Brussels Bickers About Budapest Summit but Won’t Do Anything About It

Far from having warmed to the idea of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and possibly Volodymyr Zelensky meeting to talk peace—albeit on ‘enemy ground,’ aka Hungary—EU leaders have been thinking up new ways to frustrate the possibility of a Budapest peace summit.

Officials suggested on Monday that they would not allow Putin to enter their airspace to get to Budapest in the first place. Such talk is, of course, fairly banal since these officials would obviously not authorise the shooting down of such a flight anyway. And as one diplomat told Politico on Monday, “If the U.S. wants Putin to come, he’ll find a way to get there.”

This was later confirmed on Tuesday when Brussels officials cast aside their bolshy rhetoric, which has recently included criticism of Washington’s actions, to say that “we strongly support President Trump’s position that the fighting should stop immediately, and that the current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations.”

As has been the case in the Middle East, the EU knows it lacks the power to do little other than agree with whatever Trump’s administration determines. As another diplomat told the Financial Times, “no one likes” the location of the meeting, but either way, “we’re all grinning through our teeth whilst saying this is fine.”

An opinion piece in the same paper argued that “Europe needs its own channels to the Kremlin.” This, of course, is true, and the fact that it doesn’t, but Hungary still does, is why the meeting is set to take place in Budapest.

It is now being reported that some bloc leaders are “lobbying” to attend the Budapest summit anyway, after spending days criticizing it and, bluntly, illustrating that they are unworthy of having a seat at the table.

EU leaders will hold their own summit on Ukraine on Thursday. This is likely to be largely inconsequential, though surely not quite as much as the next ‘coalition of the willing’ meeting in London on Friday.