U.S. President Donald Trump, fresh off his Alaska meeting last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin, seems to have cooled on the idea of pressuring Moscow to end the war it started in Ukraine, despite Trump’s recent threats of “severe consequences” if Putin didn’t agree to a cease-fire.
Late Sunday, Trump appeared to revert to his default position of blaming Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for getting invaded by its larger avaricious neighbor. “President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight,” Trump said on his social media network.
But Europe has plenty of cards to play in this conflict even if the Trump administration has opted for appeasement. The supporting cast joining Zelensky in the White House Monday includes the heads of NATO and the European Union, the Finnish Trump-whisperer-in-chief, and four of the most prominent national leaders in Europe. That raises the prospect that Ukraine and its biggest backers could inject some backbone into the United States’ approach, if not show some spine itself.
“I think the United States and Europe have all the cards. They are just not willing to play them, and that is nowhere more evident than in the realm of economic warfare,” said Tom Keatinge, the director for finance and security at the Royal United Services Institute in the United Kingdom.
“From the start, the G-7 allies have talked a tough game but have never gone all in on sanctions. We have, at every step of the way, fallen short of what we would need” to inflict sufficient economic pain on Russia to force Putin to recalibrate, he said.
Now that the Trump administration appears to have sworn off additional economic sanctions to pressure Russia into a cease-fire or an agreeable peace agreement, Europe may have to go it alone, in much the same way it has been contemplating going it alone in terms of providing Ukraine with what security assistance it can in the absence of fresh Trump administration deliveries of arms or military aid to Kyiv.
“The Europeans have had plenty of time to figure out how to take action, and there is plenty Europe could do by itself if it chose to drop the hammer,” Keatinge said.
That might start with the low-hanging fruit of further constraining Russia’s ability to smuggle crude oil to global markets by using illegal tankers, the so-called shadow fleet. Successive EU and U.K. measures, as well as many by the Biden administration, have already taken many of Russia’s black-flagged ships out of business and forced around half of Russia’s oil exports to be conducted in legal fashion. More could be done, though, that would be much more effective with the long reach of the U.S. Treasury, experts say. (The Trump administration has not added to any of the Biden-era sanctions on Russian oil tankers.)
A related step, even without designating new tankers, would be to further constrain Russia’s ability to use the Baltic Sea and the vital Danish straits to lawlessly get its oil to global markets. Some European states have already taken steps to enforce international law and have taken tentative steps to limit Russia’s ability to contravene Western sanctions.
Another long-standing option for Europe would be to seize the approximately $220 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves already frozen three years ago by Europe and the United States. Fear of reprisals by Russia and worries that such a seizure could undermine the appeal of the euro as a global reserve currency have stayed the hand of key EU member states, especially Belgium. But those frozen funds could underwrite years of Ukrainian arms purchases and provide a down payment on the half-trillion-dollar reconstruction bill Ukraine already faces.
The problem for the last three years, during both the Biden administration and the Trump administration, and abetted by Europe, is that Western countries are loath to inflict pain on their own economies, even if that is what it would take to ratchet up the pressure on a Russian economy set for a serious slowdown this year and possibly a recession. Both the Biden and Trump administrations aimed to keep oil (and gasoline) prices reasonable, which limited their ability to go after Russia’s main cash cow.
Even Trump’s latest threats, of novel secondary tariffs on India to punish it for buying huge volumes of Russian oil that the West had previously urged it to buy to keep the global oil market steady, may not come to pass for fear it could spike oil prices. (“Maybe I won’t have to do it,” Trump now says of his latest unfulfilled threat.)
The biggest task in the short term for Zelensky and the Europeans supporting him may be simply to get Trump to understand the reality of the war in Ukraine and the challenge posed by Putin’s imperialist ambitions. That includes being the latest to speak into his ear.
“The reason the [Europeans] are going together is to send the message that this is not just about Ukraine, it is about European security. This affects Europe much more than it does the United States,” said Jana Kobzova, the co-director of the European Security Program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
She stressed that the European entourage accompanying Zelensky is designed both to bolster Ukraine and present a united front, but also to give Trump concrete evidence that Europe is doing what he has long asked: ramping up defense spending to assume more of the security burden in Europe, both for themselves and for Ukraine. (Even countries that officially ban military aid to Ukraine, such as Slovakia, are doing gangbusters business selling arms to Kyiv.)
“If you want to keep the U.S. on board, and be a serious actor, what are the cards you are playing, not just on sanctions but also on arms?” Kobzova said. “That is an important message for Trump, and for Putin as well.”
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