While the US and Russian foreign ministers, Marco Rubio and Sergei Lavrov, are meeting in Riyadh, on Tuesday, February 18, to begin the “normalization” of their relations, European leaders failed to demonstrate their unity at the Elysée Palace on Monday. Nevertheless, they still hope to play a role in the upcoming negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, despite Washington’s and Moscow’s signals to the contrary.

After more than three hours of discussions, Emmanuel Macron, who hosted the mini-summit attended by eight European leaders and the heads of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union bodies, refrained from attempting to summarize the content of the debates at the end of the meeting. Some of his guests, such as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, were not much more talkative. Late in the evening, the French president simply announced, on X, that, after the talks, he had spoken with Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, calling for “strong and credible guarantees” for Kyiv.

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