Good morning. Yesterday, European leaders attended an emergency meeting in Paris to discuss how best to respond to the shift in Ukraine policy from the US under Donald Trump. Today, US and Russian officials will meet in Saudi Arabia for preliminary peace talks. And while Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that there can be no “agreements about us without us”, events of the last week have made it clear that the second of these summits is likely to be more consequential than the first.
As shocking as interventions from the US vice-president, JD Vance, and the secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, were last week, part of their argument was emanating from Washington even before Trump’s first term: the demand that European nations take more responsibility for their own security as the US seeks to shift its focus towards Asia.
