Trump about the area of ​​Ukraine leaves European leaders efforts

Powerless fury. European leaders are in a hurry.

US President Donald Trump caused the fury of the menu of insults and lies about Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Choose your: He is an unpaid dictator. Ukraine began a bloody war with Russia. Zelenskyy worked better or lost his country.

“This is our security, which exposes to risk,” said Jean-Yves Drian, a former French Foreign Minister, to a wider radio-info, referring to Trump and Europe. “Since the arrival of power, all his drags were directed exceptionally at the historic friends of the USA”

Even more fury spilled on social media from the Czech interior minister, Vit Rakusan; “I'm afraid that we've never been so close to” Orwell war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. “

The main blow was the refusal to invite Ukraine and Europeans to talk with Russia about Ukraine in Saudi Arabia this week.

The Czechs have a bitter experience of diplomacy of closed doors. In Munich in 1938, Hitler intimidated the leaders of Great Britain and France to agree to sculpt Czechoslovakia, while a representative of Czechoslovakia was forced to sit outside in the hallway.

“About us, without us” – about us, without us. This has become a Czech slogan for intimidating high power, finding Echo in the comments of European leaders, as well as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Trump and Russians.

But all this fury is powerless – and for this impotence, Europeans must blame themselves.

European inactivity

There were many warnings, starting with the furious speech of Russian President Vladimir Putin at a security conference in Munich in 2007. He accused the US of merciless use of force and said that NATO's expansion was a serious provocation for Russia. Seven years later, his soldiers took Crimea from Ukraine. In 2022, he ordered a full invasion of Ukraine.

Europeans reacted, first with sanctions, and then more sanctions, and finally money and weapons. But they always begged much less than the Ukrainians.

Now, when Trump apparently on the side of Putin against Ukraine, European leaders again met at the table at the Palace of Élysée in Paris at the request of France.

“France has said since the 1960s that Europe must stand on its own feet, not to bow in the US,” said Phillips P. O'Brien in a recent Podcast. He is a historian and professor of strategic studies at the University of Saint Andrew in Scotland.

“But it turns out that French leaders have never believed it because they did not prepare for it. Macron has made several speeches over the past one and a half years. But they could not convince themselves or the rest of Europe to join them. “

After the meeting of the Élysée Palace, one country announced that it doubles the defense budget in the next two years. But it was a small dish.

The Prime Minister of Great Britain Keir Starmer said that his country is willing to send peace army to Ukraine in the case of a contract. But he was alone. Even Macron said that time was not right.

Instead, the answer was … More money. Europeans would loose the strict rules of the European Union on expenditure on the deficit for the purchase of more weapons and send more help to Ukraine.

As for French actions that match Macron's words, expenditure on defense of the government is only 2.1 percent of GDP. And his government does not have an expansion budget now, but now interrupting the belt by the French National Assembly.

Germany, the largest country in Europe, spend only 1.5 percent of GDP on the army, just more than Canada. His leaders are busy with an election campaign, and a man is widely expected to be another chancellor, Friedrich Merz, wants to reduce the equivalent of $ 150 billion CDN from the government budget. The war of Ukraine is not his priority.

Or most of Europe, according to former French president François Hollande.

“A great misunderstanding between Europe and Putin is that Europe does not want to go to war,” said CBC in the last CBC document Putin's journey. “In Europe, war has a terrible history in the 20th century and there is no reason to think in terms of war. We are peaceful nations that do not like death. For Putin, death is part of the action. “

“Trump disinformation bubble”

The main exception is Poland. He is afraid of Putin and Russia, with good historical reason – the Soviet Union carved him with the Nazis in 1939. As a result, his armed forces are the largest in Western Europe, and the defense is 3.8 percent of GDP.

Even before the latest comments from Trump, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland, Radoslav Sikorski, had a clear message to the US President, delivered at a security conference in Munich on February 15.

“If you allow Putin to narrow Ukraine, he will send to China that you can regain what you consider to be the province of the renegades. And this would also have direct consequences for the great strategy of Americans and the alliance system. “

However, the Polish Prime Minister also rejected the idea of ​​sending soldiers to Ukraine. Instead, Sikorski will soon go to Washington to convince the US government to stop all his soldiers in Poland and the rest of Europe.

The anger and misfortune of Ukrainians and Europeans barely resonate in Trump's administration. They know who is guilty: he is the Ukrainian president Zelenskyy because he said that Trump could be a prisoner of the Russian disinformation bubble.

Trump was also angry that Zelenskyy refused to sign a huge opportunity, enabling the US unrestricted access to Ukrainian mineral resources as a repayment of American weapons used in defense of Ukraine. Thus, the American National Security Advisor Mike Waltz had a news for Zelenskyy: “Come, look and sign the contract.”

Words that the Canadian government and others may soon hear.