Europe’s Empty Promises: Why Russia Sets the Price of Peace in Ukraine

PARIS — When Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer convened a “coalition of the willing” in Paris to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine, they were not speaking from a position of strength. Twenty-six capitals signed the communiqués. None could answer the basic question: what can Europe actually guarantee?

The answer lies on the battlefield. Russia dictates the tempo, Russia holds the artillery advantage, and Russia’s war economy is now operating at a scale Europe cannot match. Security guarantees made in conference halls are void if they cannot survive contact with reality.

A Force That Cannot Be Credible

The Paris plan centres on a “reassurance force” — multinational troops who would deploy to Ukraine once the war ends, with a remit ranging from training to deterrence. Zelensky has floated numbers in the thousands. Macron’s aides say the deployment would be “the day after the ceasefire.” The language is careful: not peacekeepers in the line of fire, but a political presence after hostilities.

Moscow’s answer was blunt. Vladimir Putin warned that any Western troops in Ukraine would be treated as “legitimate targets.” The guarantee, in other words, is a fuse. If its credibility depends on Russia not testing it, it is not a guarantee at all.

The Battlefield Sets the Price

Security is not set in communiqués; it is set where guns fire. NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe testified this spring that Russia now produces roughly 250,000 artillery shells a month. That pace eclipses Western output and builds a stockpile three times larger than Europe and the U.S. combined.

Brussels talks of 2 million shells annually by the end of 2025, but its factories are not yet producing at scale. Rheinmetall’s new line in Unterlüß promises 25,000 shells next year, ramping to 350,000 by 2027. Russia already exceeds that. On the battlefield, the side that reloads fastest writes the rules.

That imbalance is compounded by Russia’s willingness to strike deep. In August, missiles hit a U.S.-owned Flex electronics plant in western Ukraine, far from the front, forcing a shutdown. The message was unmistakable: any attempt to anchor Ukraine’s defence industry on its own soil will be vulnerable. Europe’s guarantee that Kyiv can produce weapons “indigenously” collapses once Russia decides otherwise.

Britain’s Hollow Example

Europe’s military weakness is starkest in London. The British Army has shrunk to around 73,000 trained soldiers — smaller than Wembley Stadium’s seating capacity. Recruitment shortfalls continue, and retention lags. “The whole British Army could fit in a football ground,” has become a bitter joke in Westminster, and not without cause.

The Navy’s prestige carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, have suffered repeated breakdowns: propeller shaft failures, flooding, missed NATO deployments. Even when operational, they lack the escort fleet and air wing to survive in high-intensity war. Yet London positions itself as guarantor of European security. It is theatre, not deterrence.

Kyiv’s Pivot: Money, Not Boots

To Kyiv’s credit, it has adjusted to the facts. Former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote plainly: “Western boots on the ground won’t secure peace. Arming Ukraine and politically integrating it will.”

President Zelensky has asked for $1 billion per month in new U.S. weapons via a NATO-managed procurement pool, while the EU debates whether to channel windfall profits from frozen Russian assets into the pipeline. This is the new “guarantee”: not men in uniforms, but dollars and euros converted into Patriots, Leopards and drones.

The sums are staggering. According to the Kiel Institute, Europe has already outpaced the U.S. in military commitments — $95 billion versus $75 billion — but much of this remains pledges, not delivered kit. Ukraine’s wartime economy is now almost wholly militarised, dependent on external flows. That creates survival, but also dependency.

Russia’s War Aims Are Not Mysterious

Moscow has never hidden its terms. “Demilitarisation, neutrality, denazification” are not slogans but conditions. In an interview with Kompas this month, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov insisted any settlement must “eliminate the root causes and address Russia’s security concerns.” He cited Istanbul talks in which, he claimed, “concrete progress” had been made.

For Moscow, neutrality is non-negotiable. Demilitarisation means no NATO weapons on Ukrainian soil, no long-range strike capacity to threaten Russian cities, and no Western garrisons. These are not bargaining chips; they are the minimum Moscow will enforce by treaty or by arms.

In the Duma, hawkish factions openly debate whether Odessa and Kharkov should be incorporated into the Russian Federation — either by battlefield capture or by plebiscite. This maximalist mood sets the parameters. Any European “guarantee” that ignores it is negotiating with itself.

Europe’s Imperial Logic

Why can’t Europe acknowledge these realities? Because to do so would unravel its own project.

Since the 1990s, EU expansion into Eastern Europe has been as much about imperial economics as political ideals. Germany and France sought new markets, cheap labour, and control of transit routes for energy and commodities. Scholars have long described Eastern Europe as Europe’s “internal periphery,” treated as a semi-colonial zone within the single market.

NATO’s role fused with this project: the bombing of Yugoslavia, the carving of Serbia, the integration of former Warsaw Pact states. Ukraine was intended to be the final prize: a vast agricultural basin, a pool of skilled yet inexpensive labour, rich in resources, and a sizeable market. Fold Ukraine into Europe and Russia would be permanently marginalised — an isolated ex-power excluded from continental trade flows and permanently locked out of the “American-led world order.”

It did not work. The EU discredited itself during the Greek debt crisis. Cheap Russian energy disappeared with the war. China leapfrogged Europe technologically. Donald Trump imposed tariffs. NATO wars in Libya and Syria produced migrant flows that convulsed European politics. Growth stagnated. The final wager is rearmament. But Europe lacks the money, the demographics, and the time to make it work.

Double Talk and “Agreement Incapable”

Europe’s language of guarantees rings hollow because of its history of double talk. NATO insisted that missile-defence bases in Poland and Romania were aimed at Iran. Moscow never believed it. To Russians, the West is “agreement incapable” — signing frameworks in one decade while reversing them in the next.

That phrase, used by Russian officials since 2014, has become central to Moscow’s narrative. It justifies the reliance on “military-technical measures” to impose security by force. Russians circulate a meme showing NATO bases encircling Russia with the caption: “Why is Russia so close to our military bases?” It captures in one image the asymmetry Europe refuses to acknowledge: NATO’s deployments are defensive by definition, Russia’s objections illegitimate by definition.

Diaspora Politics and Narrative Discipline

In North America, diaspora politics reinforce Europe’s illusions. Canada’s large Ukrainian population, and the Ukrainian enclaves in Chicago and Brooklyn, dominate the political language around the war.

As one community voice in Chicago described it: “The Ukraine Embassy in Chicago very much endorses the ‘brutal unprovoked full-scale war of aggression’ trademarked view of the conflict. The embassy endorses fundraisers for the Azov Battalion within Chicagoland, many of which are centered in Ukrainian Orthodox parishes and Ukrainian community centers. There are comedy nights, concerts, fitness challenges, festivals — everything you would expect from a vibrant and engaged diaspora.”

In such settings, alternative perspectives are unwelcome. “A Russian-leaning immigrant who prized Catherine the Great’s history of Crimea would have to suppress those views,” the same source noted. Within these enclaves, Zelensky’s nightly TikTok address is closer to liturgy than to politics. That diaspora discipline echoes in Washington and Ottawa — and through them, into Europe’s councils. Guarantees thrive where dissent is silenced.

What Finland Shows

Even Finland, once cited as the model of neutrality, abandoned that posture by joining NATO in 2023. President Alexander Stubb has argued that Ukraine could learn from Finland’s Cold War experience: cede territory, accept neutrality, and build quietly at home. To Moscow, that model demonstrates enforceability. To Kyiv, it smacks of betrayal.

The irony is that Finland’s NATO membership proves Russia’s point: neutrality clauses are fragile unless backed by hard power. For that reason, Moscow insists on written, enforceable constraints — not Western “guarantees” that can dissolve with a change of government.

Europe’s Last Bet

What remains is rearmament. Macron, Scholz, and von der Leyen talk of a continental arms industry as a growth engine. Factories are breaking ground, contracts signed. But the math is unforgiving: ageing populations, high interest rates, weak growth. Russia has already mobilised a war economy. China is surging past Europe in industrial capacity. Rearmament may buy time, but not parity.

The Only Real Guarantee

Europe’s guarantees are not guarantees at all. A multinational “reassurance force” deployed after hostilities is symbolism. Financing weapons factories inside Ukraine is an invitation for missile strikes. Endless procurement pledges may sustain Kyiv, but they do not deter Moscow.

The only enforceable guarantee will come through a settlement that meets Russia’s baseline demands: neutrality, demilitarisation, and territorial concessions. That is what Moscow will impose, either at the table or through continued attrition.

Europe’s elites know this, which is why their rhetoric grows shriller even as their leverage shrinks. They promised Ukraine entry into a European order that no longer exists. They offered guarantees they cannot honour. They are watching an imperial project collapse, and they cannot admit it.

On the battlefield, Russia is setting the price. Europe is offering cheques that will bounce.