European Union leaders have gathered for emergency talks in their first meeting since an explosive exchange last week between United States President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the war in Ukraine.
Leaders of the 27-nation bloc arrived in Brussels on Thursday to discuss ways of increasing their military budgets to support Ukraine in its war with Russia against a backdrop of dramatic policy shifts from Washington that have cast severe doubt over its support for European security and defence.
After the fiery meeting at the Oval Office, Trump slammed President Zelenskyy for saying peace with Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, was still “very, very far away”. Days later, the US suspended military aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv.
Reporting from Brussels, Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler said the summit was “a real show of support for Ukraine” with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Zelenskyy.
“We are here to defend Ukraine,” Costa said.
Arriving at the meeting, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said: “Europe as a whole is truly capable of winning any military, financial, economic confrontation with Russia. We are simply stronger.”
Merz a ‘wild card’
Butler said the bloc could struggle to reach a unanimous position on aid to Ukraine as leaders intent on stepping up their defence capabilities and bolstering aid to Kyiv hope that pro-Russian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban would not “scupper” their efforts.
It is feared that Orban, who is also a strong Trump ally, may veto a statement backing Kyiv although he made clear he would support measures for an increase in spending on Europe’s own defence.
“We all know that Viktor Orban is blocking many of the moves made by the other EU member states, so this will be the key stumbling point,” Theresa Fallon, an analyst at the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies, told Al Jazeera.
The expected new chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, is also a “big wild card”, she said.
Many EU leaders hailed the European Commission’s proposals this week to give them fiscal flexibility on defence spending and to jointly borrow up to 150 billion euros ($160bn) to lend to EU governments to spend on their militaries.
But decades of reliance on US protection, divergences on funding and on how France’s nuclear deterrent could be used for Europe showed how difficult it would be for the EU to fill the void left by Washington after it froze its military aid to Ukraine.
Washington provided more than 40 percent of military aid to Ukraine last year, according to NATO.
Russian threat
On the eve of the summit, French President Emmanuel Macron addressed his nation, stressing that Russia had become a threat for all of Europe.
“I want to believe that the United States will stand by us. But we have to be ready if that is not the case,” he said.
Poland and the Baltic nations have welcomed a proposal by Macron to launch talks about using France’s nuclear deterrent to protect the continent from Russian threats, a move Moscow quickly dismissed as “extremely confrontational”.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said at the weekend that London and Paris would work on a peace deal with Ukraine and present it to Trump.
Macron told Le Figaro newspaper that the deal would feature a one-month truce between Russia and Ukraine.
However, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the proposals. Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said any pause in the fighting would enable Ukraine to strengthen its military, which would lead to a prolonged conflict.
On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio caused a stir in an interview with Fox News, in which he described the “stalemated” conflict in Ukraine as a “proxy war” between the US and Russia.
“All the president is trying to do here is figure out if there’s a path towards peace. We have to engage both sides – the Russians and the Ukrainians. And we asked the Ukrainians not to sabotage it,” he said.