No one in Europe is talking to the Kremlin. You can’t end a war if you don’t start negotiations. Someone from Europe has to be appointed to talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin otherwise this war will go on forever or else Ukraine will be defeated – and soon.
The Trump administration has made an effort. It culminated in the 27-point peace plan (27PPP) agreed at the Moscow meeting on December 3 that came very close to ending the war. But after the White House recused itself from talks after the attack on Iran in February, the EU briefly tried to find a rapporteur. That effort didn’t last long and quickly descended into a farce. presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin wouldn’t talk to any of the suggested names, calling the EU a “party of war.”
However, Russian President Vladimir Putin did suggest someone that he would be willing to talk to: it’s time to send ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to Moscow to try and negotiate an end to the four-year destructive conflict in Ukraine.
Everyone will hate this idea. Schroeder is seen as far too pro-Russian. He was hired by Gazprom after a very unseemly mere 17 days after his exit from public office in Germany and has been working for Russian blue chip companies ever since. He is also a close personal friend of Putin’s and was in Moscow as recently as October 7 to celebrate Putin’s 74th birthday. The two men are best buddies.
But that is why he is so suitable for the job. Being close to Putin is not a disadvantage but an advantage as Putin will actually listen to him. The key is of course what Schroeder will say. But at the end of the day Schoeder, unlike US President Donald Trump, is a real politician.
And despite his very obvious flaws, he is actually a very competent one. He had to work his way up from the very bottom to the principle of German politics. His love of lucre is maybe understandable as he grew up in poverty, one of five children, the son of Erika, a cleaning lady, who raised her kids on her own after his father was killed in WWII in 1944. He started his career as a retail apprenticeship who attended evening classes, before studying law at the elite Göttingen university and entering politics. This is the CV of a hardworking and very determined man, not a lightweight grifter that is now sponging off the Russian state.
Trump, by contrast, is the privileged son of an American real estate billionaire who never had to prove himself at anything – and didn’t with spectacular success. Indeed, he managed to set up and bankrupt several casinos and was reportedly just under a billion dollars in debt before winning office. Since then, he has earned an estimated $4bn from a torrent of equity trades, frontrunning his own announcements, as well as other schemes, in what must be one of the blatant episodes of corruption in US presidential history. He is in short, an archetypal narcissistic snollygoster that the entire US checks and balances system was built to contain.
Yet the idea of Schroeder as an interlocutor is dismissed out of hand. So far Brussels’ entire strategy has been to butter up Trump and play on his ego in the vain hope he can be manipulated into helping Bankova, Ukraine’s presidential administration. Even at this weekend’s EU leadership summit, one diplomat told Zelenskiy that he should tone it down as “somethings should not be said out loud,” one MEP told the Financial Times.
Schroeder’s “pro-Russia” label is also not as damning as it may first appear, simply because he is a lot less pro-Russia than the current leader of the Free World and the only person with a direct line to Putin: US President Donald Trump.
Trump is as pro-Russia as it gets. Since the Alaska summit in August last year, Trump has exclusively pushed Putin’s line at every step – in particular in his “final offer” deal floated last April in London that was almost word for word the Kremlin’s wish list – as he has said from the start that he wants to do business with Russia. And screw Ukraine in the process, if that is what it takes. When he did agree to help Ukraine last spring he simply used to it to screw a minerals deal out of Bankova to grab rare earth metals (REMs) that Ukraine doesn’t actually have.
It appears that in Alaska he and Putin worked out a wireframe deal that went beyond the war worth billions, indeed trillions, of dollars covering everything from America taking over the Nord Stream gas pipeline to sell Russian gas to Europe, oil, rare earth metals (REMs), datacentres, and even a subsea tunnel connecting Kamchatka to Alaska. The list goes on and on. Zelenskiy himself reported on the so-called Dmitriev package worth an astonishing $12 trillion – six times the value of the entire Russian economy. Putin seems exceptionally keen on these deals, as apart from anything else, as IntelliNews has argued, going into business with the US would provide him with significant leverage in his extremely one-sided relationship with Beijing.
In the last week things have become even more extreme. Not only did Putin and Trump enjoy a one-and-half hour loved-up phone call where they did their diesel deal, that significantly undermine the sanctions regime on Russia – “neither side wanted to put the receiver down first,” according to Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy advisor – but he is now actively trying to facilitate Ukraine’s defeat in the war, according to Zelenskiy.
Since that call Trump Zelenskiy has been unusually blunt in his criticism of Trump, saying that he has “betrayed" Ukraine. Trump lashed out at Zelenskiy in response, first saying Ukraine “needs a new president” and then calling Zelenskiy a “dictator.”
More importantly, Trump has nixed the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) programme where Europe buys US weapons on Ukraine’s behalf, threatened to cut off crucial satellite intelligence, which has happened, and throttled Ukraine’s access to Elon Musk’s Starlink communications system that has made all Ukraine’s drones fired inside its own country redundant. Ukraine literally now has no significant air defences against Russia’s escalating brutal tit-for-tat missile war.
The heating season just started in Ukraine and Russia immediately launched the largest missile and drone barrage of the war this weekend. All four of the surviving power stations in Kyiv are now out of action and while the autumn has been unusually mild so far, the first snows are expected to arrive in the coming weeks. Social media has been full of footage of kilometre-long queues of cars at the Ukrainian-Polish border as reports from Kyiv say that everyone who can leave, is leaving.
Ukraine is facing, if not outright defeat, then at least the wholescale destruction of what remains of its economy. More than two thirds of its power generation capacity has already been destroyed. The metallurgical sector, which was the biggest export earner pre-war, has come to a complete halt for the first time in a century. The port of Odesa has been brought to a standstill that handles some 90% of Ukraine’s grain exports, which is now rotting in the fields and silos. 90% of Ukraine’s modern warehousing has been destroyed and Russia has moved on to try and systematically destroy Ukraine’s retail infrastructure. And more recently attention has turned to Ukraine’s datacentres and telecoms infrastructure. Earlier this year the World Bank estimated the damage to the Ukrainian economy to be some $586bn, but since the start of Putin’s “Pandora’s box” onslaught that must have climbed significantly. As IntelliNews argued, Ukraine is facing two futures: Finland or Afghanistan, and the way things are going at the moment, Afghanistan is now looking more likely.
Set against this sort of “support” for Ukraine, how much worse could Schroeder possibly be? The EU has been clamouring for a role in the peace talks but has been totally sidelined by the Trump administration. When talks did kick off in Riyad at the start of this year, the EU was prominently completely excluded. The point was brought home again only this week, when Putin proposed three-way talks between himself, Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the ASEAN summit next month in China to which neither Ukraine nor the EU have been invited. If Schroeder was in the game, would Putin have invited him to this meeting? Impossible to say, but at least it would have been possible and, given his closeness to Schoeder, easy to imagine. Schroeder and Xi have already met when they shared the VIP box with Putin at the opening ceremony for the Sochi Winter Olympics.
The worst break up between the White House and Bankova since the famous rumble in the Oval Office last February could not come at a worse time for Kyiv. The situation is deteriorating rapidly and as IntelliNews reported, Zelenskiy is looking increasingly desperate. He has run out of options. Unable to bring either the Ukraine or Iran war to an end Trump is also running out of options and reaching for even more extreme methods of coercing Ukraine into capitulation in a war he promised to end in his first 24-hours. But the EU never had any options to begin with as it has been excluded from the whole peace process.
The EU is also starting to look more desperate. Zelenskiy has no men, no money and no missiles. He was in Brussels to ask for an additional €70bn for next year after he had already badly overspent on the €90bn EU loan that was approved in April. However, the dysfunctional European economies are also running out of funds. It is still pouring money into the conflict while cutting spending at home. A spiralling cost-of-living crisis has ignited mass demonstrations that are tearing France apart, but not only, as similar demonstrations are brought out in neighbouring countries down to and including Albania. At the same time dissent with Brussels policies are driving the rise of the right across Europe from Finland through France, Austria, Germany and into Central Europe – most of which are campaigning on an end to aid to Ukraine. Many of the incumbents that run Brussels now could well all be gone in two year’s time. It’s time for war to stop.
Yes, Schroeder is a very good friend of Putin’s but at least he is a proper politician with presumably some sense of duty to his fellow countrymen. Trump is a rank amateur and incompetent to boot. His "energy ceasefire” on October 11 showed that he is clueless and incapable of ending the Ukraine conflict.
But what is the alternative to Schroeder? Send EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas? On paper she should be the person to go, but she is almost as incompetent as Trump and increasingly ridiculed in Brussels for her extreme anti-Russian stance.
The bottom line is someone has to go to Moscow, if Europe is to play any role in bringing it to an end. The disunity in the EU is growing fast and its collective position is in slow collapse. Under Biden was it was “the US plus the EU” standing with Ukraine – all 27 members. That was then reduced to the coalition of the willing with less than everyone in a group that was never named. That shrank further to the E3 (France, Britain and Germany), one of which is not even a member of the EU. And with French President Emmanuel Macron on his way out next year and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government close to collapse, this group may be reduced to the (not actually E at all)1 fairly soon.
If Schroeder is the only choice – then so be it. After all, if you don’t like the deal he cuts with Putin, then reject it. Ukraine will be no worse off than it is already.