Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs without our involvement. And the same rule should apply to all of Europe. No decision about Europe without Europe,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky thundered in the Munich Security Conference in a speech calling for a pan-European army. “The time has come—European armed forces must be created.” 

As what could be cautiously termed as a weirdly played “divide and rule” attempt to rally Europe against its primary protector, the United States of America, it had a very crusading feel to it: a pan-European force, marching in unison, spilling European blood, to repel evil and retake occupied land. Weird, as Russia objectively has always been a historic European great power—even under the Marxists, an ideology as European as it could be—so the entire gimmick of repelling foreign invaders was somewhat rhetorically jarring. 

Zelensky ended with a TV interview for the American audience, in which he categorically rejected the idea that he would ever accept a U.S.-brokered peace. That meant—he was crystal clear for the American audience—that if the U.S. and Russia negotiated a peace where there are some territorial concessions but overall the line of contact is frozen in a ceasefire and a DMZ is created, and if American funding were consequently to stop, Ukraine will not accept the deal and would continue as-is. A curious warning for the Trump administration to remember and plan for. 

Not that it mattered. Within moments, the “EU army” was shot down, despite ferocious Churchill LARPing by members of the NATO escalation caucus. In an interview with the Financial Times, Macron said that the idea of deploying a huge force is “far-fetched”: “We have to do things that are appropriate, realistic, well thought, measured and negotiated.”