Trump Cut Europe Out of Ukraine Talks. Here’s How Europe Pushed Back.

European leaders were blindsided by President Trump’s 28-point-plan to end the Ukraine war, setting off a dash for influence.

When Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany first learned of the Trump administration’s peace plan for Ukraine last Thursday, he was stunned by both the content and the way he found out.

Instead of hearing of it from American officials, Mr. Merz learned about the plan from a news headline. His team had to reach out several times to set up a call on Friday night with President Trump for an explanation, according to officials with knowledge of the events.

The content was alarming, from a European perspective. The leaked 28-point plan would ensure that Russia paid little price for invading Ukraine in 2022. It would hand it more territory than the Russian Army has captured on the battlefield. And it would force NATO to formally refuse to admit Ukraine, countermanding a European desire for the Ukrainians to join the alliance.

Senior European officials had known the Trump administration was working on some kind of plan, but nothing that favored Russia to this extent. When it surfaced, they realized that Europe had been cut out of the Trump administration’s efforts to end the continent’s biggest land war since World War II.

This account of how Mr. Trump sidelined Europe in discussions about its own backyard, based on interviews with 16 officials with knowledge of the diplomatic wrangling, paints a picture of a continent squeezed between competing powers, its leaders grasping for influence in a world their nations once dominated. Most of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive political matters.

In the days since the plan was leaked, European leaders, including Mr. Merz, have worked frantically to reverse the slide, using persuasion and behind-the-scenes maneuvering to nudge Mr. Trump’s administration toward a more acceptable position. Plans were upended, frenzied huddles arranged. Several envoys took the first possible flight from Johannesburg, where they were meeting counterparts from the G20, to Geneva to try to persuade U.S. officials to change course.

That huge diplomatic effort, mounted across major European countries and institutions, meant that by Sunday evening, Europe’s leaders had managed to forestall some of what they saw as the worst excesses of the Trump plan for Ukraine.

Sidelined by Mr. Trump last week, Europe’s “coalition of the willing” had become a “coalition of the waiting,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former NATO chief, said in an interview.

“Now, the Europeans understand that they must do much more,” Mr. Rasmussen said.

Thursday: Shock and Disbelief

Many of Europe’s foreign ministers first heard of the Trump plan last Thursday in Brussels as they were heading to a long-planned meeting about Sudan, as well as Ukraine.

The leaked proposal, reported in outlets like Axios and The Financial Times, floored them. It suggested that NATO would be prevented from stationing troops in postwar Ukraine, scuppering a French and British proposal to send peacekeepers there. It included a plan to unfreeze billions of dollars of Russian funds, now held largely in Belgium, which many in Europe hope to loan to Ukraine.

“When everyone had arrived, having read The Financial Times, there were some questions,” Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the Danish foreign minister, said with dry understatement in an interview.

Seeking clarity, the ministers swiftly began pressing the Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, who had joined the meeting via teleconference. Did Mr. Sybiha know anything more about this plan? Was it real?

Like his counterparts, Mr. Sybiha had limited details, according to two officials present at the meeting.

In Germany, Mr. Merz canceled a scheduled appearance at a reading event at an elementary school to deal with the fallout. The chancellor’s team wondered if Mr. Trump had known about the plan and if it was really to be taken seriously, according to two people briefed on their thinking.

By Friday, Mr. Trump and his administration had begun to talk to their European counterparts, and it became increasingly clear that the plan was real. Daniel P. Driscoll, the U.S. Army secretary, said at a meeting on Friday in Ukraine that European countries were left out of negotiations to avoid having “too many cooks,” officials present said. Mr. Driscoll said European officials had grown too close to Ukrainian counterparts to objectively assess the war, those present said.

Now came the dilemma. Should Europe and Ukraine reject the proposal out of hand, angering Mr. Trump and losing any control over its trajectory? Or should they risk giving it momentum by trying to correct its course?

“Ukraine may soon face an extremely difficult choice,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an address to the Ukrainian public on Friday, echoing a view felt across the continent. “Either the loss of dignity or the risk of losing a key partner.”

Saturday: Trying to Engage

Over the next 24 hours, diplomats and other officials across Europe burned up phone lines and text messaging apps to map out a strategy.

By the time European prime ministers and presidents gathered on Saturday at the G20 summit in South Africa, they were collectively reaching a pragmatic, if unpalatable, conclusion. If Europe’s leaders wanted to regain a seat at the table, according to four officials familiar with their discussions, they needed to engage — and to speak with one voice.

The meeting was organized by António Costa, president of the European Council, which defines the European Union’s political direction.

He and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the executive arm of the European Union, had just spoken with Mr. Zelensky. They now knew that the Ukrainian president was engaging with Mr. Trump’s team, and they understood that Europe, too, needed to make a plan.

Sitting in a semicircle of beige armchairs arrayed under glaring white lights, the leaders began to coalesce around a set of principles, according to a European official familiar with the discussions. Borders should not be changed by force, there could not be major limitations on Ukraine’s armed forces, and decisions that affected Europe and NATO should be made with their involvement — all ideas that ran counter to the Trump plan.

Instead of setting themselves in opposition to Mr. Trump, the Europeans decided to flatter him. For all their qualms about the plan, the leaders released a statement that suggested it could be a starting point.

“We welcome the continued U.S. efforts to bring peace to Ukraine,” the statement said, adding: “We believe therefore that the draft is a basis which will require additional work.”

To make their case, Europe’s top diplomats would need to head quickly to Geneva, where the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was set to hold a hastily organized summit on Sunday with Ukrainian counterparts.

The two top E.U. diplomats assigned to attend the Geneva talks, Bjoern Seibert and Pedro Lourtie, rushed to the airport within half an hour of the statement’s publication, a European official said. They caught the first flight available from Johannesburg to Switzerland.

There, they joined envoys from the governments of Britain, France, Germany and Italy in attempting to alter the Trump plan.

Sunday: Persuading Rubio

As Sunday dawned in Switzerland, Europe remained on the edge and on the outside. Several European officials gathered at the German mission, where they waited to meet Mr. Rubio’s team. They talked with their Ukrainian counterparts. They strategized.

It paid off. Late in the day, the Americans finally met with them, five officials said. That closer contact, along with pressure from the Ukrainians, brought a small breakthrough: Mr. Rubio told the Europeans privately that issues that directly affected European nations would no longer be included in the current discussions, an official said.

By the time Mr. Rubio briefed reporters on Sunday evening, there had been a clear change in tone.

Mr. Rubio made good on the promise he made in private, painted the talks as constructive, and the plan as open to change. “This is a living, breathing document,” he said, indicating that Europe would have a say in the parts of it that concerned European nations, and that those discussions would proceed along a “separate track.”

Relief pervaded Brussels, even if major challenges remained. Mr. Seibert and Mr. Lourtie scrambled out of their meetings to give a hopeful late-night briefing to ambassadors from across the 27-nation bloc.

By Monday morning, Germany’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, was describing the talks as a European win.

Yet as European leaders continued to gather over the following days, their united front was tested. Divisions persisted over how to fund Ukraine in 2026. Major questions lingered over whether the U.S. would keep Europe looped in. And despite the momentum for a cease-fire, it remained unclear if a deal would be reached, especially as Russia signaled its resistance to the plan.

“There is little reason for any kind of cheerful optimism,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland told journalists on Monday.

“The matter is delicate,” Mr. Tusk said, “because nobody wants to discourage the Americans and President Trump from ensuring that the United States remains on our side.”

Reporting was contributed by Andrew E. Kramer in Kyiv, Ukraine; Michael D. Shear in London; Jason Horowitz in Madrid; Motoko Rich in Rome; and Catherine Porter in Paris.

Related Content