It would be naive to consider that Trump and Putin are now talking about lasting solutions to the dispute between Russia and the West, through the war in Ukraine, but at least a first step was taken to seek change.
This first attempt caused a “shock” to European leaders, whose countries sacrificed energy, trade and investment project facilities with Russia, to create a common front with Ukraine, as Washington dictated.
The change of Cossack in the White House, with a Donald Trump who promised during his electoral campaign to seek an immediate solution to the Ukrainian conflict, seemed to introduce a change in how to value the role of Brussels and Kyiv in this effort.
Europe under Democrat Joe Biden spent more than 150 billion euros on rearmament in kyiv, without taking into account that money was needed to keep energy prices low, preserve jobs, and maintain its competitiveness.
In fact, there were cases such as that of German Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a social democrat who at one point seemed to prefer to allocate money to the purchase of weapons for Ukraine, over the needs of flood victims in 2024.
Reactions from the sidelines
The newspaper Politico points out that Ukraine and Europe waited for years for a meeting between the leaders of Russia and the United States, but when that finally happened, it threw Kyiv’s allies into a real spasm.
During the telephone conversation with Putin, Trump agreed to begin talks to end the conflict and thereby annulled three years of US policy regarding Ukraine, which stunned the Europeans, comments Bloomberg.
CNN emphasized the reconciliatory tone of the two leaders in the conversation, while The Economist magazine estimates that the dialogue caused alarm among European officials who fear a change in Washington’s policy.
The head of diplomacy of the European Union (EU), Kaja Kallas, merely claimed on her X network account that in any negotiation on the conflict Europe must play a central role, something that did not appear in the telephone conversation.
In fact, there was a statement by EU foreign ministers on the need to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine, after the Pentagon considered unrealistic a return of that country to the borders before 2014.
Eleven years ago the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, in the Donbas area, proclaimed their independence from Kyiv in separate referendums, as did Crimea, which immediately passed to Russian jurisdiction and avoided war, but not the Donbas area. The confrontation intensified when, on February 24, 2022, Putin ordered a military operation to protect the rebellious population of Donbas. During that confrontation, Moscow also brought the territories of Zaporozhye and Kherson under its control.
Germany, from locomotive to stork
If we are talking about visible losses in the implementation of a policy of ruthless support for Kyiv, Germany is a clear example of a country that seemed to go from being the locomotive of the European economy to practically a stork, experts estimate.
The Bild newspaper comments that Berlin was not invited to the discussion on the end of the Ukrainian confrontation at all, only to “come away empty-handed.”
The German side sacrificed its comfortable system of supplying gas pipelines from Russia, with cheap natural gas that gave its economy a high degree of competitiveness, to move to a scheme of buying expensive liquefied gas from the United States.
With energy prices three times higher than in the United States, Germany is now experiencing deindustrialization, with several of its large companies moving to North American soil and in the process of closing down.
Now, as the testing of what may happen in Ukraine under Trump begins, Europe is discovering that, clearly, its role will be to watch everything from the sidelines, in addition to previous sacrifices.
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