Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 17 February 2025. © Richard Kemp

After warning European Nato members to stop freeloading on the US, President Trump has contemptuously sidelined Europe from immediate negotiations with Russia over ending the Ukraine war. Whether anything will come of this we don’t yet know. Putin told Trump he is interested in peace but that means nothing and Russia has been stepping up the tempo of its operations on Ukrainian territory in recent weeks.

Although the US special envoy for Ukraine, General Keith Kellogg, has said Russia will have to make territorial concessions and give undertakings against future aggression in Europe, any settlement is likely to end with a frozen conflict roughly along current front lines, with Russia in possession of around 20 per cent of Ukrainian sovereign territory.

Sir Keir Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron seem to be contemplating taking the lead on a non-Nato peacekeeping force to police the approximately 800 mile ceasefire lines if the fighting ends. The Nato Secretary General as well as other military experts have estimated a force of up to 100,000 would be needed. Germany seems unlikely to send troops to Ukraine, fearful of an all-out war with Russia, and Poland has ruled out participation.

So the job would fall mostly to Britain and France. France’s foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot has said ‘Who will bring the guarantees? It will be the Europeans’. Meanwhile at around the same time, Macron dismissed the idea of a ‘huge force’ to patrol the buffer zone as ‘far-fetched’.

Starmer says he will consider putting British boots on the ground. But how can an army of now fewer than 75,000 regular troops sustain a sizeable force on rotation for a protracted period?

Let’s not forget as well: without an immediate increase in the defence budget, there will have to be further cuts to UK forces this year. Since taking office Starmer has repeatedly equivocated on any increase in both size and time-scale and his Chancellor has pretty much ruled it out.

This is a continuation of Britain’s bankrupt defence policy which has for years assumed that our hollowed-out forces would always be fighting with the US alongside to prop up inadequate troop numbers and bargain basement equipment. Now, faced with an emerging reality, Starmer on the one hand talks about the UK taking the lead while on the other says it is conditional on US security guarantees.

Europe’s faltering reaction to a potential frozen conflict is no different to its support for Ukraine in the three years this war’s been running – depend on the US for everything but talk, flag waving and whatever cash can be spared from bloated social welfare budgets. That dependence was misplaced as Biden refused to properly fill the gap because he was deterred by nuclear-armed Russia.

And now we have Trump, understandably exasperated by European failure to take care of its own defence and in any case wanting to prioritise what he considers the greater threat from China.

A lack of any real vision of what they stand for has left European leaders – including our own – wringing their hands over the threats they face but lacking means to defend themselves. That has left Ukraine fatally exposed and Russia undeterred from any future aggression on the continent of Europe.

Image: Number 10/Flickr