British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is hosting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alongside French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at Downing Street on Sunday, in what officials are billing as a high-level show of solidarity following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s flat rejection last week of face-to-face peace negotiations. The meeting comes as Ukrainian drones struck St. Petersburg in an attack Russia describes as unprecedented, and as Western European leaders scramble to hold the alliance together ahead of a US election cycle in which support for Kyiv cannot be taken for granted. No new defence package announcements have been confirmed ahead of the summit.
The received wisdom
The progressive-internationalist consensus holds that summits like this one matter enormously. Collective leadership — Starmer, Macron, Merz in the same room with Zelenskyy — signals to Moscow that European resolve has not cracked despite two and a half years of attritional warfare, soaring energy costs, and domestic political turbulence in each of the three host countries. The argument runs: Putin is betting on Western fatigue, and every show of unity raises the cost of that bet. European unity, on this reading, is itself a deterrent. The summit also has symbolic resonance: it is happening on the weekend after D-Day commemorations, consciously evoking 1944 solidarity. Zelenskyy needs the photograph as much as any concrete commitment, and photographs have strategic value when your principal opponent is waging an information war as much as a kinetic one.
A different read
There is something to all of that. But summitry divorced from a coherent theory of how the war ends is beginning to look like a substitute for strategy rather than a component of one.
Consider what the Downing Street meeting is not. It is not, as far as public reporting indicates, a discussion of a specific war-termination framework — a ceasefire line, a negotiating mandate, a territorial red line. It is not a discussion of how to respond to Putin’s rejection in any concrete military sense. And crucially, it is happening without the United States, which retains the decisive leverage over Ukraine’s long-term arms supply and any eventual guarantee architecture. Macron has been the most vocal European leader about the need for autonomous European defence capacity, but France’s own defence industrial base remains constrained by decades of post-Cold War hollowing-out.
The historical parallel worth keeping in mind is the series of Allied coordination meetings in 1917 — not the triumphant coalition of 1944 — when Western European powers repeatedly demonstrated unity of purpose without unity of strategy, and stalemate persisted for another year. Solidarity declarations are not the same as escalation dominance.
There is also a structural problem that no three-way summit can resolve: the mismatch between Europe’s stated ambition and its actual military throughput. Germany under Merz has moved faster on rearmament than at any point since reunification, which is genuinely significant. But the Bundeswehr’s capacity to sustain a major conventional deterrent remains years away, and Macron’s France is simultaneously managing internal fiscal constraints and a fragile domestic political situation following the 2025 parliamentary elections. Britain, meanwhile, has just heard its own military chief warn that the UK faces the most dangerous period in his career — yet the defence budget as a share of GDP remains below the 2.5 per cent Nato target.
Putin’s refusal to negotiate is not, as some Western analysts frame it, a sign of weakness or desperation. It is, from Moscow’s perspective, a sign that the status quo — continued grinding attritional advance in eastern Ukraine — is producing results at an acceptable cost to the Russian state. The Kremlin does not need a summit. It needs to run out the clock on Western political will, and it has good reason to believe, on current trends, that it is doing so.
None of this is to say the Downing Street meeting is worthless. Zelenskyy’s presence keeps Ukraine visible at a moment when Middle East and Iran conflicts are competing for Western attention. Merz’s participation is particularly significant given Germany’s historically cautious posture. And there is a real case that demonstrable European investment in Ukraine’s survival — even symbolic — reduces the probability of American disengagement by raising the political cost of abandonment.
But the bar for calling this summit a strategic success should be higher than another joint statement. If the three leaders emerge with a specific commitment — additional artillery ammunition pledges with delivery timelines, or a formal security guarantee framework — that would be news. If they emerge with a photograph and a communiqué pledging to “stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” we are in the territory of managed optics, not statecraft.
What to watch
- Whether the summit produces any concrete new military or financial commitment beyond existing pledges, or only solidarity language
- Macron’s messaging on European strategic autonomy — whether France is prepared to anchor a multilateral security guarantee independently of American participation
- The Ukrainian drone campaign’s trajectory: the St. Petersburg strike suggests Kyiv is willing to escalate domestically inside Russia, which carries its own risk calculus
- Congressional dynamics in Washington: European solidarity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Ukraine’s survival; US funding cycles remain the binding constraint
— J