European weakness over Ukraine and overdependence on Trump has left us dangerously exposed. A bigger disaster may be on the horizon

Francis Dearnley

26 December 2025

In the final working week before Christmas, EU leaders gathered for what was billed as a historic summit. The familiar platitudes were duly rehearsed. “Ukraine alone can determine the terms of peace,” they insisted, while gesturing towards progress on Kyiv’s EU accession. Yet behind the rhetoric, some of them – a few openly aligned with Moscow, others paralysed by fear – pushed back. The result was not resolve, but exposure: a Europe divided over how to confront the war reshaping its future. Nothing truly shifted.

If this sounds like the EU meeting last week – where Brussels failed to unlock frozen Russian state assets, missed a rare chance to seriously hurt Moscow, and instead forced taxpayers to underwrite a $90bn loan to Ukraine – you would be wrong. I am describing a summit from a full year earlier, in December 2024, when I was last asked to write a contemplative piece about the year ahead.

Then I warned that despite more than a year of clear signals that a Trump presidency was a real possibility, Europe – Britain included – had failed to develop a serious, independent strategy for its own security. There was no rapid rearmament, no hardening of posture over Ukraine, no red lines drawn to deter the worst outcomes. Europe’s fate – and Ukraine’s – remained tethered to the goodwill of an ally that, I argued, “might soon prove unreliable”.

Twelve months on, the consequences of that failure have been graver than many imagined. An emboldened Russia, buoyed by the red carpet rolled out for Putin by Trump at the disastrous Alaska summit, now baits Europe openly. Hybrid attacks have intensified, culminating in a drone incursion into Polish airspace that forced Nato into its first direct engagement with Russia in the alliance’s history. Meanwhile the White House, sensing weakness, has repeatedly humiliated its former European allies while signalling an unmistakable appetite for rapprochement with Moscow.

Last year I wrote that Europe had “left itself no choice but to seek a festive miracle from across the Atlantic”, pinning its hopes on a negotiated peace with Putin. That hope rested on a single, fragile assumption: that Russia would negotiate in good faith. “What no one seems to be asking,” I wrote then, “is what happens if it doesn’t.”

That question remains dangerously under-examined. Despite overwhelming evidence that Putin has no intention of ending the war unless his demands are met – demands that would shred Ukrainian sovereignty and permanently weaken European security – a stubborn delusion persists in many capitals. That the war will end soon. That a bad deal imposed on Kyiv might be survivable. Or that holding the line at today’s level of support will eventually exhaust Russia into a ceasefire.

Yes, Russia’s economy is under strain. And yes, it is conceivable that Putin may at some point decide to pause his war. But history offers little comfort. Regimes that successfully pivot to a war economy rarely disengage voluntarily. Indeed, the Kremlin’s military spending has soared, its industry recalibrated, and while the model is not sustainable indefinitely it generates powerful incentives to continue. War promises not just strategic gain, but financial reprieve –debts deferred, or repaid, through conquest.

This is why the warnings issued by intelligence chiefs across Europe demand urgent attention. There is no sign that Moscow intends to de-escalate, either in Ukraine or in its campaign of intimidation against Europe. Some assessments go further, suggesting Russia is already probing beyond Ukraine – particularly in the Baltic states – testing Nato’s resolve, corroding confidence in Article 5, and gambling that Europe will hesitate if Russia manufactures a crisis there, deploying “little green men” and then troops, as it did before, while the United States looks away.

With American reliability no longer a given, the world generations of Europeans have taken for granted has ended. In that sense, 2025 may come to be remembered as the year “the West” ceased to function as a meaningful political concept. Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a democratic “community of power” has been replaced by talk of “spheres of influence” – language that cedes the moral ground to authoritarian regimes and legitimises conquest where none should ever be allowed.

Because this is the crux of it. To deny people the right to choose their future – as current peace talks appear to do – is to abandon democracy itself. Ukrainians made their choice at the ballot box. Putin has no right to overturn that by force, unless we are content to return to the rules of the nineteenth century. And that is the deeper danger: not war with Russia in isolation, but a future war – perhaps with China – born of the deliberate erosion of the principles that preserved peace for decades.

At the end of my article last year, I warned that in 2025 Russia might reject negotiations outright, or feign good faith while dragging them out. In the end, Putin did both – betting that American impatience would do the rest. The best-case scenario was that Moscow’s bad faith would finally be laid bare, prompting Washington to double down on support for Ukraine. Today, that looks vanishingly unlikely. The ideological shift in the United States is profound. Almost daily, Trump extols his “good relationship” with Putin, while rarely missing a chance to denounce President Zelensky. It is, unmistakably, a new world.

I closed last year’s piece with a warning about the cost of inaction: concede principles, and eventually you concede territory – “and innocent people die”.

Many more innocent people have died since then. More will die in the year ahead if nothing changes. And one day, it may not be innocent people in a “faraway country”, but our own sons and daughters, paying the price for our failure to act while there was still time.

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Francis Dearnley is one of the hosts of our award-winning podcast, Ukraine: The Latest