Almost a fortnight after British Prime Minister Keir Starmer dubbed a group of European leaders working to support Ukraine—or to boost their home approval ratings, depending on how you see it—the ‘coalition of the willing,’ it is no more clear which nations are actually willing to put their troops forward.
Other than the UK and France, no other members of this alleged coalition have pledged to send their soldiers to Ukraine to defend a peace agreement, which is largely being orchestrated not by them but by the U.S.—albeit not yet conclusively.
After a Zoom meeting between the group’s leaders on Saturday, Italian PM Giorgia Meloni again rejected “Italy’s participation in a possible military force on the ground.”
A report in The Sunday Times later suggested that the most that many leaders of 35 countries are willing to commit to is supplying weapons and intelligence to British and French troops. That’s a good job, given the state of their armies, but does not go anywhere near as far as Emmanuel Macron and Starmer would like.
It also remains unclear, following a separate meeting between UK foreign secretary David Lammy and U.S. vice president JD Vance over the weekend, whether America would provide a ‘backstop’ to European security guarantees. Politico has described the chances of this as likely being “somewhere between nebulous and nonexistent.”
This failure to achieve anything solid during talks did not prevent Starmer from declaring that plans for military deployment in Ukraine had entered “operational phase.” Nor did it hold Macron back from insisting that troops could be sent without Russia’s permission. It is almost as though they are trying to frustrate the chances of a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.
Further talks will take place on Thursday when military chiefs from around 30 nations will arrive in London. More importantly though, Donald Trump will speak with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday. This after the U.S. president said on Monday:
We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.
