The European Parliament on Wednesday accused the Trump administration of “blackmailing” Ukraine’s leadership into capitulating to Russia with a forced ceasefire, and denounced Washington’s decision to leave the European Union out of negotiations.
More than 440 lawmakers in the 720-seat Parliament approved a joint declaration that “strongly deplores any attempts at blackmailing Ukraine’s leadership into surrender to the Russian aggressor for the sole purpose of announcing a so-called ‘peace deal’.” The statement also condemned as “counterproductive and dangerous” the current attempts by the Trump administration “to negotiate a ceasefire and peace agreement with Russia over the heads of Ukraine and other European states.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, they added, was being “rewarded” for Moscow’s ongoing three-year invasion of Ukraine. Signatories to the statement included members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from both sides of the aisle, including the Greens, Socialists & Democrats, liberals, Christian Democrats and the hard right.
Moreover, the lawmakers added, the U.S. foreign policy shift means EU member countries have become Ukraine’s primary allies and must therefore increase military aid.
With U.S. President Donald Trump having aligned his country with Russia, the EU is facing its single most existential threat since World War II. MEPs in Strasbourg on Wednesday laid out how Europe can fortify itself.
In a separate non-binding resolution on European defense, which passed by a margin of 419 votes to 204 with 46 abstentions, the Parliament demanded that member countries and the European Commission beef up the bloc’s defense capabilities amid Trump’s continuous threats to diminish U.S. engagement with NATO.
Since the start of his second term on Jan. 20 Trump has pressured Ukraine to engage in peace talks, among other things by suspending military aid and intelligence sharing. The U.S. president agreed to resume both after Ukraine on Tuesday agreed to a 30-day ceasefire; Russia has yet to respond to the deal.
To counter the Trump administration’s threats, MEPs on Tuesday pushed in the non-binding resolution for a “fully capable European Pillar of NATO able to act autonomously whenever needed.”
That would mean using NATO’s command structures to run operations among European member countries without U.S. involvement, leading Socialist MEP Sven Mixer argued.
Among other initiatives, the non-binding resolution proposed an “EU crisis response air fleet,” managed from Brussels and comprising military transport aircraft available to member countries for the transport and deployment of troops and equipment.
Some hard-right factions in the Parliament asked that the vote on the resolution be postponed to account for the latest ceasefire proposal between the U.S. and Ukraine, but were not successful.
The current wording of the resolution “is not up to date and can only serve to unleash hatred against Trump and the US rather than favoring the Ukrainian cause,” the chair of the hard-right European Conservatives and Reformists argued in the hemicycle.
Ultimately, some ECR MEPs voted in favor of the resolution.
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