Defence Secretary John Healey and Foreign Secretary David Lammy are set to travel to the annual Munich Security Conference on Friday. The significance of the location will not be lost on them or anyone else there.
As every schoolchild knows, Munich was where the UK and France made the 1938 agreement with Germany and Italy to appease Adolf Hitler by allowing him to annex the Sudentenland region of Czechoslovakia without her consent. But far from stemming Hitler’s ambitions, as they hoped, it only served to strengthen them.
Comparisons with Nazi Germany should only be made rarely, if ever. But the US’s decision to show Russian president Vladimir Putin its hand of cards on how it will carve up Ukraine’s territory is an example of moral hazard which will reverberate for years to come.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has effectively been told by the US to give up hope of taking back all the land Russia has seized.
Just look at Russia’s jubilant reaction to the news. “Europe’s time is over”, and the continent’s leaders are “mad with jealousy and rage”, after the phone call between Donald Trump and Putin, Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev crowed.
The West, once so proud of its rules-based approach to international affairs, is still learning how to handle Trump’s transactional perspective.
But by effectively abandoning Ukraine, Trump could not have made it clearer that his priorities lie at home. And in doing so the effects will be felt far beyond Europe. China’s president Xi Jinping will see this news and be emboldened to strike Taiwan in the next few years, not dissuaded.
Ukraine and its allies were not shocked by the news announced by US Defence Secretary Pete Hesgeth on Wednesday in Brussels when he said Zelensky has no chance of achieving his goal of evicting Russian forces out of Crimea and the east of the country and returning Ukraine to its pre-2014 borders.
“Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering,” Hegseth said. Later Trump spoke to Putin for an hour and a half, after which Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said Putin told Trump that the “root causes” of the war needed to be eliminated before the fighting could end. That’s shorthand for “get rid of Zelensky and put a Russian puppet in Kyiv”.
Zelensky and the Ukrainians weren’t surprised because they knew this moment was coming. They have been suffering a wave of deserters along the eastern front, keen to abandon a grinding war that could be in its final months after Trump signalled his intentions last year.
Zelensky put on a brave face, writing on X, “No one wants peace more than Ukraine”. Behind the scenes there is frantic diplomacy as plans are drawn up to put Kyiv in the strongest possible military position before any talks begin.
That stiff-upper-lip stance was mirrored in London. In the House of Commons on Thursday, defence minister Maria Eagle was asked if this was an act of betrayal by Trump. She said she wouldn’t accept the point. “The US Defence Secretary has said he wants a durable peace,” she added.
But in Europe what a durable peace looks like differs wildly to the current US position. It’s also becoming harder for Nato to keep a united front with its chief, Mark Rutte, urging allies to dramatically ramp up defence spending to win influence with Washington.
So far, the UK’s approach to dealing with the new White House has been a softly-softly approach. Starmer is not prepared to hit the US with reciprocal tariffs, for instance. Like so much of this administration, the Prime Minister is being tugged between the US and Europe.
The four ways war in Ukraine could end if Trump negotiates with Putin
Read MoreEven so, the consensus against criticising Trump in Europe is already starting to fray, with German defence minister Boris Pistorius going the furthest yet, saying “he regretted” that the US administration had already made concessions to Russia before the talks had started.
The US has also suggested Ukraine joining Nato is now not a realistic prospect, even though the official position of the defence alliance is that Kyiv is on an “irreversible” path to membership. The UK will have to make that case to the US in the coming days and weeks, as well as lobbying for Ukrainian and European involvement in peace talks.
At the Munich conference European leaders will hope Vice President JD Vance and the US’s Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg can provide more clarity when they meet with Zelensky on Friday.
That’s because while Trump also spoke to Zelensky after the Putin call, he was non-committal about whether Ukraine would be an equal participant in US negotiations with Russia. Strong echoes of Czechoslovakia in 1938.
“I think president Putin wants peace and president Zelensky wants peace, and I want peace,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I just want to see people stop being killed.”
No one in the West could argue with the idea of peace. What differs wildly is the price they are prepared to pay, both in the short term and in the example that’s set by giving in to Russia’s aggression.
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