He said it was too early to say how many British troops he would be willing to deploy.
A peacekeeping force could risk direct confrontation with Russia, which launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but also stretch European armies already depleted by supporting Ukraine and years of peace.
There are also difficult questions about how some European nations, burdened by strained public finances, will pay for such expanded military commitments.
‘Russia is threatening all of Europe now’
Starmer’s push for peacekeepers appeared to draw a dividing line between participants in Paris.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said there could be no peace deal without Ukraine’s consent but said talk of a German peacekeeping mission in Ukraine was “highly inappropriate” without any peace deal in hand.
Instead, he said European nations spending over 2 per cent of their gross domestic product on defence should not be blocked by European Union (EU) budget rules.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she was also against the peacekeeping plan, according to sources in her office.
“It was useful to discuss today the various hypotheses on the table. The one that foresees the deployment of European soldiers in Ukraine seems to me to be the most complex and perhaps the least effective, and on this too I voiced Italy’s doubts,” she said, according to the sources.
Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she was open to discussing troop deployments and that Europe must boost its support for Ukraine while ramping up domestic defence spending.
“Russia is threatening all of Europe now, unfortunately,” Frederiksen told reporters.
Scholz and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the EU’s strict fiscal rules should be relaxed to allow more defence spending without breaching deficit limits.
Tusk said there was “confirmation … that defence spending will no longer be treated as excessive spending, so we will not be at risk of the excessive deficit procedure and all its unpleasant consequences.”
US and Russia to meet in Saudi Arabia
Ahead of US-led negotiations to end the war, Russia has ruled out conceding territory, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has dismissed the US-Russia talks taking place without him.
Trump shocked Ukraine and European allies last week when he announced he had called Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss ending the war without consulting them.
Senior US and Russian officials will meet in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. The highest-level in-person discussions between the nations in years are meant to precede a meeting between Trump and Putin.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Monday met with US secretary of state Marco Rubio in Riyadh as well as national security adviser Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, also part of the US negotiating team.
On the Russian side, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov were due to take part, the Russian government said.
But there were signs of differences in approach.
US state department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the conversation would determine if the Russians were serious about peace talks, “about perhaps if that first step is even possible”.
For its part, the Russian government said the talks would focus on “restoring the entire complex of Russian-American relations”.
Keith Kellogg, Trump’s Ukraine envoy, said he would visit Ukraine for three days starting Wednesday.
Asked whether the US would provide a security guarantee for any European peacekeepers, Kellogg said: “I’ve been with President Trump, and the policy has always been: You take no options off the table.”
