Who Speaks for Europe Today?

Opinion Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and envoy in the negotiations over Ukraine, after two days of talks in Abu Dhabi, told Europeans that finding one person to speak for them would be a greater achievement than persuading the Russians to admit Europe to the talks.Delegations from Ukraine, Russia and the United States attended those talks on Nov. 10 and 11. Kushner made his remark on the second day, as he and Steve Witkoff prepared for another trip to Moscow. There, he said, they intended to seek Putin’s “blessing” for Europe’s participation in the next round. When an American mediator asks the Russian president whether Europeans may discuss their own security, Europe’s diplomatic problem runs rather deeper than the lack of a shared telephone number.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.There is an answer to Kushner’s remark. Kaja Kallas is the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Her warnings about Russia have proved accurate, and the decisions she took as Estonia’s prime minister lent weight to her words. She is ready to challenge Washington when its assumptions are wrong. While other European politicians argue about who should have a seat at the table, Kallas is clear about what should be allowed onto the agenda in the first place.Kushner and Witkoff have spent most of their business careers in real estate. That experience may be useful when negotiating investment and the reconstruction of shattered cities, but it gives them no right to treat Ukrainian territory as a mere plot of land to be traded away to close a deal. Their public remarks betray a belief that some sufficiently ingenious offer will satisfy Putin, while Zelensky ought to be more accommodating towards Moscow’s demands. Once the aggressor’s wishes are accepted as the starting point, the country resisting invasion is made to look like the obstacle to peace. Other Topics of Interest Estonian military officials have confirmed that multiple drones struck Russia’s Naro-Fominsk missile ship in the Baltic Sea, causing crew casualties and disabling propulsion. In a March 2025 interview with Tucker Carlson, Witkoff said he did not consider Putin a bad man, described him as exceptionally intelligent, and recounted with evident delight how the Russian president had commissioned a portrait of Donald Trump and supposedly prayed for him after the attempt on his life. Witkoff also claimed to be utterly convinced that Russia would never attack Europe. While he marveled at Putin’s graciousness, Russian bombs were falling on Ukrainian cities.Trump went further in a Reuters interview on Jan. 14 this year. Asked who was holding up a peace agreement, he gave a one-word answer: “Zelensky.” He added that Putin was ready to make a deal and that Ukraine was less willing. At the same time, American negotiators were pressing Kyiv to give up the Donbas. The president of the country leading the mediation had placed responsibility for the absence of peace on the president of the country under attack. Russia was demanding territory its army had failed to capture after five years of war.Trump has occasionally condemned Russian bombing, but his concrete political demands have consistently been directed at Kyiv. On Oct. 10 he went so far as to urge Ukrainians to elect a new president, one more willing to strike a deal with Moscow. He made no such demand of the Russians regarding Putin, the man who ordered the invasion of a sovereign state. That same day, a Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia killed a six-year-old girl. Standing over her body, her grandfather told reporters that she would have celebrated her birthday later that month. The following day Zelensky said he would hold elections if Putin agreed to a 60-day ceasefire. Trump did not even attempt to demand that ceasefire from Putin. Set these events alongside one another and it becomes difficult to speak of impartial American mediation.Kallas’ early warnings and foresightKaja Kallas warned of exactly this danger before Russian tanks rolled towards Kyiv. Addressing Estonia’s parliament on Jan. 19, 2022, 36 days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she set out three rules of Soviet diplomacy that she attributed to Andrei Gromyko: demand what was never yours; issue ultimatums, because someone in the West will always be willing to negotiate; when the other side makes a concession, demand more. Kallas explained that Moscow was using this method to force a new division of Europe into spheres of influence. Her warning now reads like the minutes of the Abu Dhabi talks.Two days earlier, on Jan. 17, 2022, she had described Russia’s proposals as a trap and its tactics as blackmail. While Western capitals were still debating whether Putin was bluffing, she was openly warning of a wider assault on Ukraine. In parliament she traced a line from Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008, through its occupation of Crimea in 2014 and the fighting in the Donbas, to its hybrid operations against European democracies. NATO, she stressed, threatened nobody. Yielding to Russian ultimatums would reward the very state that had manufactured the crisis.Her government began securing weapons for Ukraine before Feb. 24, 2022. Estonia supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles, and after the invasion Kallas pressed for tougher sanctions, more ammunition and a stronger defense of NATO’s eastern flank. In Berlin that April, she urged Europe to stop being afraid of its own decisions. She told her German hosts that rising gas prices could not make Ukrainian freedom any less important. Many European governments reached the same conclusion only after paying the price of their dependence on Russian energy.At the Copenhagen Democracy Summit in May 2023, Kallas spoke of a free world that had traded principles for money and truth for gas. She demanded accountability from Russia’s political leadership and warned that merely pausing the aggression, without changing Moscow’s conduct, would only postpone the next war. Three months earlier, in Munich, she had called for a special tribunal for the crime of aggression, so that Putin and his associates could not remain beyond the reach of international justice. She was openly challenging those who were counting on a return to business as usual with Russia.Kallas knows Russian occupation through her own family’s history. Her mother was six months old when she and her family were deported to Siberia in 1949. Estonia knows what peace looks like when an occupier proclaims it after resistance has been crushed. In February 2024, the Russian authorities placed the then Estonian prime minister on a wanted list over the removal of Soviet monuments. Moscow thereby made clear just how much it resented a politician who refused to accept its version of history.That consistency was about more than speeches. In 2024, Kallas proposed that countries supporting Ukraine commit at least 0.25 percent of their GDP each year to military aid, a pledge Estonia made for the following four years. In Warsaw that year, she warned that Russia was banking on elections in Europe and America, and on fatigue in Western societies. Her response was to insist on giving Ukraine the means to win while Europe strengthened its own defenses. This is a policy that can be measured in budgets and deliveries, unlike grand declarations about peace that end with yet another photograph beside Putin.That is why Kallas reacted so sharply in early November to the suggestion that Trump’s envoys might negotiate a “new European security architecture” with Moscow. NATO, the European Union and existing international agreements already provide the framework for European security. Russia has broken obligations it undertook, including its commitment under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum to respect Ukraine’s independence and borders. Negotiating Russia’s security demands anew while its troops occupy Ukrainian territory would trigger the very trap Kallas described in January 2022. Kaja Kallas has rejected any bargain that would make Ukraine pay for peace with its territory, allow Russia to escape accountability, or entrust Europe’s security to Putin’s word. In Warsaw on Nov. 6, she rejected legal recognition of occupied Ukrainian territory, restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces and any Russian say over Ukraine’s alliances. She called for the return of deported children, accountability for war crimes, reparations and an end to Russian sabotage across Europe. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, thanked her that day for the strong voice she gives Europe. Kallas pressed the question Moscow refuses to answer: what would Russia have to do, and what would it have to relinquish, to show that it would not invade again?Three days later in Paris, Kallas told Reuters that Moscow was merely pretending to negotiate while bombing Kyiv and killing civilians. As talks in Abu Dhabi turned to broader security guarantees, she stressed that Putin had no veto over Europe’s security. On Nov. 11, speaking to France 24, she set out the limits of American mediation more plainly. Decisions on lifting European sanctions and on the use of frozen Russian assets belong to Europe. Washington can talk to Putin as often as it likes, but it has no authority to make promises on behalf of the European Union about matters reserved for its institutions and member states.After Abu Dhabi, a major new agreement on the exchange of prisoners of war was announced. For their families, this was important news. Yet there was no publicly confirmed breakthrough on territory, a ceasefire or a final peace agreement. Kushner and Witkoff arrived in Moscow again on Nov. 12, just as Russian diplomats were offering talks on separate non-aggression pacts with NATO members. The sequence is hard to ignore. Russia is trying to turn the war it started into negotiations over the rules under which the whole of Europe will defend itself in future.European states that have supported Ukraine financially and militarily for years cannot rely on the goodwill of a man who openly describes them as enemies. Putin must answer for his aggression against Ukraine, not decide who is allowed to take part in negotiations on Europe’s security.Some politicians in the European Union understand this danger. Poland, the Nordic countries and the Baltic states have spent years warning of Russia’s intentions. France, Germany, Britain and European institutions are committing substantial resources to Ukraine’s defense. Their leaders certainly have a voice. Yet when Europe needs to deliver a united answer to Washington, it still sounds uncertain. Some want a special envoy, others rely on their own channels to the White House, and others fear that speaking more forcefully would jeopardize what they call the peace process. Kushner’s remark exposed that weakness precisely.Kaja Kallas cannot, on her own, impose sanctions, allocate funds or sign a peace agreement on behalf of 27 governments. Her responsibility is to defend common principles and sound the alarm when negotiations threaten Europe’s security. She is exercising that mandate as any diplomat accountable to European citizens ought to, without taking her cue from the mood in the Kremlin.Kushner wanted a single person who could speak for Europe. He could have heard the answer in Warsaw or Paris, or read the speech delivered by Estonia’s prime minister in January 2022. It anticipated Russia’s methods and the cost of Western concessions. Since then, Kaja Kallas has rejected any bargain that would make Ukraine pay for peace with its territory, allow Russia to escape accountability for its aggression, or entrust Europe’s security to Putin’s word. Putin tried to erase Ukraine from the map of Europe. It would be unforgivable for European governments now to let him redraw the security map of the entire continent.