Bowing to Reality

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy finally falls in line as Europe’s empty rhetoric is laid bare.

For years, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was lionised as the Churchill of the 21st century, his defiance burnished by glowing endorsements from Western leaders and sentimental encomiums in the press. That illusion finally has disappeared after the Ukrainian president’s declaration that he is “ready to work under Donald Trump’s strong leadership.” His very acceptance of the need for negotiations are nothing less than a public admission of defeat, laying bare Zelenskyy’s stubborness after the recent explosive Oval Office meeting where Trump accused Zelenskyy of dragging his feet on peace talks, and shortly after Washington announced a pause in military aid to Kyiv.

The volte-face is not merely about Zelenskyy. It marks the culmination of years of misplaced nostalgia and self-delusion among Europe’s political class, those self-styled ‘Atlanticists’ who believed they were reliving 1938, courageously standing up to an expansionist dictator. But this was never 1938, and Ukraine was never Czechoslovakia. Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler, and the comparison has always been a grotesque simplification of history. The lamentations over Western ‘weakness’ in the face of Russian aggression ignored an uncomfortable fact: even as European leaders vowed to stand firm against Moscow, they were bankrolling Putin’s war machine through their energy purchases.

Take Europe’s much-vaunted ‘unity.’ At a recent London summit, Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and other European leaders indulged in grandiloquent declarations about standing by Ukraine. The harsh truth is that Europe has poured more money into Russia’s coffers through oil and gas payments than it has sent to Ukraine in aid. In 2024 alone, the European Union spent €21.9 billion on Russian oil and gas, while providing just €18.7 billion in financial aid to Kyiv. Even as Brussels boasted of sanctions, Russian liquefied natural gas imports to Europe surged by 14 percent last year.

The same hypocrisy extends to energy sanctions. The European Union and the United States announced a price cap on Russian oil, theoretically limiting purchases to $60 per barrel. But in practice, Moscow’s shadow fleet of tankers, many owned by European firms, easily bypasses these restrictions through accounting sleight of hand. Meanwhile, the UK’s latest sanctions package targets a mere 40 oil tankers out of the 700 shipping Russian crude.

As for those much-trumpeted frozen Russian assets, Western leaders still cannot agree on how to seize them. Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, admitted after the London meeting that some European countries “feared the consequences for the euro or the banking system.”

Even Ukraine itself was entangled in this energy paradox. Until January 1, 2024, Gazprom continued to supply natural gas to Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia via a pipeline running through Ukraine. Astonishingly, Russia paid nearly a billion euros in transit fees to Kyiv, making Gazprom one of Ukraine’s largest taxpayers for three years of the war. Though that arrangement has now ended, Russian gas still flows into Europe through Turkey, circumventing the West’s supposed economic embargo. So much for cutting off Putin’s war funding.

And what of those stirring speeches about Ukraine’s European future? Here, too, reality diverges from rhetoric. Poland, Ukraine’s staunchest ally in the early months of the war, now refuses to participate in Starmer and Macron’s proposed European peacekeeping force. More strikingly, Warsaw is wary of Ukraine’s potential EU membership, fearing that Polish farmers will be undercut by a flood of cheap Ukrainian grain. European unity dissolves when economic self-interest is at stake.

And yet, in the face of all this, European leaders persist in issuing lofty proclamations about the West’s moral duty. What Ukraine truly needs is not more hollow gestures, but a swift end to hostilities and a clear-eyed assessment of its future.

This is not to excuse Russia’s aggression or deny Ukraine’s suffering. But wars end not through endless declarations of resolve, but through pragmatic decision-making. Ukraine must now negotiate, and Europe must reconcile itself to its own limitations. The Churchillian fantasy is over.