Europe Pushes Back Against US Talk of Redrawing Continent's Security Order

European governments have bent to many of US President Donald Trump's demands in recent months, but they were caught off guard when he revealed that he had raised the future of Europe's security framework in conversations with Russian officials.

"It's going to be a big agreement and it's going to involve more than Ukraine," Trump said after meeting Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev at the White House last week, adding that the deal might include all of Europe, though what he meant by that remained unclear. US envoy Jared Kushner separately wrote that Europe and Russia had struggled to build a sustainable security framework for more than 30 years, and said he was examining a "broader" European architecture before flying to Abu Dhabi to meet Russian and Ukrainian representatives.

European diplomats quickly pushed back, worried that a Ukraine peace settlement negotiated on those terms could restore Russia's sphere of influence and weaken NATO. "We already have European security architecture in place. NATO and the European Union both have their respective roles. We must make sure Ukraine is integrated into this architecture," said Kaja Kallas, the European Union's foreign policy chief.

Russia signaled during talks in Abu Dhabi earlier this week that it wanted to discuss a broader European security framework before turning to the specifics of the war. Michael Kimmage, a historian of the Cold War, said such language is a Kremlin talking point and, to a degree, part of a media propaganda effort to frame the war as Russia wishes. Russian leaders, including Vladimir Putin, have long claimed the US and NATO broke early 1990s pledges not to expand the alliance into the former Soviet bloc, a process Moscow viewed as humiliating.

That same decade saw the birth of the European Union, the single market, the Schengen border-free travel zone and the euro, all built around the idea of extending peace across the continent, and there were even suggestions at the time that Russia might one day join NATO. "Europe can mean so many things, but the European project was not designed for war. It was designed for peace," Kimmage said. The relative stability ended with Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Because redrawing borders by force is, in his view, the lifeblood of Russian foreign policy, Kimmage said, Russia and Europe are at an impasse.

The Trump administration moved quickly to stress that existing European security institutions would remain intact. Kushner said late Thursday that the next round of negotiations would include "our European partners," and he and envoy Steve Witkoff flew to Moscow to meet Putin after the Abu Dhabi talks before traveling on to Dublin, Ireland, to see Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Kushner had earlier pointed to "really incredible" postwar plans for Ukraine that could not be concluded without Europeans at the table.

Hiski Haukkala, director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, warned against any Russian diktat that would neutralize Ukraine or significantly cut its armed forces, saying that would leave the country deeply vulnerable to future aggression and wholly dependent on security guarantees Washington or European capitals are willing and able to provide. "We are supporting Ukraine because we are supporting international law and the basic norms of decency and international security when it comes to European security architecture," he said.

The EU has repeatedly listed the treaties it says Russia has violated: the UN Charter, the 1975 Helsinki Act, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, commitments made through the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Russia, the US and Britain gave security assurances to Ukraine and others in exchange for their nuclear weapons. "Russia walked away from these principles and smashed them to pieces in the process," Haukkala said, adding that for Moscow, war itself is a form of bargaining.

Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state for European affairs under President George W. Bush, said Russia is skilled at holding to its demands but that "right now, they are not negotiating." Some experts see no possibility of a new security architecture with Moscow given the absence of trust, while Balazs Jarabik, an expert on post-Soviet politics, argued Russia is part of that architecture whether Europeans like it or not, and the task is to find a modus operandi that reduces the risk of a wider European war.

On Friday, a host of European leaders rejected Moscow's demands to put the continent's security framework on the table. A German government spokesperson said Berlin was looking to host a meeting of the "Coalition of the Willing" to secure funding for Ukraine's defense and reach a unified position ahead of future peace talks.