On 11 October, Trump declared an “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine. It binds only Ukraine. In the two days that followed, Kyiv held its fire while Russia kept hitting Ukrainian energy and critical infrastructure across 19 regions. A Russian strike collapsed an apartment stairwell in Kharkiv and killed three. And before Russia’s latest ballistic missile strike, five missiles and more than 100 drones, Ukraine received no early warning at all. Washington then said both sides were to blame.

This is what one of Trump’s decisions looks like on the ground. There were four of them, in three days, 9 to 11 October.

Three days that further weaken the West and undermine liberal democracies. Three days that encourage Putin to continue his war against Ukraine and his hybrid war against Europe. Like China, the US has sided with Russia against Ukraine and Europe. Whatever the motives in Washington—diesel prices before the midterms, a long feud with the court—the effect is the same.

International law

On 9 October, the Trump administration announced new sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC), an institution crucial for holding Putin and the Kremlin responsible for the war of aggression and its atrocities. The sanctions came hours after the Nobel Peace Prize went to Navi Pillay, a former ICC judge.

"We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. "Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC." He expects allies, many of them ICC members that rely on American servicemembers for their defense, to rein in the court.

The ICC exists to investigate, prosecute, and try individuals accused of the world's gravest international crimes. Washington wants to end it. The court called the measures an assault on the rule of law and the foundations of the international legal order.

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Funding Russia's war

On 9 October, Trump also lifted sanctions on Russian diesel exports. The deal comes less than a month after he signed the sweeping Russia sanctions law dedicated to the memory of Sen. Lindsey Graham, which allows tariffs on buyers of Russian oil. Multiple US lawmakers argue the move violates federal law. Congress banned Russian energy imports in 2022, and a bipartisan group of seven senators, including Republicans Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski, stated that the decision "runs directly counter to that law." They also argue that the administration failed to consult Congress or justify its decision as the statute requires.

Western sanctions and Ukraine's strikes on Russian refineries—its own "sanctions"—aim at the same effect: making the war unaffordable for Russia. Trump's decision does the opposite: it helps Russia pay for the war. It also breaks with the principle of unity of effort, further undermining Western cohesion.

Zelenskyy said the deal showed US weakness, as Washington had secured no concessions in return: "What did [Trump] get? That he will have more diesel? For whom? More Russian diesel for Americans? ... It looks like Alaska No. 2. You know, it looks like a happy birthday present for Putin. It looks absolutely terrible."

Stability and sovereignty

On 10 October, Trump said of the elected president of a country fighting off Russia's full-scale invasion: "I think it's time for Ukraine to get a new president... I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal, because he could have made many deals and, for some reason, he never does." He claimed Zelenskyy could have ended the war many times, and insisted that Zelenskyy "wants to make problems for the world" by authorizing strikes on Russian refineries.

The Trump Administration conspicuously ignores the Swiss Summit on Peace in Ukraine, President Zelenskyy’s 10-point peace plan based on international law, and not least, the international effort to establish unity of efforts to enforce a just peace.

Zelenskyy has repeatedly proposed talks and shown willingness to compromise for a peace that guarantees Ukraine's sovereignty. On 18 July, he said: "This year alone, we have reached out to Russia dozens of times with proposals to stop this war—but all we got in return were refusals."

The "deals" Trump alludes to would not have secured peace or guaranteed Ukraine's future existence, nor safeguarded Europe against future Russian aggression. They were not rooted in international law, but in the prospect of great wealth for Trump and his associates—business deals dressed up as "peace plans”. Ukraine and its European partners instead proposed amendments and defined red lines to bring the drafts up to the standards of international law.

The Kremlin itself exposed the absurdity of Trump's claim. In a phone call with Trump, Putin categorically ruled out resuming peace talks, his aide Yuri Ushakov said, and sought to convince Trump that Ukrainian resistance has "no prospects whatsoever."

Supporting Russia

On 11 October, Trump announced: "Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed. Do not break it!"

He gave no details. Zelenskyy had no prior knowledge, but said Ukraine would agree if Russia did. He had already offered to stop striking Russian refineries if Russia stopped attacking Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

It was not an energy ceasefire. It was a gift to Putin. A White House official told Axios that, as Trump understands it, the term means only that Russia and Ukraine stop attacking each other's oil refineries—and that this is what Washington expects Ukraine to do. Ukraine has one refinery, while Russia has 38, of which 21 have been targeted by Ukrainian drones.

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To most of the world, an energy ceasefire covers the whole energy sector: nuclear power, oil refineries, power plants, the grid down to local transformers. But not in Trump's world. The official said a deal on power plants and grids could come next—if Ukraine first stops striking the refineries fueling Russia's war.

Axios wrote that White House officials see Ukraine's refinery strikes as doing more damage to Zelenskyy's relationship with Trump than to Russia. The administration has reportedly threatened to cut Ukraine off from US intelligence if the strikes continue.

Forcing Ukraine to halt its refinery strikes, while Russia keeps hitting not only power plants and the grid but heating and water systems, hospitals, schools, railways, ports and civilians, does not motivate Russia to stop. Within hours of Trump's announcement, Russia struck a power plant in Kharkiv. Trump's one-sided pressure encourages Russia to continue.

Enabling Russian aggression

Moscow paints Ukraine as the intransigent party, though Russia has offered no concessions and rejected numerous compromise proposals from the US and Ukraine. Still, Trump insists that Ukraine, not Russia, is the problem.

In three days, Trump has sanctioned the court that could hold Russia accountable, called on Zelenskyy to step down, secured revenue for the Kremlin's war, and declared an "energy ceasefire" that only asks Ukraine to stop striking Russian refineries, while Russia goes on turning winter into a weapon.

The call for Zelenskyy to step down led Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, chair of the European Parliament's Committee on Security and Defence, to say: "If Trump calls on Zelenskyy to step down, he is clearly siding with a murderer. Only the Ukrainian people can decide who leads Ukraine in free elections, not the White House, and certainly not the Kremlin." Her conclusion: "By once again attacking allies and democratic institutions, Trump is weakening the West and undermining democracy. [...] Europe must therefore remain firmly on course and support Ukraine, because the US can no longer be relied on."

The US's latest National Security Strategy does not merely shift America's foreign policy priorities. It aligns them with Moscow's on seven separate issues, while explicitly calling for Washington to "cultivate resistance to Europe's current trajectory" by backing nationalist parties against sitting EU-aligned governments.

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Europe must stand on its own

The last three days demonstrate that the US is no longer an ally, but a strategic adversary. None of Trump's recent decisions helps end the war on Ukrainian or European terms. On the contrary, they encourage Putin and push any realistic hope of peace years away. They undermine international law and support the notion that might makes right.

Worse still, they help explain why war between Russia and Europe by 2029 is becoming more likely. Trump—Putin's close ally—leaves office on 20 January 2029.

Europe must stress its support for continued Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries unless the Kremlin agrees to a comprehensive energy ceasefire in line with Ukraine’s demands.

Europe urgently needs to distance itself from the US and its foreign policy. Heads of state must join Canada's efforts to unite middle and small powers in common defense against increasingly aggressive great powers. As this series has repeatedly argued, Europe must build a Coalition of Like-Minded countries strong enough to confront Russia, China and, sadly, the US.

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The alternative to NATO: A Coalition of Like-Minded European Countries

Hans Petter Midttun

Hans Petter Midttun, independent analyst on hybrid warfare, Non-Resident Fellow at the Centre for Defense Strategies, board member of the Ukrainian Institute for Security and Law of the Sea, former Defense Attaché of Norway to Ukraine, and officer (R) of the Norwegian Armed Forces. 

Editor's note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press' editorial team may or may not share them.

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On 9 October, three weeks after signing the first major Russia oil sanctions in two years, Donald Trump agreed with Vladimir Putin to bring Russian diesel back to world markets. The US Treasury suspended its sanctions on that trade until April 2027 the same day. In the two days before, Russian strikes had killed more than 80 Ukrainian civilians.

Europe answered on 12 October with its largest sanctions package yet: nearly 1,600 new listings, almost all in Russia’s military-industrial complex. Its core, says Ukraine’s sanctions envoy Vladyslav Vlasiuk, is Russia’s missile program and the electronics inside it, from capacitors to semiconductors. Six in ten listings came from Ukrainian proposals, and Brussels adopted them within weeks.

That is the right reflex, and proof that Europe can move fast when it chooses. But the package names companies and people one by one. On the measures that cut whole sectors, the ones that would hurt Moscow most, Europe still waits for Washington.

It waits for Trump to decide whether to enforce the Graham Act he signed in September. It waits for him to decide whether to lean on Hungary and Slovakia or let them off. It waits for the G7 to rule on tanker services before touching its own ships. Europe keeps asking the Trump administration to decide things it is perfectly able to decide itself.

If the EU is serious about ending a war on its own continent, it does not need a miracle from Washington. It needs to pull the levers already in its hands. Here they are.

Strip Russian weapons of European parts

1. Fix export-control enforcement on dual-use goods. It is unacceptable that the newest Russian drones and missiles contain not only Chinese parts but American and European ones. The "War and Sanctions" portal logs what turns up. The EU should find and close the enforcement gaps in its own dual-use export law. Choking the supply to Russia's war industry serves Ukraine and Europe alike.

Cut Russia's energy money

2. Force Hungary and Slovakia off Russian oil. The EU banned Russian oil imports in 2022, with temporary exemptions for landlocked states: Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary. Czechia has since diversified and dropped Russian oil entirely. Slovakia and Hungary can do the same; the Czech case proves it is a question of will, not feasibility. Ending the exemptions would also make good on REPowerEU's central promise, phasing out Russian energy. The gas-import ban is already decided. Oil is the gap that remains.

3. Close the Greek and Maltese tanker loophole. Up to 40% of Russia's seaborne oil travels on European tankers, Greek and Maltese. The EU has banned maritime services for Russian oil since 2022, with one exception: cargoes sold below the price cap. This spring the Council discussed scrapping that exception, which would have meant a full ban, then made any change conditional on coordination with the G7. Once again, Europe is asking Washington to act for it. The EU should overcome Greek and Maltese resistance and ban every maritime service for Russian oil: transport, insurance, and the rest.

4. Stop the shadow fleet in European waters. Russia ships oil to India, China, and Türkiye through a shadow fleet of aging, often uninsured tankers. Europe can check their insurance and turn away any that lack EU or G7 cover, especially in the North Sea and the Baltic, where any spill would be an ecological disaster, and an uninsured operator would not pay for it.

Patrols in territorial waters and exclusive economic zones have to be reinforced. Russia also uses these ships for espionage, sabotage, and damage to undersea infrastructure. Strengthen NATO's Baltic Sentry. Consider adding a maritime operation by the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force or the Coalition of the Willing across the North and Baltic Seas and the Skagerrak, before the Danish straits. If the Russian Baltic Fleet escalates, Europe should be ready for confrontation. Moscow should hear that it is not feared and that it will be stopped. At sea, it is weaker than even NATO's Baltic Sea states alone, never mind NATO's European members together.

5. Scrap the Lingen nuclear-fuel deal. In July, Lower Saxony approved a plan for the French state company Framatome to make nuclear fuel jointly with Rosatom, Russia's builder of nuclear weapons, at Lingen. It is dressed up as serving REPowerEU, since the venture lets Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria buy fuel from a Franco-Russian joint operation instead of straight from Rosatom.

This is nonsense. Ukraine was once wholly dependent on Russian nuclear fuel and diversified fast; Finland and Czechia have done the same. Hungary, Slovakia, and Bulgaria can follow. Stretching the dependence out and hiding it behind a French partner is the opposite of what REPowerEU is for. Lower Saxony's own environment minister called the deal "grundfalsch," fundamentally wrong.

Fund Ukraine from Russia's own money

6. Build a Ukraine Fund from frozen Russian assets. Supporting Ukraine will cost more next year, not less, so it is time to get serious about Russia's frozen assets. Not confiscation, which European capitals still resist, and not a simple transfer to Kyiv, which amounts to the same thing, but a dedicated EU-run Ukraine Fund that could invest these assets and use them better than they are used now. ICUV has set it all out in a policy paper.

Isolate Russia further

7. Adopt the Graham-bill sanctions. Sanction every Russian state company (majority or controlling state stake) and every Russian oligarch who has not taken a public anti-war stand. Forbes counts 155 Russian billionaires.

8. Cut every Russian and Belarusian bank off SWIFT. Russia still has 301 operating banks, yet only 103 Russian banks and financial institutions sit under the EU's transaction ban, and just a handful of Belarusian ones. Gazprombank, which the US Treasury says pays Russia's soldiers, is still not on the EU list. Stop listing banks one by one: disconnect the entire Russian and Belarusian banking systems and put them under a full transaction ban, with narrow exceptions for food, medicine, and humanitarian trade.

9. End land transit to and from Russia, Kaliningrad included. Stop all overland freight, rail and road, between the EU and Russia. Baltic ports should carry no Russian trade at all, not just grain. Halt the gas transit to Kaliningrad through Lithuania's pipelines, too; let it arrive by sea, where Russia already runs an LNG terminal. Winters are mild now, so the real effect is mostly higher costs, and even that is worth doing.

10. Ban visas for Russian (ex-)servicemen and their families. The EU's 21st sanctions package laid the legal basis in July and then set no start date. Bring it into force, and extend it to the families.

Deliver accountability

11. Launch the Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression and the Claims Commission. Speed up the creation of, and accession to, the tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine, and the convention establishing a Claims Commission.

The point

Europe cannot escape this burden. A Russian victory, even a partial one such as a peace on Moscow's terms, would cost it far more than helping Ukraine to a partial victory of its own, a peace along the line of contact. If Europe wants the war to end, it has to lead, alongside Ukraine, instead of waiting on a miracle from the Trump administration. The tools are already in its hands.

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Norway did the math: Arm Ukraine to win, or pay double when Russia does

Dmytro Shulga

Dmytro Shulga is director of the "Europe and the World" program at the International Renaissance Foundation in Ukraine.

Editor's note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press' editorial team may or may not share them.

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Dmitry Muratov, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and co-founder of Russia's shuttered Novaya Gazeta, has lent his name to an idea that sounds like pure humanitarianism. Russia frees some of the people it jails for opposing the war; in return, the United States eases its sanctions on the Russian economy.

The scheme did not even start in an American office. According to The Atlantic, which reported the plan on 29 September, it was Muratov himself who urged Donald Trump's envoy, John Coale, to try it. Coale had used the same model on Belarus, where some 500 prisoners were released, sanctions softened, and trade talks reopened.

Now, with Trump's approval, he wants to run it on the Kremlin.

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The prisoners should go free. There is nothing to argue about there. No one jailed for anti-war words, for journalism, or for political dissent belongs in a cell. But here is the small detail: the price for their freedom is easing the pressure on a state that is waging war, not on the United States, which is being asked to ease the sanctions, but on Ukraine.

And here is where the real humanitarian arithmetic begins. We do not yet know which sanctions would be lifted. Whichever they are, the logic is the same: Moscow lets some of its political prisoners go, and Washington gives the Russian economy some breathing room in return. People walk out of Russian prisons, and the Kremlin gets more oxygen.

More money for the Russian state in wartime is not merely a figure in a bank report. It is more resources for the army, for missiles, for drones, for the war's continuation. And Ukrainians are the ones who feel it.

I can picture the Kremlin ghoul rubbing his hands at an idea like this. Now he can be not just president, but the director of a prisoner market: release a hundred today, jail three hundred tomorrow, so there is something to trade next time. New dissidents, journalists, activists, and merely inconvenient citizens he can pack away far faster than the West can lift a sanction.

A tidy little business model: Russia produces the prisoners, the West buys them back with its policy, and Ukraine settles the account.

Because if easing sanctions widens Russia's room to finance the war, then Ukrainians effectively get a very strange bill for someone else's humanism: a Russian political prisoner walks out of prison, and a Ukrainian gets a fresh portion of missiles and drones on their head.

By the way, about those Ukrainian civilians. By the estimates of international and Ukrainian rights groups, Russia is holding, or has held, some 16,000 of them illegally. The real figure may be higher, since not every case can be documented.

This is exactly where Muratov, as a Nobel peace laureate, might find his powers of persuasion useful. Why not put in a word for the Ukrainians in Russian prisons? The same people seized in occupied territory during "filtration," taken from their homes, buried under fabricated cases, held for years without a proper trial.

And among them are children.

And here onto the stage steps Russia's Baba Yaga of "child protection": Maria Lvova-Belova, the so-called presidential commissioner for children's rights. She herself told Putin, in public, about a boy from Mariupol she had taken into her care after he was removed from the occupied city. Ukraine and international organizations view such cases as part of a wider system of unlawful transfers of Ukrainian children to Russia. The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for her arrest on exactly those charges: the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children.

That is what Russian care for children looks like: take a Ukrainian child from Mariupol, carry him off to Russia, and set about turning him into a Russian. If this is how Russia's children's commissioner works in public, it is frightening to imagine what happens where there are no cameras and no international warrants.

Nobody is offering to lift a single sanction for them.

And Muratov's pacifist initiatives are not new, either. After the full-scale invasion, he was among the authors and promoters of the ceasefire appeals. One public statement, signed by 51 Nobel laureates, called for an end to the fighting, which Muratov later described as a plea for a "genuine ceasefire" before talks.

On paper it all looks wonderful: stop shooting, stop killing one another, make peace. But there is one small problem. Russia did not wander into this war alongside Ukraine. Russia launched the full-scale invasion itself.

And in these appeals, Muratov did not demand that the Kremlin withdraw its troops from Ukraine. He did not demand the de-occupation of Ukrainian territory. He did not put the question of responsibility for the aggression and the war crimes to Russia. The formula was far more convenient: just stop shooting.

But "stop killing each other" is a beautiful phrase for people who would rather not notice who attacked whom.

It turns aggressor and victim into two symmetrical sides, as though Ukraine and Russia had simply quarreled and now both must show wisdom and stop firing. There is just one nuance: if, after such a "peace," the Russian army remains on occupied Ukrainian territory, that is not an end to the aggression. It is a pause with a Russian flag on Ukrainian soil.

Now add the prisoner proposal on top. Russia does not withdraw its troops. Ukraine does not get its occupied territory back. The Kremlin answers for nothing. But a few Russian political prisoners are released, and for that, Russia's sanctions are eased too. And Ukraine, meanwhile, is simply supposed to stand to one side and rejoice that humanism has triumphed.

Except there is a difference of principle. A Russian political prisoner can walk out of a Russian prison. A Ukrainian civilian can stay in one. And a Ukrainian soldier can be killed by a weapon Russia bought thanks to that same sanctions relief.

And then a very simple question arises for the great humanist and Nobel laureate: why should the freedom of Russia's political prisoners be bought at the expense of the freedom, the safety, and the lives of Ukrainians?

Yuriy Lukanov

Yuriy Lukanov, author of two books about the Russian-Ukrainian war Reporter Volkovsky and The Press: how Russia destroyed media freedom in Crimea.

Editor's note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press' editorial team may or may not share them.

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For decades, Europe operated on a series of assumptions: that borders were essentially settled; that economic interdependence would constrain major-power conflict; that international law would increasingly regulate state behavior; that military force was becoming less relevant; and that, ultimately, the United States would guarantee European security.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has shattered those norms, as Moscow attempts to change borders by force and reshape the European security order. NATO now describes Russia as the most significant and direct threat to Allied security, while also identifying sabotage, cyberattacks, disinformation, economic coercion, and other hybrid actions as part of the threat.

The foreign policy of the Trump administration is further undermining past postulations. It threatens to annex Canada, speaks of occupying Greenland by force, and ignores Spain's sovereignty. It disrespects European military contributions, then demands European support for operations of its own choosing, legal justification optional. It negotiates European security over Europe's head while resetting relations with the power that threatens the continent, calls European countries "decaying" and their leaders "weak," and has launched a trade war against its former allies while pursuing business with its former strategic opponent.

Discussing solutions without first agreeing on the problem is meaningless. Yet that is what Europe has done since the war started in 2014.

Eight realities

Analyzing the security environment, before recommending solutions, I have identified eight fixed points that I regard as constants.

1. It was never a Russia/Ukraine war

Russia has offered the West four tales, all unpleasant, one designed to look like an "easy way out." The first calls on Ukraine to give up Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, the lie Trump's plan is built on. But Putin's demands transcend Donbas, as his 2024 speech and Russia's operations show. The second, "Novorossiya," adds Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv and Odesa to the first lie.

The third, "one people, one nation," claims all of Ukraine. In the words of former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski: "Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire." The fourth, "the Russian World," is the only one formalized in Russian strategic documents, encompassing the "former territories of Kyivan Rus, the Kingdom of Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the contemporary Russian Federation."

Ukraine's defeat is crucial to Russia's broader strategy. Integrated with Belarus, a subjugated Ukraine would give Russia the population, economy and technology to be seen as a near peer to the US and China, project power across the post-Soviet space, and ease its own demographic decline, while handing Moscow the country's defense industry, farmland and mineral, gas and oil deposits, and moving Russian military power nearly 900 km closer to London, Berlin and Paris.

It would create an aggressive, imperialist power on Europe's border, emboldened to force NATO's withdrawal to its 1997 borders and to deny the US the ability to deploy forces and nuclear weapons to Europe. The West, not Ukraine, has been defined as Russia's enemy.

2. A war is ongoing in Europe

Russia has been conducting an ever-escalating hybrid war against NATO's European member states since 2014. The EU Parliament acknowledged as much in September 2021. Its aggressions include sabotage against critical infrastructure, cyberattacks, disinformation, GPS jamming affecting civilian aviation, repeated airspace violations by strike drones, and attacks on Europe's defense-industrial base.

Russia's acts of violence against Western targets are becoming increasingly brazen. In August, Western intelligence sources reported a new wave of attacks on weapons factories in Europe under cover of "plausible deniability," The Telegraph reported. A CIA report shared with European governments warns Russia may attack Spain, France or Italy with Gerbera drones launched from ships, El Mundo reported, citing Lithuanian sources.

It is the same hybrid war Ukraine faced until 24 February 2022, one expected to turn open by 2029. Article 5 could, and probably should, have been triggered years ago. Having failed to respond, NATO has lost credibility, raising the risk of war.

3. The tsunami of ripple effects is changing the political landscape in the West

In May 2022, I began using the term tsunami of ripple effects to describe the cost of not intervening in a war that threatens the security of the Alliance. It is the reverberations that raise the cost of living, undermine food and energy security, and spread famine, recession and inflation, raising the risk of unrest, extremism, and, ultimately, the fall of governments. Europe is living through the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War.

The international security architecture is being dismantled, our institutions discredited, and NATO no longer deters Russia. Building on public frustration, the tsunami of ripple effects gave us Trump and the rise of right-wing parties across Europe.

4. NATO no longer deters Russia

If Russia were deterred, it would not have launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. NATO's strategic concept commits it to ending, by political and military means, conflicts that threaten Alliance security, including in Ukraine. Nor would Russia be conducting an ever-escalating hybrid war against NATO's European states, or preparing for a military conflict with the Alliance, as US and European intelligence services warn. Lack of deterrence raises the risk of Russian strategic miscalculation and war, especially since NATO was the only military power able to deny Russia its Great Power aspiration and its demand for a sphere of influence over the post-Soviet space.

NATO used to display readiness and capabilities. Today it has become a religion. Europe begs it is still almighty while Russia is a disbeliever.

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NATO no longer deters Russia. A new coalition could

5. The transatlantic rupture undermines NATO and European security

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it plainly at Davos on 20 January 2026: "We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition." We "cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination," he said, calling for countries to organize in the face of great-power rivalry through different coalitions for different issues, based on common values and interests. As he told the World Economic Forum: "We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be."

6. The war is existential to both Ukraine and Russia

Ukraine is fighting for its right to exist. Russia is fighting for its Great Power status, strategic parity with the USA and China. If it is defeated in Ukraine, it will forever remain a pariah state, potentially imploding. For a negotiation to succeed, it must solve the cause of the war: Russia's Great Power ambitions, which cannot be negotiated away, only denied through military power.

7. Russia will never accept being defeated by Ukraine

Even with the tools to evict the Russian Armed Forces, Ukraine cannot expect Russia to accept defeat by a nation that, in its distorted narrative, "does not exist." Russia would only accept withdrawal from Ukraine if the alternative were to fight a far superior military power and thereby risk losing the means that secure the survival of the regime and the state.

8. Europe has very limited time to stop the war from escalating

Several European intelligence services warn of war by 2029;

• French intelligence is preparing for large-scale Russian attacks by 2030, and autumn 2027 is now being discussed, France Télévisions reported;
• US intelligence expects Russia may test NATO's resolve with a limited strike against a member state between this autumn and 2029, the Wall Street Journal reported in August;
• Baltic intelligence chiefs told The Guardian on 20 September that an attack could come within "months, not years."
• Worse still, Europe won't be ready until 2035, six to nine years too late, SACEUR warns.

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NATO’s generals warn of war by 2029. Europe won’t be ready until 2035.

Rules do not enforce themselves

International law, sovereignty, and territorial integrity remain fundamental principles. But without the capability and political will to defend them, principles become aspirations, not constraints on states prepared to use force. Acknowledging the world as it is means acknowledging that power still matters. It means accepting that deterrence requires more than statements of concern: ammunition, air and missile defense, long-range strike and counter-drone systems, secure communications, logistics, cyber resilience, and the industrial capacity to sustain a prolonged conflict.

This is where Carney's second formulation matters: countries must rely not only on "the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength." Values mean nothing unless one is prepared to defend them, as Canada is doing, raising defense spending and strengthening domestic industry. Europe needs to draw the same conclusion: strategic autonomy, not abandoning NATO, but ensuring Europe can defend itself and its interests even when an ally's priorities change.

The European Council already calls Russia's war an existential challenge and demands defense readiness be strengthened by 2030. But acknowledging reality means going further than setting targets.

It means recognizing that Ukraine is not merely the recipient of European security assistance. Ukraine is an integral part of Europe's security architecture. Its battlefield experience, defense industry, intelligence, and ability to absorb and defeat Russian attacks are crucial to European security.

Because individual member states refuse Ukraine as a member, NATO has made itself a liability, and some of the same countries are erecting hindrances to its EU membership too, letting national interest block common security.

The solution

The choice is not between idealism and realism. It is between pretending that the old assumptions still hold and building the capabilities required by the reality that has replaced them.

Acknowledging the world as it is means seeing the threats clearly; defending the world as it should be means acting on that knowledge, and the bridge between the two is strength.

Accept those eight fixed points, and Europe's room for maneuver is gone, along with its present strategy. Europe cannot afford another 12 years of futile diplomacy while Russia exploits our naivety to prepare for war in the next two to three years, diplomacy that has undermined Europe's need to rearm and establish credible deterrence.

European governments have long acknowledged that their armed forces no longer provide credible defense, yet their security policy still assumes NATO guarantees collective security.

Acknowledge reality, and the illusion shatters.

Europe urgently needs a new strategy, one that looks beyond NATO and the EU's inherent weaknesses toward a military alliance credible enough to reshape the strategic environment. This is why I have long argued for a Coalition of Like-Minded European countries (CALM). It offers a path from recognition to action, from acknowledging NATO's failure to building something that works.

Strength is not found in numbers, but in unity: agreeing on the enemy, his aims and strategy, and committing to countermeasures that demonstrate real will and capability to fight.

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The alternative to NATO: A Coalition of Like-Minded European Countries

Unlike NATO or the EU, CALM does not have to wait for Europe's rearmament to reach 2035. It builds on existing NATO interoperability.

The force already exists: Ukraine's battle-hardened army, National Guard, Special Operations Forces, air defense, and Unmanned System Forces, combined with European fifth-generation aircraft and state-of-the-art navies, are credible, combat-proven, and in place.

Russia already struggles to fight Ukraine alone; it would face a different reality entirely if Ukraine formally joined a coalition of European military powers. That is why the declaration matters now, not after the capability is fully built: with the interoperability already proven, it changes Russia's strategic assessment immediately, not in 2035.

This is not only about physical capabilities. It is about changing Russia's perception of its strategic environment. It starts with a declaration; preparing for military intervention comes next. But it begins with the declaration.

Hans Petter Midttun

Hans Petter Midttun, independent analyst on hybrid warfare, Non-Resident Fellow at the Centre for Defense Strategies, board member of the Ukrainian Institute for Security and Law of the Sea, former Defense Attaché of Norway to Ukraine, and officer (R) of the Norwegian Armed Forces. 

Editor's note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press' editorial team may or may not share them.

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We have come to know the Kremlin's energy playbook well: "Europe will freeze without Russian gas," "sanctions hurt Europe more than Russia," "a managed, indefinite return to Russian supply is simply pragmatic." The respected European project EUvsDisinfo has repeatedly exposed these false narratives, carried by Russian state media, proxy outlets, and paid commentators. But Kremlin-friendly energy narratives do not travel only through obvious propaganda channels. They also enter policy debate through expert commentary, think tanks, media quotes, and institutional platforms, where they are far harder to see.

None of the apocalyptic forecasts came true. Europe cut Russian gas imports from 45% in 2021 to 13% by 2025 without blackouts or economic collapse. Yet the narratives predicting ruin kept circulating, sometimes from unexpected addresses. One of them, in my view, is worth a closer look: the work of Katja Yafimava, of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Across nearly two decades, in my reading, her analysis has landed with remarkable consistency where Gazprom would want it. Gazprom's trading arm was once among the sponsors of her program. The record is public, and it is worth reading in full.

The narrative you don't notice

The most effective version of Kremlin-friendly energy messaging does not shout. It hedges, reframes, and omits. It raises "legitimate concerns" about sanctions costs, stresses the "legal complexities" of an LNG ban, and warns of "supply disruption risks" from moving too fast, without weighing Ukrainian lives or the cheaper, homegrown clean-energy alternative. Real concerns about European energy security did exist. What is worth noting is how reliably certain voices amplified concerns and how rarely they weighed counter-evidence.

This is not abstract. Surging oil and gas prices since the Iran war have handed Russia windfall revenues averaging, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, €604 million a day, money that funds the missiles falling on Ukrainian cities. Every argument for delay has a price, and Ukrainians pay part of it.

The Oxford label, and the money behind it

Katja Yafimava is a Senior Research Fellow at the OIES, which she joined in 2006. The institute is an independent charity rather than a department of the University of Oxford, which recognizes it as a separate independent research center. It carries the Oxford name, and its researchers appear regularly as authoritative, independent voices in UK and European media.

That independence has been questioned. Democracy for Sale, an investigative outlet, has documented the proximity between Russian oil and gas industry money and OIES, which previously received funding from Gazprom and its subsidiaries. OIES's own website and annual reports up to 2020 list Gazprom Marketing and Trading among over 20 organizations that sponsored equally its Natural Gas Research Programme, where Yafimava works, alongside Nord Stream 2 financiers Shell, OMV, Uniper, and Wintershall.

None of that, on its own, tells you what any individual researcher believes. What makes it worth raising is the alignment between that funding context and a published record that, across nearly two decades, has been remarkably convenient for Gazprom's positions.

Remarkable consistency

Consider the pattern. In 2017, Yafimava argued that Poland's legal challenge to the European Commission decision widening Gazprom's access to the OPAL pipeline risked letting political objectives override regulatory rules, a framing that would sit comfortably in Gazprom's own filings. She framed the EU's Gas Directive amendment as an instrument "aimed primarily at Nord Stream 2" in a 2019 paper. Russian state media have quoted her approvingly in pieces casting Brussels or Washington as acting in bad faith.

In September 2021, as suspicion grew that Gazprom was deliberately holding back gas to squeeze Europe before winter, she told Bloomberg she did not subscribe to that view, insisting the company "has not abused" the tight market and "has not manipulated it," and had "honored all of its contractual supply obligations to Europe." Within months, Russia's supply cuts had become the opening move of an energy war. In January 2022, the head of the IEA said Russia's cuts were creating "artificial tightness" in European markets.

Each judgment is defensible in isolation. It is the direction of the whole series that is striking: over years and across cases, the analysis lands where Gazprom would want it to land.

The pattern holds as the war grinds on

Through 2022 and 2023, Yafimava warned that cutting Russian gas too fast risked "unavoidable" blackouts in Central and Eastern Europe. The blackouts never came. In a 2025 paper, she and two OIES colleagues accepted that the phase-out would be manageable for markets, but argued that the EU's proposed ban risked undermining the commercial and legal positions of European importers, and that it was "not obvious" the risk was worth taking to end modest volumes of Russian gas after 2027. A competing Forum Energii report concluded that full EU independence from Russian fuel by 2027 is feasible, and that Russia needs EU markets more than the EU needs Russian supply. In early 2026, she wrote that no complete phase-out "will happen either by 2027 or by 2028."

A forecast is not a crime. But the forecasts, like the analyses, keep pointing one way.

She has also stepped beyond technical commentary. On 27 January 2026, responding to a Financial Times report on US security guarantees for Ukraine, she posted on X that "reliable security guarantees could only be achieved via common European security architecture that would have to include Russia," a framing that mirrors a longstanding Kremlin strategic goal.

Katja Yafimava's current position as Vice-Chair of the UNECE Group of Experts on Gas gives her a visible role in a UN forum that helps shape discussion on European gas policy, security of supply, and the energy transition. In January 2026 she co-opened and concluded the Group's workshop on implementation of the EU Methane Regulation. The arguments she repeatedly advances can have policy effects closely aligned with Russian commercial and strategic interests. At a UNECE/OIES workshop in 2025, for example, she explicitly examined the possibility of a "limited return" of Russian gas to Europe via Ukraine, while her subsequent OIES paper argued that the EU ban on Russian gas could undermine European importers and security of supply and questioned whether ending the remaining Russian imports after 2027 was worth the associated risks.

The alignment is a matter of record. Why independent analysis, over nearly twenty years, has tracked so reliably the interests of a company that once helped fund her program is a question that deserves an answer.

Here is what the arguments for delay leave out: the alternative to Russian energy is not economic ruin. It is cheaper renewable power. The International Renewable Energy Agency found that in 2024, 91% of new renewable projects were cheaper than any fossil-fuel alternative; solar came in 41% below fossil power, and onshore wind 53% below. Renewables saved $467 billion in fossil-fuel costs in 2024 alone, and battery storage has fallen more than 93% in price since 2010.

This is the point that "supply disruption" warnings tend to bury, and it is why the warnings matter. Every year of delay, justified by the risks of moving too fast, is a year of continued payments to Moscow when a cheaper, domestic, un-weaponizable alternative already exists. Renewables reached 47% of the EU electricity mix in 2025; EU gas demand fell more than 17% between 2022 and early 2025; and the gas import ban agreed in December 2025 phases out Russian pipeline gas and LNG by the end of 2027, precisely the direction the delay arguments have worked against. The transition is not the risk. The delay is.

What should change

Editors, producers, and conference organizers could apply to energy analysts the conflict-of-interest standards already routine for pharmaceutical research: prior employment or program funding from Gazprom, Sberbank, or Russia-linked entities disclosed clearly every time such an analyst is presented as independent. UNECE could ask whether agenda-setting roles over European energy policy are well placed with analysts whose published record aligns so consistently with Kremlin positions. And Europe could close the transparency gaps that let think tanks with Russian-adjacent funding operate without disclosure requirements.

Every euro Russia earns from energy funds the war against Ukraine. The least we can do is know who is arguing for delay, and who once funded the programs they work in.

Disclosure: the author was involved in a March 2026 Razom We Stand research concerning the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and Katja Yafimava, and works as a strategic advisor to the organization. Euromaidan Press reached out to Dr. Yafimava for a comment, but received no answer at publication date.

Oleh Savytskyi

Oleh Savytskyi is a world-class climate and energy policy expert. Oleh has ten years of experience in the field – from youth climate activism to consulting the Ministry of Environment of Ukraine to managing international advocacy campaigns at Razom We Stand. Oleh is a fellow of the Michael Succow Nature Conservation Fund and an alumnus of the Agora Energiewende EnerTracks training program for energy transition professionals.

Editor's note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press' editorial team may or may not share them.

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On 6 May 2022, I began using the term tsunami of ripple effects to describe the cost of not intervening in a war that threatens the security of the Alliance. That was NATO's own strategic ambition—right up until the Madrid Summit in June 2022, where it found its political will and military capabilities wanting, deterred by Russia.

The latest wave of that tsunami reached American voters this month, in the price of diesel—and the US President's response shows exactly how the refusal to end the war keeps compounding its costs.

Diesel, and the president who blamed the victim

President Trump has urged President Zelenskyy to stop targeting Russian oil refineries, saying the attacks are "hurting the world" as fuel-supply disruptions from the Ukraine and Iran wars propel US diesel prices to a record high, according to CNBC.

"Mr. Zelenskyy has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia," Trump said during an official visit to Ireland. "Let him go after targets but not diesel fuel because he's causing a shortage of diesel. This isn't done by the Middle East; this is done by what's happening with Russia and Ukraine."

The claim inverts the evidence. The latest IEA assessment is unusually clear: the US-Iran war and the disruption of Middle Eastern flows are the dominant shock, with Gulf refined-product exports down almost 60% since February.

Disruptions to Russia's refining system and the near-halt in Russian product exports following intensified Ukrainian attacks, the IEA says, "have compounded these losses." The aggressor is responsible for the dominant shock; the war Trump himself helped start accounts for most of the rest; and the victim's attempt to force Russia toward peace has only reinforced the consequences of that aggression.

Yet Trump singled out Zelenskyy—not Putin for starting the war, not himself and Prime Minister Netanyahu for the war against Iran.

Ukraine has intensified the tempo of its refinery-strike campaign and improved its targeting to cause maximum pain to the Russian oil industry, striking at least 26 different Russian oil refineries since the beginning of 2026, according to ISW. The strikes have put roughly half of Russia's refining capacity offline and prompted widespread fuel shortages, with Moscow recently extending a ban on diesel exports through the end of September to stabilize domestic supplies.

The lie, the contradiction, and the lack of credibility

Trump's statement is an outright lie—the link to the US/Israel war on Iran is clear for anyone to see—and it is in direct contradiction with US and European policy.

As late as early July, Trump noted that Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries were an escalation capable of bringing the war to an end. The reversal appears driven primarily by the fuel-price shock and its political consequences—not by any change in his assessment of the strikes' military value. US consumers have seen a roughly 20% increase in diesel prices in a matter of weeks, midterms are seven weeks away, and the Republican Party is struggling in the polls.

And Ukraine's strikes aim at the exact effect Western sanctions were designed to achieve: ensuring Russia cannot afford to continue the war by undermining its economy. Neither the US nor Europe is supposed to import Russian crude or refined products—the EU banned them, cutting Russia's share of EU oil imports from 25.8% in 2021 to 2.2% in 2025, and the US prohibited them in March 2022.

"The United States is taking sweeping action against Russia's key source of revenue for funding its brutal and illegal war against Ukraine," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in January 2025. That is exactly what Ukraine is doing—with the difference that when Ukraine does it, Trump calls it "hurting the world."

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The tsunami of ripple effects

Diesel is only the latest wave. During the year after Madrid, I watched the West take the role of bystander to a war that is all about us—a Russian ever-escalating hybrid war against European NATO members—seemingly accepting the global consequences.

I say seemingly because it makes no sense to sit idle while the tsunami grows to the point where it causes political, economic, and geopolitical chain reactions impossible to predict and difficult to control.

Inaction is not neutral. It is also a choice, and it carries the consequences of engagement with one crucial difference: inaction makes us react to the strategic environment, whereas action lets us shape it.

Aid without an endpoint is not a policy for ending the war; it is a policy for enduring it.

Enduring it is what produced the tsunami: the reverberations that raise the cost of living, undermine food and energy security, and spread famine, recession, inflation, and rising interest rates—increasing the risk of social unrest, extremism, and, ultimately, the fall of governments. Europe is living through the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War.

he international security architecture is being dismantled, the institutions meant to unite us are discredited, and NATO no longer deters Russia—raising the risk of direct conflict between Russia and Europe.

In June 2023, I argued this would likely change the political landscape in the US and Europe—as in the 1930s—as political forces sought to exploit voters' frustration over the war's global effects. It produced President Trump and a rising tide of right-wing forces across Europe—the leading edge of what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called, at Davos, a rupture the world hasn't yet reckoned with: "We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is... We know the old order is not coming back." Its consequences for Europe have not yet dawned on us.

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How to end it

The only way to end the tsunami of ripple effects is to end the war. Waiting only lets it reach the scale where it produces chain reactions impossible to control.

Since 2014, the West has tried to stop Russia's war through diplomacy, negotiations and ceasefires; sanctions and economic pressure; diplomatic isolation; military aid, training and intelligence; NATO deterrence and reinforcement; and humanitarian and financial assistance. More than 200 negotiations were held to stop the war from happening.

They were all futile, because Russia was never negotiating in good faith—it sees negotiation as a means to defeat its opponents. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

For a negotiation to succeed, it must solve the cause of the war: Russia's Great Power ambitions, its pursuit of strategic parity with the US and China at the expense of its neighbours. Until that is checked, there will be no peace—and those ambitions are not negotiable. They can only be denied through military power.

The West has done everything short of military intervention. It is time to employ military power, because the cost of continuing the present path is far too high. If Europe wants to turn the tide, it must become proactive. Instead of waiting for the war more intelligence services are warning about, Europe—or rather a Coalition of Like-Minded European countries—must help shift Russia's appraisal of the strategic environment. We need to intervene militarily to end the war, and the tsunami of ripple effects with it.

Hans Petter Midttun

Hans Petter Midttun, independent analyst on hybrid warfare, Non-Resident Fellow at the Centre for Defense Strategies, board member of the Ukrainian Institute for Security and Law of the Sea, former Defense Attaché of Norway to Ukraine, and officer (R) of the Norwegian Armed Forces. 

Editor's note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press' editorial team may or may not share them.

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