What’s next? Beyond Ukraine, the whole of Europe has been shaken by the failure and heated argument of the meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Friday, February 28. Without the US, how will the EU stand up to Moscow? How, in the event of an American retreat, can Europe continue to support Kyiv and, beyond that, ensure its security in the face of a Russia bolstered by a Trump administration ready to make any concessions to sign a ceasefire deal as quickly as possible? These are the existential questions that Europeans should be seeking to answer at the summit that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has organized in London on Sunday, March 2. After the rather warm exchanges he had with Trump on Thursday, February 27, the Briton was hoping to convince his partners of his government’s ability to act as a “bridge” between Europe and the US. The humiliation suffered by Zelensky in front of the world’s cameras all but erased his efforts, as well as those of Emmanuel Macron, to plead the Ukrainian cause with Trump.

In the space of 24 hours on Friday, Europe found itself even more alone than it had been two weeks earlier at the Munich Security Conference on February 14. There, US VIce President JD Vance spectacularly downplayed Russian and Chinese threats to criticize the European Union. As Estonian Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, acknowledged on X on Friday evening: “Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.”

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