BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT — As the Trump administration moves sharply towards Russia, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has made a plea to his allies in Europe: the continent, he says, needs an “armed forces of Europe.”
It’s a bold idea, and it comes at an unprecedented moment for Ukraine and for the U.S.-Europe alliance. In the last two weeks, President Trump has branded Zelensky a “dictator” and blamed him for starting the war; senior U.S. officials have opened negotiations to end the war in Ukraine and said Europeans have no place at the table; and Vice President JD Vance has criticized European democracy. On Monday, the U.S. broke from its European allies and voted against a United Nations resolution that labeled Russia the aggressor in Ukraine.
While Zelensky vowed that Ukrainians would “defend our beautiful land no matter if we have 50,000, 150 or one million soldiers of any army,” he said that the shifting geopolitical landscape — and the threats and aggression from Russia — should compel the nations of Europe to create an army.
“I really believe that time has come,” he said. “The armed forces of Europe must be created.”
Zelensky’s statement raises several questions: What would the mission be for such a force? Which nations would contribute troops? How would it integrate with existing NATO forces? What role would Ukraine’s own armed forces play? And while Trump administration officials have said there will be no “boots on the ground” in any such force, might there be other roles for the U.S.?
The Cipher Brief put these questions to three members of our expert network from different backgrounds: former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency John McLaughlin; former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker; and former top British Foreign Service official Nick Fishwick.
Excerpts from their answers appear below. Full interviews with all three can be found at The Cipher Brief YouTube channel.
THE CONTEXT
- Zelensky made his remarks at the Munich Security Conference on February 15. “I really believe that the time has come that the armed forces of Europe must be created,” he said, adding that it was needed to counter Russia and to account for fresh concerns about the U.S. commitment to European security.
- European leaders met in Paris on February 17 for emergency talks about the continent’s defense, but there was no consensus on a unified European army, or even on European contributions to a potential peacekeeping force in Ukraine.
- British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he would send British troops to help guarantee Ukraine’s security in any peace deal. Officials said Britain and France are working on a proposal for a European “reassurance force” of fewer than 30,000 troops that would serve mainly in air and maritime defense to deter attacks on Ukrainian cities, ports and critical infrastructure.
- German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said it was “completely premature and completely the wrong time” to discuss the prospect of European peacekeepers in Ukraine.
- Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in response to Zelensky’s remarks that “there will be no joint European Union army to counter Russian aggression and compensate for any withdrawal in U.S. support.” However, he acknowledged a need for Europe to bolster its militaries.
- French President Emmanuel Macron suggested in 2018 that the European Union create an army to complement NATO, when President Donald Trump expressed skepticism about security commitments to Europe during his first term. German Chancellor Angela Merkel backed Macron’s proposal but it was never pursued.
- Russia has not directly addressed Zelensky’s remarks, but Moscow has said it will not accept Western troops deployed in Ukraine under any peace deal. President Donald Trump later suggested there may be an opening in the Russian position — saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin “will accept” a European peacekeeping force in Ukraine.
- NATO’s 32 members have a combined military force of more than 3 million personnel and advanced military capabilities, as well as a nuclear deterrent based on the American, British and French nuclear arsenals.
- Former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has warned that the idea of a new European force army invites the dangerous idea that Europe could manage without NATO.
McLaughlin: Those words “armed forces of Europe” tumble freely from [Zelensky’s] mouth in part because — and this is something I felt the Trump administration didn't fully grasp in dealing with all of this in Munich — he's a wartime leader. He's different from all of us. He's different from all of the Europeans. He is a wartime leader who has led a war for three years, has lost a lot of his people, and has seen tragedy and devastation and horror. He now has the strongest army in Europe. If he turned that army on Europe, he could cut through to the French coast overnight. He's not going to do that of course — I'm just saying that metaphorically, to say that the idea of an army for Europe is a very easy concept for him to grasp, because he's had to put together the strongest army in Europe and fight a war.
What Zelensky doesn't take into account is that this is not a new idea for Europe. The Europeans have talked for years about some kind of defense capability that would either be parallel to or independent from NATO. They get hung up on that problem all the time – how can we be doing something that is separate from NATO? – and they never have been able to resolve that. How do you put together a European army? The closest thing to a concept is the idea of a multiple-brigade force made up of Europeans that would somehow be policing a line of contact between Russian forces and Ukrainian forces. And yet we still don't know what the Russians would agree to here, and what the Ukrainians would agree to.
There would have to be [a Ukrainian contingent]. At the moment the Ukrainians have the strongest, most battle-hardened army in Europe, and if NATO's mission is to stand against aggression, why wouldn't you want the Ukrainians in the tent? I guess the answer to that is because it's provocative to Russia, but isn't it Russia's aggression that you're standing against? So the internal logic of all of these things is tortured.
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We're talking about all of this now with no knowledge whatsoever of what a peace agreement might look like. I sat next to a former prime minister of Ukraine [at the Munich Security Conference] who said to me as all of the confusion was unfolding: Wait a minute – we Ukrainians, we have a vote, and if we don't like the agreement, we're going to fight on. And an authoritative source – I won't reveal exactly who – said, Look, there's still a year or two of [American] weapons in the pipeline coming to Ukraine. So unless the Russians ramp up dramatically, the Ukrainians can fight on. They're not without leverage in this. The fact that Putin is now relying on North Korean troops and help from Iran, that Russia has taken, by some measures, 600,000 casualties and that it is having trouble mobilizing troops – all of this tells me he's not in a great position, either. So Ukrainians get a vote here. And Zelensky's speech at the end [of the Munich Security Conference] was an angry speech. It was a speech that conveyed a wartime leader who was feeling not just pressure, but maybe a degree of betrayal.
I think it will be necessary that America at a high level – in this case the president – would need to say to Putin, we're standing in the background, and even though our troops are not in the front line, we support this. And if you break this agreement, it will be at your own peril.
The other problem that we have to think about is this: let’s assume hypothetically that an agreement is reached and the Europeans agree to a peacekeeping mission, and there's no U.S. direct component to it. If that peacekeeping mission goes bad – if Putin is not deterred and he does something provocative that breaks the agreement and the Ukrainians and the Europeans are in trouble, if the United States doesn't come to the rescue, I think Trump would suffer a catastrophic defeat politically. So whether the U.S. is seeking to construct this thing without U.S. involvement or commitment or fingerprints, I don't think the United States can avoid exposure and risk here in any circumstance. That has to be said to Putin, whether we're in it with frontline troops or not. It has to be said to him, that the United States endorses and will enforce this agreement.
Volker: I was [in Munich] and listened to Zelensky’s speech and it struck me as being almost equal measure, We Europeans – meaning Ukraine and Europe – we have to protect Europe against the Russians, and also against the Americans. And that is probably one of the reasons that Trump got angry.
If Europe produced an army or a military capability and it were unified in whatever way, I think Trump would be happy about that. That's kind of what he's been agitating for – you guys, you Europeans, should take care of your own security. So it's one of those cases where you see Europe perhaps moving to do the right things, but for the wrong reasons. They should have been developing the European security capability for decades because it's their responsibility and their interest. And yet, if there's any momentum to do it now, it's only because of their anger with Donald Trump.
What is interesting here is that the French called this meeting after the Munich conference with the British, Germans, Danes and others to talk about just this very thing. And they left without any common view, which was kind of disappointing. I thought this was a moment where they could actually be defining what their contribution [to a security force] could be. That would be a very constructive way to engage the Trump administration, but they didn't manage to do that.
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As for numbers, it starts with the mission. What is the purpose of a force? And the purpose is clearly to deter new Russian aggression in Ukraine, but potentially elsewhere as well. And what therefore is required for that deterrence to be credible? In a serious capacity, it's going to have to have some backup from the United States. It doesn't have to be the U.S. in the lead, but enablers like intelligence and reconnaissance surveillance and so forth. And it's going to have to have some potential for air power response. And it's going to have to have a rule of engagement about what to do if fired on by Russia, or if Russia fires on Ukrainians and breaks the ceasefire. So it's going to have to be prepared to fire back. Those are tough decisions to make. And that's what the Europeans are going to have to think through.
And when you talk about mission, Zelensky was assuming you'd have European forces lined up all along the front line, which I don't see as a useful mission. There's plenty of Ukrainians who are better capable and battle-hardened and they're ready to be there. I think the European role would be more training, equipping and assisting, and particularly assisting with air defense, and then the ability to provide additional backup as needed, including from others in NATO. So that means a size of 30,000 could be about right if the mission is defined properly and if they answer that question about what to do if Russia violates.
There’s a political and symbolic argument [for U.S. involvement], but then there's also a practical argument – for things like satellites, intelligence, and logistical support. Europeans don't have everything they need, and so some U.S. backup support like that would be important. And then, from an American interests point of view, if we participate, we have influence. That should be something that I think any administration would want, so that we're not seeing Europeans by themselves go do something and not have any influence over how that goes, and then potentially having liabilities if it goes badly.
Fishwick: There's a big challenge for Europe, which is that we've been lucky since 1945 and shortly after, when NATO was formed, in that the U.S. is the bedrock of NATO. Particularly in the Cold War days, but since then as well, the U.S. has given us a kind of security reinsurance. We've been very lucky to have it, with America's amazing economic and military resources.
It looks to me as if we've now got to not only think about what a post-U.S. NATO in Europe would look like, but what a different type of U.S. support for NATO in Europe would look like, and then do it. There’s evidence that some of the thinking actually has been going on in Britain, in France, in Germany, in other countries. But the tricky thing after doing the thinking and agreeing what it's going to look like — is doing it. You can't just build a defense industry or resource an army in three weeks. It does take a bit of time, and there's a slightly scary gap between what the U.S. is doing now and what the Europeans might be capable of doing to deter Russia.
I can understand why President Zelensky, who is, I think, a fantastically admirable and brave European leader, is going to be unhappy about the way things look to be developing. But it looks to me as if what could be an acceptable, if challenging, outcome would be the Russians get what they've stolen for the time being, there's a ceasefire, and then we work to integrate Ukraine into a European defense system. Ukraine is not going to go into NATO, but it's been made quite clear by the Russians, interestingly, that they can envisage Ukraine going into the European Union, which I thought had been a red line, but now it doesn't seem to be. That's actually very encouraging, as long as pro-Russian European Union states can be persuaded to let Ukraine in.
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On the military side, we're looking at some European boots on the ground in Ukraine, strengthening the message to Putin that he doesn't go any further, and if he does he's facing big trouble. European forces, and maybe other support for Ukraine to develop its indigenous military industrial capacity, and basically building a fortress Ukraine, so that even if Putin is tempted to push further west than the ceasefire lines are, he can't do it. It'll be too much of a risk for him. And we need something like that in the Baltics and Poland as well. Think of the parts of Europe that are most threatened by Russian unpredictability and aggression.
Somehow that deterrent line, a bit like the Warsaw Pact-NATO line before 1989, has to be built and reinforced. And the Russians must know it's a red line beyond which they must not go.
[Russia] is a dying regime at loggerheads with us and our values. I can't see that ceasing to be anything other than a conflict. I don't want that to be a military conflict, but because Russia is basically fighting these battles with us in the space of legal and constitutional freedoms, using criminal tactics to murder people, in terms of cyberattacks and cyberespionage, this to me amounts to not a cold war, but a kind of non-military war. And if they want to fight it, we've got to fight it back. Although it's an uncomfortable position for us now, if we're looking at an American presidency that wants to withdraw its commitments in Europe, we've got to do that. And we are capable of doing it. We're much richer than Russia. We're much more creative. We're technologically ahead of them. If we have the political willpower on a sustained basis to gear up for this conflict, we can't lose it.
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